Boston Strong

by Casey Sherman

  “I was stopped at mile twenty-five [just outside Kenmore Square]. It was heartbreaking,” Jeannie Hannigan of Keene, New Hampshire, said. “I just wanted to keep going because I was having a really good race until then. This year I was going for it; I knew I had it. It was shocking. I wish everyone would have been able to finish, but I’m glad I have it [the medal].”37 This year’s medal would have special significance, like those from other athletic contests marred by historic events, such as the infamous 1936 Summer Olympics in Adolph Hitler’s Berlin, or the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, where eleven members of the Israeli team were murdered at the hands of Palestinian terrorists.

  While law enforcement continued to focus its attention on the twenty-plus blocks around Boylston Street, the heart of Boston shifted that evening to a small park in Dorchester where Martin Richard once played with his friends. By now, his photograph had traveled the world and back. The image of the young boy at school holding a blue poster board with the words No More Hurting People — Peace surrounded by two red hearts drawn with magic marker, had become a symbol of both hope and tragic loss. Larry Marchese was also getting inundated with phone calls and texts from Richard family friends and relatives who wanted him to establish some kind of fund for the family.

  “You all need to relax,” Marchese told them. “We need to do this right.”

  At that point, Marchese did not know whether he could legally accept donations or what the tax implications would be.

  “What are we gonna do?” friends of the Richard family asked Marchese and his wife, Nina.

  “I don’t know,” Larry replied. “We’re gonna hug Bill.”

  He also spent the day on Tuesday with an MIT student who was a neighbor of the Richards’ at the lake in New Hampshire. Together, they built the Richard Family Fund website. Larry then sat down with Bill and worked on this statement they would release to well-wishers and the media:

  My dear son Martin has died from injuries sustained in the attack on Boston. My wife and daughter are both recovering from serious injuries. We thank our family and friends, those we know and those we have never met, for their thoughts and prayers. I ask that you continue to pray for my family as we remember Martin. We also ask for your patience and for privacy as we work to simultaneously grieve and recover. Thank you.38

  Larry and Nina Marchese did their best to shield Bill, Denise, and Henry Richard from the outside world while they remained at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. There was a virtual news blackout. In the family room, where Henry spent most of his time, the television was locked on the Discovery Channel. Henry’s uncle Brad Richard spent time keeping the eleven-year-old entertained and occupied.

  “Brad was a rock star,” Marchese recalls. “He and Henry were hanging out in the corner of the room acting like two little boys.”

  Denise’s father, Bob, arrived from Florida and the moment he saw his daughter — he let go, tears spilling down his cheeks. He had been especially close to his grandson Martin, even sleeping in a bunk bed in the boy’s room when he visited.

  Staffers at the Brigham moved an additional hospital bed and a cot into Denise Richard’s room so that the family could sleep together, while over at Children’s Hospital little Jane remained in a medically induced coma. But Jane was never alone, and she was semi-conscious now, beginning to move and reach for tubes and push nurses’ hands away. Her aunts rallied around her, as did Nina Marchese. They held prayer vigils at her bedside.

  “When I saw Jane for the first time, she didn’t look like herself,” Nina recalls. “Her tiny body was covered by machines working to keep her alive.”

  Nina did her best to stay calm and focused while she was in Jane’s hospital room. Crying would not do the little girl any good. Nina held her tears for later, when she broke down and asked herself — and God — How will this little girl recover? How will she live and move forward with her life?

  As darkness fell over the Richard family’s Dorchester neighborhood, thousands of candles were lit by friends, neighbors, and total strangers alike who gathered at Garvey Park to pray for Jane, Martin, Denise, Henry, and Bill.

  “Nobody knows what to do, but this is the only thing we can think of to do,” said neighbor Maria Deltufo. “To come together and be with each other and just show how strong a community we really are because Dorchester really is a strong support system. There’s nothing any of us wouldn’t do for that family right now.”39

  The vigil closed with an emotional and impromptu chorus of “God Bless America,” with thousands of attendees singing through tears.

