Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (14 page)

“God didn’t do this,” said the priest. “Evil did it.”

“But God created everything,” said Jason. “Didn’t He?”

Yes, the priest acknowledged. He was ready to say more. But just then a doctor walked into the room, looking for Heather’s friends and relatives.

It was hard to know how to react to the news he brought. Jason had wanted more than anything to believe that Heather’s foot could be saved. For the moment it had, and that was a huge relief. But the doctors warned them that things could change quickly. If blood couldn’t get to the foot through the transplanted veins—if the foot turned gray—they would have to consider amputation.

To Heather’s mother, Rosemary Abbott,
the wait for information Monday night seemed endless. She and her husband had rushed to Boston from Rhode Island after the call from the ambulance. They knew nothing about the bombing at first; they thought Heather had been in an accident. They had found their daughter’s friends at the hospital—and had seen the bloodstains on their clothes—but Jason and the others shared few details about what had happened, believing it was better to leave that to the doctors. For six or seven hours she waited to learn more, with no idea how dire the situation was. When at last, around 11:00
P.M.
, a doctor called to tell her the surgery was over, Rosemary still thought maybe Heather’s leg was only broken. Instead, he said her daughter’s foot had been severely damaged but that it had not been amputated. Shock washed over Rosemary as the words sank in. She had been waiting and worrying for hours, yet she had not imagined anything this bad. It was gut-wrenching, but there was no time to dwell on it. Heather was out of surgery, headed to the ICU, and her mother needed to get there and reassure her.

“You’re alive,” she told her daughter. “We will deal with this.”

In the midst of all the worry and the waiting, an unexpected visitor had shown up at the Brigham. Heather’s ex-boyfriend had rushed to the hospital as soon as he’d heard she was hurt. Their on-again, off-again relationship had ended badly a few months earlier. Now, in the wake of the bombing, he wanted to start over. He was emotional when he finally saw Heather, late that night in her room in the ICU. “I’ll never let you down again,” he promised. She was groggy, vulnerable; still, she had her doubts. She had been hurt before. The stakes were a lot higher now. She wanted to believe him, though. So she said okay.

Her mother stayed beside her through that first long night, leaning forward in a chair beside the bed, resting her head gently on the mattress. “Talk to me,” Heather said, and so Rosemary did, speaking softly to her until Heather fell asleep. The busy ICU beeped and hummed around them. Nurses moved in and out, monitoring her condition as the night outside went from black to gray. The watching and waiting continued all the next day. Heather drifted in and out, in pain and medicated, but she understood that a gamble had been waged. The surgeons had done their best to give her foot a chance. The passing hours would reveal their failure or success. There were no guarantees, but there was reason to hope for the best: a full recovery and return to normal life. Lying in her bed, she tried to focus on the hope. It was hard to do in the midst of so much pain.

 • • • 

E
ven with his legs gone and his life hanging in the balance, Jeff Bauman knew he had something vitally important to share. After he was rushed to an ambulance after the bombing, Bauman began talking about the suspicious man he’d seen standing near him—the one with the hat, sunglasses, and backpack—with whom he’d exchanged a stare just before the blast. Bauman told someone at the hospital the same thing. When he woke up after surgery, FBI agents were waiting for him. As Bauman described the man he felt certain was responsible, a sketch artist began to draw. The furious work of finding the bombers was on.

Three voices, silenced

T
he mission was one no mother should ever perform, nor even contemplate. But late on Tuesday afternoon, barely twenty-four hours after her daughter had lost her life on Boylston Street,
Patty Campbell summoned all her strength, stepped out onto the weathered wooden porch of her two-family home in Medford, and prepared to deliver the most painful words she would likely ever say. She surveyed the pack of reporters, photographers, and camera operators staring up at her from the sidewalk along Park Street, in a quiet residential neighborhood bordered by the highway and the Mystic River. The cameras clicked away, capturing every frame of her stunned movements, every angle of her shock. Wearing a black jacket over a blue shirt, Patty put on her glasses and approached the bank of microphones. She looked down at the notepad cradled in her shaky hands.

