“Take that car and draw a twenty-block perimeter around it,” Davis ordered.
Keeler got his men organized. “If you have a vest, you’re in. If you don’t have a vest, you’re out. Two guys into each yard, and remember to announce yourself going in. Don’t move to the next yard until this yard is clear. Check the houses, check the occupants and get them up and be comfortable that they’re not being held by someone inside their home.” Keeler thought back to the FBI’s decision against releasing photos of the suspects the day before. Maybe, just maybe, this bloodstained night could have been prevented, he said to himself. But he couldn’t dwell on anybody’s past mistakes right now. At this moment, he needed to help capture, cage, or kill Suspect Two.
The manhunt got off to a rocky start, however. Believing that the FBI’s tracking dog had identified the scent of the suspect, armed officers followed the canine through several backyards — until the dog’s handler realized that it had been chasing after a squirrel.
[19]
THE LOCKDOWN
Dic Donohue was clinging to life when he was rushed into Mount Auburn Hospital. Doctors would later say that he had barely a drop of blood left in him when he arrived. He had gone into cardiac arrest during the ambulance ride. As Tim Menton drove, his brother, Pat, and Watertown firefighter Jimmy Caruso did their best to apply pressure to Donohue’s gushing wound. Blood covered their hands and arms, and both men feared that Donohue would be DOA. When they reached Mount Auburn, doctors worked for forty-five long minutes to revive him. Once they got his heart beating again, they whisked him into surgery.
A short time later Donohue’s wife, Kimberly, arrived at the hospital, where doctors and a priest were waiting to greet her. She had not heard from her husband since midnight, when he had texted the following: “Phone dying, gonna be late.” Kimberly read the text and went back to sleep. She was awakened at around 1:30 a.m. by their seven-month-old baby, Richie, who was wailing in his crib. As she attended the infant, the doorbell rang. It was the police.
“You are my worst nightmare,” she told him. “If Dic is dead, you’d better tell me right now. Don’t walk in this house. Don’t come past the door. Tell me if Dic is dead.”50
When she got to the hospital, Kimberly was shocked to learn that doctors had just gotten Dic’s pulse back. They gave Kimberly her husband’s wedding ring, his police badge, and his cell phone. His life would hang in the balance for the next eight hours as surgeons worked to repair the three-quarter-inch wound near the top of his right thigh.
As she sat in the hospital waiting room, Kimberly thought of their son, Richie. Would he grow up without a father? Would he know his dad only through a collection of medals and citations and some pictures on the wall? Dic Donohue had embraced life during his thirty-three years. He’d been a track star at Winchester, Massachusetts, High School and had graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 2002 before becoming an officer in the US Navy. He’d served in the military, but he never saw combat until he returned home. VMI’s motto is “In Peace, a Glorious Asset, In War, a Tower of Strength.” The city of Boston was now at war, and Kimberly Donohue prayed that her husband’s name would not be added to the growing list of those killed by the Boston Marathon bombers.
After Dic’s surgery, Kimberly was allowed into the recovery room, where she saw tubes coming out of his chest, mouth, and nose. She turned to his doctors.
“We have a seven-month-old baby,” she said, her voice shaking. “He has to come through. It’s not a question. You cannot come back in this room and tell me anything else. That’s the only answer I want.”
Sean Collier’s sister was seeking answers of her own. How was she going to break the news to her young daughters that their beloved uncle was dead?
“When we got home and they had come into my room, I told them that Uncle Sean had died at work, and still to this day that is pretty much all that they know,” Nicole says. “Each comes out with different stories as to how maybe Sean has died. My middle one actually told me the other day that she had figured it all out — she knows exactly how Sean died. He climbed a ladder at our house up onto our roof and fell off, and that is her story.”
Sean’s brother, Andy, was also struggling to come to grips with what had happened. His family had booked him a flight from North Carolina to Boston, but the plane was not scheduled to take off until 7 a.m. Andy sat alone with his thoughts and took a Xanax to calm his nerves. Sleep was impossible, so he turned on the television to watch continuing coverage of the drama unfolding back home.