  As Bill Richard mourned in seclusion while watching over his injured wife and daughter, the mother of Krystle Campbell shared a glimpse of her grief with the world from the front porch of her Medford, Massachusetts, home. Patty Campbell, who just hours before had suffered the doubly cruel fate of mistakenly believing that Krystle had survived the attack, stood before a pack of reporters and photographers and shared memories of her twenty-nine-year-old daughter.

  “Krystle Marie, she was a wonderful person,” Patty Campbell said, fidgeting with her reading glasses, her voice failing. “Everybody that knew her loved her. She loved her dogs. She had a heart of gold. She was always smiling. You couldn’t have asked for a better daughter. I can’t believe this has happened. She was such a hard worker at everything she did. This doesn’t make any sense.”40

  Nothing made sense. The city was paralyzed and bewildered by the events of the past two days — two days unlike any other in Boston’s turbulent history. Confusion was also felt on the campus of Boston University, where students scoured Sina Weibo, a Chinese social media site, for any word of their missing friend, Lingzi Lu. BU’s Chinese student organization was also put on notice.

  Lingzi’s aunt Helen Zhao was working in the Boston area when she first saw television reports of the bombings. As shocked as she was to see the explosions and destruction on Boylston Street, it never entered her mind that the tragedy would hit so close to home. Still, she called her niece to see if she was OK but got no answer. A college friend of Lingzi’s contacted the aunt and told her not to worry, that Lingzi was probably tending to one of her friends at a hospital. At 11 a.m. the next morning, Helen Zhao received a phone call from the Boston Police.

  “They said they wanted to come and talk to me,” Helen Zhao said in an interview with WCVB television. “They walked in and sat and they said, ‘Sorry, we have really bad news. The third victim was Lingzi.’”41

  When word finally came that the graduate student was among the three people who perished in the bombings, both friends and total strangers took to social media to express their condolences. Just days after her death, a memorial page was created on Facebook entitled “R.I.P. Lu Lingzi.” On it, mourners wrote brief notes such as, “My heart breaks for you. R.I.P. lovely girl” and “The world has lost a beautiful, intelligent woman. So, so sad!”

  BU’s Marsh Chapel, where Martin Luther King Jr. had formulated his pacifist beliefs while pursuing his doctoral studies in the early 1950s, was now surrounded by a garden of flowers along with handwritten notes from Lu’s heartbroken classmates. Her parents responded to the notes and the overwhelming love for their daughter in a statement issued on their behalf days later by Boston University. The statement read in part:

  We are grieving and at a loss for words to describe the pain and sadness we are experiencing following the sudden passing of our daughter, Lingzi. She was the joy of our lives. She was a bright and wonderful child. We were thrilled to watch her grow into a beautiful and intelligent woman…. It has always been her dream to come to America to study. While she was here, she fell in love with Boston and its people…. While her dream has not been realized, we want to encourage others who have Lingzi’s ambition and dreams, and want to make the world a better place, to continue moving forward…. We hope that everyone who has now heard the story about Lingzi will keep a memory of her in their hearts.”42

  “She felt love with Boston,” Helen Zhao sa
id. “The food; the culture. She one time told me that every corner you turn is a picture … it’s like why her? What has she done?”43

  Approximately forty minutes after the bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev received a call on his cell phone from Khairullozhon Matanov, a native of Kyrgyzstan who had been living in the US since 2010. Matanov lived in an apartment in Quincy, Massachusetts, and drove a cab. He had known both Tsarnaev brothers but was particularly close to Tamerlan. The two men had discussed hiking a mountain in New Hampshire to train like the mujahideen. Matanov invited the brothers out to dinner on the night of the bombings. When he returned home from the restaurant, a friend pulled Matanov aside and told him that he wished the bombers weren’t Muslim.