“We are heartbroken at the death of our daughter, Krystle Marie,” she said. “She was a wonderful person.”

Every word was a struggle. Her voice broke, her breathing heavy. She took her glasses off. Her son, Billy, stood to her left in a white Boston Red Sox cap, his right arm hung tight over her shoulder. Her brother John Reilly walked up on the other side and put a hand on her back. She fought on.

“Everybody that knew her loved her,” Patty said. “She had a heart of gold. She was always smiling, friendly. You couldn’t ask for a better daughter.”

Her face was a portrait of agony; still she pressed forward.

“We can’t believe this has happened,” she said. “She was such a hard worker at everything she did. This doesn’t make any sense.”

She looked out pleadingly at the dozens of gathered reporters, who were quietly taking in her statement, and threw her hands up, as if looking for an answer. As if one of them might explain how it was that she could be standing in front of them here today, on a porch her daughter had been up and down countless times. How it was that Krystle, such an outsized presence in their lives, could suddenly be silenced.

“What kind of daughter was she, ma’am?” a reporter asked as she turned to walk away.

“She was the best,” Patty said.

Her family led her back inside the house.

 • • • 

T
wo blocks east of the finish line, smack in the middle of Berkeley Street, a few thousand unclaimed runners’ bags lay in rows. It was Tuesday morning. The night before, marathon officials had hastily arranged them in numerical order. Now runners were arriving to fetch them, flashing their bib numbers at a checkpoint to prove ownership. It was not supposed to be this way. They had expected to cross the finish line triumphantly, receive a coveted race medal from a volunteer, and collect their stuff from school buses parked nearby. Instead the whole place had become a crime scene, their marathon experience forever scarred. It was nothing compared with what the Campbells were facing, but the running community had lost something, too.

So on Tuesday,
race officials did their best to restore some of the ceremony the bombing had taken away. They parked a cherry-red GMC van stocked with medals in the middle of the baggage area and began bestowing them on runners who hadn’t been able to finish. The transactions were brief, as marathon representatives carefully draped blue-and-yellow ribbons around people’s necks. But they meant something. Some of the runners were distraught. Race officials became tearful, too. “Quite a few people were crying, on both sides of the fence,” said Matt Carpenter, a member of the Boston Athletic Association’s organizing committee. The moment Carpenter will never forget came when a middle-aged woman from Hong Kong approached him with her bib number. He awarded her a medal, and she broke down. He held her for five minutes. “I will be back next year,” she told him.

In the afternoon,
marathon officials took the medals and bags over to a former armory a few blocks away, a building known as “the Castle.” Here, they laid down a nearly three-foot piece of the blue-and-yellow adhesive finish line brought over from Boylston Street. Runners who hadn’t finished the marathon were invited to step across the tape and receive their medals. Volunteers snapped photos and offered applause. For some of the runners, it was a complicated moment, their emotions a mix of heartache, pride, and anger. One woman remained composed as she received her medal and her bag. But then she dug out her cell phone, which she had stowed before the race. The voice mails from loved ones in the twenty-four hours since the bombing plunged her back into Monday’s terror.

The hours after the attack were like that, Carpenter said, a blur of dread and sadness. Many of the staff, board members, and volunteers of the BAA felt the same way. Their organization had put on the Boston Marathon for 117 years—before World War I even—and here they were in 2013, badly shaken, unsure how they would get past this year. Tuesday morning, after Governor Deval Patrick briefed the public on the start of the investigation,
he slipped over to BAA headquarters behind Copley Square for a brief visit. The task was similar to the one he would perform at the hospitals: offering support, words of comfort, and an acknowledgment of their grief. Everyone gathered in a conference room, and the governor walked around and shook hand after hand. For Dave McGillivray, Patrick’s visit was a source of consolation, but the race director couldn’t dwell much on his feelings. The practical challenges and immediate demands were all-consuming. Calls and e-mails streamed into the BAA, from runners, from media, from people across the world offering support and assistance. More urgently, the BAA had thousands of marathoners for whom it had to account and care. “We didn’t have time to reflect and pause and think about what happened,” McGillivray said. “We had to give answers and directions.” Then he walked back into his house north of Boston for the first time after the bombing and saw, in the eyes of his seven-year-old son, Luke, just how much had changed. “Dad,” Luke said the minute he came in the door, “I don’t want you to ever direct that race again.”