“The first thing I saw was a picture of this one guy [Tamerlan] lying face down on the ground,” he recalls. “And I just broke down again.”
Governor Patrick had been woken up at midnight by a call from MEMA director Kurt Schwartz, who had been monitoring the action in Watertown on both his state police and Boston police radios. He had heard the shootout start. He heard officers screaming about bombs. He immediately called the governor. Patrick did not answer his cell phone, but Schwartz was able to reach him on a landline.
“Governor, I’m trying to piece this together. It sounds to me as though the terrorists are in a shootout with police right now. It sounds to me as though there’s at least one cop dead and that a second cop has been shot. It doesn’t sound good. I’m on my way to Watertown right now.”
“I need updates from you every hour,” the governor told him. “You keep me informed.”
Schwartz sped from his home in Concord with blue lights flashing.
With one suspect still on the loose, the state’s Executive Protection Unit was put on alert, and security was tightened around the governor’s home in Milton. The one piece of positive information was the fact that police had told Schwartz that Black Hat was down.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was rushed to Beth Israel Hospital, where Denise Richard and other victims were still recovering from their wounds. He was barely breathing, but he was shackled with handcuffs and surrounded by an army of police officers. According to his autopsy report, Tamerlan suffered “gunshot wounds of the torso and extremities” as well as “blunt trauma to [his] head and torso.”51
Many of his injuries had been inflicted by his younger brother when Dzhokhar hit him with the stolen SUV. Surgeons made an attempt to save his life by inserting a breathing tube into his mouth. Those efforts were futile. Suspect One fell into cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m. He spoke his final words as he was being loaded into an ambulance from the Watertown scene. He peered deep into a cop’s eyes and sneered, “Rot in hell.”
Back in Watertown, Commissioner Davis, the state police, and the FBI had set up a command post at the Arsenal Mall, less than a mile from Laurel and Dexter streets. Davis was dead tired, but his mind was still racing. Where was Suspect Two? Was he headed for New York City as the carjacking victim had suggested to police? Had a terrorist cell been activated?
The commissioner consulted with Governor Patrick, Kurt Schwartz, and State Police Colonel Tim Alben.
“How far could he [Dzhokhar] have gone?” Patrick asked.
They studied a map of the area and all the possible escape routes. They could not fully engage in a house-to-house search in the dark, so they had to hold the perimeter until first light. Then they would be able to set up a grid search pattern and bring in enough police to walk the twenty-block grid.
Alben, Davis, Deveau, and other officials held a press conference at 1 a.m., confirming Collier’s death at the hands of the alleged marathon bombers. They also provided details of the Cambridge carjacking and Watertown shootout.
A stone-faced Alben stood before a crush of local and national media and issued the lockdown order for Watertown.
“The most important message we are doing right now … is we are asking people to shelter in place for the time being and not to leave their homes,” Alben said, photographers’ shutters clicking in the night air. “If they see something suspicious … they should call 911 immediately. To motorists: they should not stop
for anyone or pick up anyone on the side of the roadway.”
Then, he issued this warning about Suspect Two: “He should be considered armed and dangerous…. Please, use extreme caution and stay inside your homes.”
He also said there were teams of explosives experts at the site inspecting devices found in the streets.
“Some detonated and some did not,” he said.
“We’re trying to protect the safety of people living there,” Davis added. “There’s a twenty-block perimeter.”
But by that time, the bombing suspect could have been anywhere. Members of the bomb squad reported that they believed they had recovered a triggering device from a suicide vest. At that point, police had to assume that Suspect Two could still have been carrying a backpack filled with explosives and perhaps a gun.
MBTA Police Chief Paul MacMillan spoke up. The time was now 4:30 a.m.
“Guys, at about five o’clock, trains and buses are gonna start going live,” MacMillan said. “What are we gonna do about Watertown?”
There was no way law enforcement would let buses roll through Watertown. They could not let Suspect Two flee by bus.