  “The bombers could’ve had a just reason if it was done in the name of Islam,” Matanov said coldly. “I’d support the bombings if the reason was just or if the attack had been done by the Taliban and the victims had gone to paradise.”44

  On Tuesday, nearly twenty-four hours after the murders of Lingzi Lu, Martin Richard, and Krystle Campbell, and the injuries to 268 others, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev resurfaced in Cambridge, where he demanded the return of a white 2007 Mercedes Benz station wagon that he had dropped off two weeks before for repair. Dzhokar wore nine-hundred-dollar Louis Vuitton shoes and Burberry pants. His hair was cut shorter than usual.

  “Where is the car?” he asked the mechanic, Gilberto Junior.

  “The car is in the parking lot,” Junior replied. “But I haven’t worked on the car yet. I’ve only removed the rear bumper and the tail lights.”

  “I don’t care, I don’t care,” Tsarnaev said nervously. “I need the car right now, right now.”

  The mechanic noticed that his customer, who was normally laid back, was fretting about something. Dzhokhar bit his fingernails repeatedly as he pressed Junior for the vehicle.

  “Gimme the key. I don’t care. I’m gonna take the car the way it is.”45

  Tsarnaev told the mechanic that the car belonged to his girlfriend and that she wanted it back. The mechanic had known Dzhokhar for two years but had never seen him in such a state. Tsarnaev walked in a circle and stared at the ground. Gilberto Junior thought the young man was on drugs.

  Dzhokhar drove back to UMass-Dartmouth on Tuesday afternoon and hung out at his dormitory, Pine Dale Hall. By now he had his nerves under control. Andrew Glasby, a classmate who sat next to him in a psychology class, later described Dzhokhar as nonchalant. “He acted like it was just another day.” Glasby said Tsarnaev even offered him a ride to his home in Waltham that Friday.46

  Later that night, Dzhokhar worked out at the campus fitness center. There he bumped into another classmate, Zach Bettencourt, who brought up the bombings.

  “Man, can you believe that happened?” Bettencourt said. “I thought that only happened in Iraq or Afghanistan with those bombs.”

  “Yeah, man, tragedies can happen anywhere in the world.”47

  Dzhokhar went back to his Twitter account late Tuesday and early Wednesday. In the months before the marathon, his tweets usually centered on his favorite television shows, including Sons of Anarchy, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad.

  “Breaking Bad taught me how to dispose of a corpse,” Tsarnaev tweeted in January 2013.

  On the day after the bombings, his messages turned to denouncing twitter rumors that a man on the cusp of proposing to his girlfriend found her dead on Boylston Street.

  “Fake Story,” Dzhokhar tweeted out at 5:09 p.m.

  Hours later, at 1:43 a.m. on Wednesday, Tsarnaev tweeted again. This time, he attempted to recapture the laid back attitude he’d been known for before Marathon Monday.

  “I’m a stress free kind of guy,” he announced.

  On Wednesday, April 17, two days after the bombings, Commissioner Ed Davis was summoned to a briefing with several video experts, detectives, and federal agents. They had a break in the case. Agents had analyzed endless streams of video until they came upon one particular clip that stood out from all others. The clip showed a man acting suspiciously — suspiciously calm in the wake of overwhelming terror. He was then dubbed White Hat.

  Davis watched the video, which would be released to the public the following day, over and over. He also saw in the footage a taller man walking in front of White Hat.

  “They were walking at the same cadence,” Davis recalls. There was no sense of panic or concern in either man. They almost appeared to be marching. These look like our guys, the commissioner thought to himself.

  Detectives examined the videos more closely and identified the second man as potentially involved. He was wearing a dark baseball cap and sunglasses and was dubbed Black Hat.

  Investigators now had their suspects. They just needed to figure out who they were. They watched more videos, and they also spotted the suspects in surveillance photos and in pictures taken by spectators. Governor Patrick was also shown the images and briefed on the situation. The problem was that neither man looked like a prototypical jihadist terrorist; rather, they looked like two everyday college kids in a city filled with more than two hundred thousand students. They were so nondescript that one popular men’s website, Barstool Sports, proclaimed that the city had been bombed by two random “bros.”