“Well, what about the Harvard Square [MBTA] station?” someone asked. “Can he get to Cambridge and the T and blow that up?”
“How confident are you that you’ve got this guy contained in the twenty blocks?” Schwartz asked the police commanders.
“At best, fifty-fifty,” he was told.
The answer wasn’t what Schwartz wanted to hear.
“What are we gonna tell the public?” Schwartz asked. “Folks are just getting up and heading out the door for work.”
MacMillan told the group it would be impossible to partially shut down the transit system at that point.
“I can’t close one station and one line in thirty minutes,” MacMillan said. “I would need a couple of hours to do that.”
What MacMillan could do was shut the entire system down. “It’s all or nothing,” he said.
Schwartz could not make the call to shut down the transit system on his own. He coordinated a conference call with Governor Patrick, Commissioner Davis, Mayor Menino, and others.
“Here’s our recommendation,” Schwartz said. “We shut down the entire T system right away. We also want to ask people in Watertown and communities that border Watertown to shelter in place. He [Suspect Two] may be wounded, but we don’t know how far he’s gonna go.”
Law enforcement officials agreed on the plan, but the politicians were unsure. Mayor Menino was originally against the idea. He was worried what kind of message it would send to the public. Schwartz reiterated the notion that there was only a fifty percent chance that cops had the suspect cornered within that twenty-block grid in Watertown. He also stressed that the fugitive could be carrying more bombs. Adding to the nightmarish worst-case scenario was information coming in that a terrorist cell had indeed been activated and that another bomber had traveled by cab to South Station while an accomplice was en route from New York. That piece of information later proved to be false, but the uncertainty of the situation was not only terrifying — it was also something no one in the room had ever dealt with before.
Menino would not allow any more blood to be spilled on his streets. He agreed to the plan, as did the governor. Menino also asked that the shelter-in-place order be expanded to include all of Boston. When people woke up that day to go to work, they were informed by TV, radio, text, email, and reverse 911 calls to their homes that the city of Boston was effectively shut down and that no one should drive in to work. An entire American city was completely locked down for the first time in our nation’s history.
The sound of car horns blaring; the sight of waves of people pouring out of MBTA stations talking incessantly on their cell phones during the walk to work. It’s a normal routine for a city like Boston, but on this day — there was none of it. The streets were deserted. The city was silent, save for the roar of a police cruiser or armored vehicle responding to one perceived threat or another. Every major corner and every major attraction in Boston was guarded by armed soldiers and cops, all of them on the lookout for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — America’s most-wanted man. Locations symbolic of Boston and the birth of our nation garnered special attention from law enforcement, which covered much of the city in a protective blanket. Faneuil Hall, where Samuel Adams called for the removal of British troops after the Boston Massacre, was now defended by a new generation of American patriots drawn from communities across the Commonwealth and dressed in Kevlar and armed with M16s. The state house and South Station were also fortified. There was quiet in the historic North End, South Boston, and Roxbury districts, where residents young and old remained housebound and glued to their television sets and computer screens. Indeed, the whole world was watching their beloved city and offering voices of support. New Hampshire native and Hollywood star Adam Sandler summed up what many were feeling that morning when he tweeted: “Boston is probably the only major city that if you fuck with them, they will shut down the whole city, stop everything and find you.”
The collective mood of the city’s neighborhoods had shifted from fear and uncertainty to one of overwhelming resolve. You are trapped; we will not let you get away.
In neighboring Watertown, where the search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was centered, Police Chief Ed Deveau marveled at the number of law enforcement teams and media crews that had descended on his quiet community. The only other time on Deveau’s watch that the town had found itself at the center of international news was in 2010, when a Watertown man named Aftab Ali Khan was arrested following the failed Times Square bombing in New York City. Khan, who had only lived in the town for a short time, was accused of sending $4,900 to Faisal Shahzad, a jihadist convicted of the botched bombing plot. Khan was deported to Pakistan in May 2011.