  Ed Davis demanded that the photos be released on Wednesday. The sooner those images were out there, the sooner this nightmare could be brought to a close. Surprisingly, Davis was met with fierce resistance from the FBI and federal prosecutors. For Davis, it was a public safety issue. These guys were still on the loose. He wanted to get their pictures out there with the hope that someone would recognize them, so that they could be caught before anyone else got hurt. But prosecutors were not focused on the immediate danger. Instead, they feared that releasing the pictures could taint public opinion and jeopardize a future trial. President Obama was coming to town on Thursday for an interfaith service, and there was a Boston Bruins game scheduled at the Garden that night. Public pressure for information was building. Did officials have any idea who committed these acts of terror?

  There were also rumblings that the FBI knew exactly who the two men were. Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been on a federal terror watch list and was known to Russian authorities as a potential threat.

  Was the FBI withholding information about the two suspects? Ed Davis needed to find out. In one meeting, Davis called Rick DesLauriers of the FBI and demanded information on the suspects.

  “I want their names,” Davis demanded. “This is my fucking city!”

  The fact that they were on a watch list and that the Russians had warned the US about them would mean that their pictures should have been on file with the Boston FBI office and with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But no one involved in that previous case came forward to identify the brothers in the days following the marathon attack.

  To make matters worse, there was a flood of misinformation and disinformation flowing throughout both the blogosphere and traditional media. Speculation was rampant about who may have been responsible for the bombings. Was it the Taliban? Was it al-Qaeda? Was it a homegrown cell? Unlike many terror attacks, no international group claimed credit for the bombings.

  Would-be cyber sleuths were muddying the waters by analyzing and dissecting pictures from Boylston Street, trying to pinpoint who the attackers may have been. Not surprisingly, there were some dark-skinned and bearded men whose mere presence at the marathon finish line made them suspects in the eyes of some online vigilantes. The website Reddit had an entire section overrun with wannabe detectives trying to identify the bombers.

  The New York Post splashed a story on its front page with the headline: “Bag Men: Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon.”48

  In its front-page photo, the Post circled two men in red and indicated they were suspects. The story quoted a law enforcement memo that sought information about the two men. Neither of them, however, had anything to do with the bombing. Both were mere spectators enjoying the day. One of them was a high school tra
ck star from Massachusetts, who later filed a lawsuit against the paper.

  Governor Patrick, Commissioner Davis and other officials threw cold water on the Post story in press conferences and criticized other media outlets for running with stories based on sources that turned out to be false. Lawyers for the tabloid would later argue that because its reporters had been working off an FBI email seeking more information about the men, and because the paper had never labeled the men as “suspects,” the story was accurate. Post lawyers also insisted that the “Bag Men” headline was merely an attention-getter and was not defamatory.

  Local media also found itself wanting in the hours and days after the attacks. Every newspaper, every TV station in the city and beyond had dedicated all of their resources to covering what would be the biggest Boston story of their lifetimes. In the frenzy to break news, the Boston Globe erroneously reported that police had a bombing suspect in custody and that he was en route to federal court. Other outlets began reporting similar bulletins, and suddenly there was a mad dash to the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, located in the Seaport section of South Boston. Reporters huddled for more than two hours waiting for some type of hearing to get underway. Courthouse staffers, caught up in the excitement and uncertainty of the situation, began discussing how they would handle the large crowd of reporters and spectators and whether they needed to provide a live television feed of the proceedings for those who couldn’t cram into the courtroom. While this was going on, the US Attorney’s office reached out to court officials to say there would be no hearing. Before this news trickled down to the media, however, the courthouse was evacuated because of a bomb threat. Throughout it all, Bostonians stayed glued to the live TV coverage, then texted friends and took to social media to pass along the latest information — information that was all wrong.