This time, the terrorism had come to Deveau’s front door — literally. He lives just a short ride away from Dexter and Laurel streets. Deveau knew Boston’s top cop from Davis’s days in Lowell. Both Lowell and Watertown are part of the North Eastern Metropolitan Law Enforcement Council (NEMLEC), a consortium of fifty-eight police departments that combine resources for emergencies. NEMLEC’s SWAT team was activated, and several officers from the unit were already patrolling the neighborhoods surrounding the zone where the shootout had gone down just minutes earlier.
Neither chief anticipated an exhaustive search as they presumed that Dzhokhar was injured, bleeding, and on foot. With several tracking dogs on the street, they figured it wouldn’t be long before the terrorist was found. Police were vigilant, and so were civilians. Residents in the neighborhood received automated calls at their homes and on their cell phones telling them to lock their doors and not to open them except for uniformed police officers. Watertown’s 911 lines lit up with reports of suspicious men walking around the neighborhood. All cars in the twenty-block perimeter were stopped. Pedestrians were ordered to put their hands up, show ID, and get off the streets. During these hours of heightened tension, the fog of war was apparent as false alarms continued to pour in. At one point, a report came in about a man who dove into the Charles River, just a few blocks south of Dexter and Laurel. There was no man in the river. There was another report of police in Kenmore Square stopping a cab that may have been carrying the bomber. It turned out to be false. Similarly, someone reported that a cab took a fare from the Arsenal Mall in Watertown to South Station, just as trains were leaving the hub for New York City. Again — false. A train was stopped in Connecticut and searched, but nothing suspicious was turned up.
There was a report from a woman that her daughter was being held at gunpoint in a Watertown home. Authorities thought they had their guy. SWAT teams and hostage negotiators were alerted. It turned out that the woman was calling about a psychiatric patient, and the incident had no connection to the at-large terrorist.
Concern spread to the south coast of Massachusetts and onto the campus of UMass-Dartmouth, where officials were shocked to learn ab
out their student’s lead role in the bloody drama unfolding up in Boston. At 11:15 a.m., a caravan of state police vehicles sped down Old Westport Road and onto the college campus. Armed troopers patrolled the grounds and searched Dzhokhar’s dorm room at Pine Dale Hall, while two Black Hawk helicopters from Camp Edwards on Cape Cod circled overhead and landed with additional troops. Just after 2 p.m., UMass-Dartmouth Chancellor Dr. Divina Grossman, who was just finishing her first year on the job, issued a statement which read in part:
On Tuesday, we drew strength from a campus vigil that attracted hundreds of people in remembrance of the victims, and today we learned that a suspect is one of our students. We closed and evacuated the campus to assure the safety of our students, faculty and staff.52
A few miles away in New Bedford, officials shut down Bristol Community College. Thirty miles to the north on the campus of Bridgewater State University, security personnel evacuated two halls following the discovery of a suspicious package. The most innocent among us were also being pulled from harm’s way as child care centers in Dartmouth — including the Schwartz Center for Children, which teaches special-needs kids — were shut down.
Inside dorm room number 7341 at Pine Dale Hall — Dhzokhar’s room — FBI agents retrieved several BBs, a large firework, and the black jacket and white hat that were believed to have been worn by Dhzokhar at the Boston Marathon. Tsarnaev’s laptop computer and a backpack stuffed with fireworks were missing. Those items had been taken out of Dzhokhar’s dorm room the day before by his college pals Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, both exchange students from Kazakhstan. Tsarnaev normally hung out at their apartment at 69A Carriage Drive in New Bedford, and Kadyrbayev had been a frequent guest at Dzhokhar’s home on Norfolk Street in Cambridge and had met several times with family members, including Tamerlan. Dhzokhar had made a disturbing revelation to his friends Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev over lunch just one month before the bombings. “It’s good to die as a Shaheed (martyr), as you would die with a smile on your face and go to Heaven, ” he told them.53 Tsarnaev also informed his friends that he knew how to make a bomb and went on to describe the ingredients needed to build an explosive device.
Boston Strong Page 21