 • • • 

A
s nightfall arrived on Tuesday,
a thousand people gathered in Garvey Park in Dorchester. In the deep blue April twilight, they lit candles in memory of Martin Richard, the yellow flames flickering inside small cups. They sang “God Bless America.” They wept for a loss that would never make sense. None of what had happened made sense—every death, every grievous injury was its own injustice. But to lose Martin, an eight-year-old boy out enjoying a spring day in the city with his family—this one cut especially deep. “My grandson plays sports with little Martin,” said Maria Deltufo, a lifelong resident of Dorchester. “When it’s somebody in your neighborhood, and your hometown—and such a little boy that is so full of life and so happy . . . The whole family is now destroyed senselessly.”

Many children at the vigil had known him; they had gone to school or played together in the neighborhood. They had played together at the very park where they gathered to remember his life. Martin told the best knock-knock jokes, his friends said. He always won at math games. He reached out to classmates who were isolated. “He sticks up for kids,” recalled Colin Baker, nine. “If somebody was left out, he would come say, ‘Want to join my group?’” The more the world learned about Martin, the larger his absence loomed: Who would stick up for the kids who needed it now? “It should not have happened to him,” Colin added. “It should not have happened to nobody.”

 • • • 

H
er friends, in the hours after the bombing, had taken to Facebook, Twitter, and the Chinese social media site Sina Weibo, frantically looking for information. Lingzi Lu was missing. They urged police and the news media to help find her, posting pictures of the Boston University graduate student, with her seafoam-green nail polish, her warm smile and dark, piercing eyes. “
Lingzi, where are you now?” her roommate asked in a Weibo message. “I know you get lost so easily. Don’t worry. We will find you.” Her roommate also contacted BU’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association, an organization of Chinese students and employees at the university, and the group’s members began trawling the streets. When Lingzi didn’t call after the bombing, her parents and extended family in China grew worried, too.

One friend, Yijing Lu, drove from hospital to hospital, eventually landing at Boston Medical Center. There, Yijing found what she thought was a glimmer of hope. She was told the hospital was treating an unidentified woman of Asian descent, and that the woman wasn’t stable enough yet to handle visitors. So Lingzi’s roommate and friends gathered and waited. Hours later, they learned the patient was not Lingzi. And it was there at the hospital that the terrible news came: Their friend had been killed. First, they sat in stunned silence. Then her roommate began quietly telling stories about Lingzi, about what she had been like. What they had just learned was too much to comprehend. Better to focus on what had come before.

On Wednesday morning, tributes to the promising young statistician began appearing at the foot of a statue in front of Marsh Chapel on campus—flowers, a pair of running shoes, messages of remembrance. Joy Liu, a twenty-three-year-old journalism graduate student, left a green scally cap with a shamrock on it and a note that said, “From Boston and Beijing with love, RIP.” Freshman Jiani Jiang, nineteen, another native of China, visited the makeshift memorial to pay her respects to Lingzi, whom she did not know but whose death made her feel sad and homesick. “There are a lot of foreign students who want to go home now,” she said.

 • • • 

A
few miles north, word of Krystle Campbell’s death spread like a crushing wave across Medford, from the high school where her strong personality stood out, to the streets around her parents’ home, to city hall, where the flag was lowered to half-staff. It was hard enough trying to absorb the blow the bombing had delivered to Boston. Now they had lost one of their own. “
To deal with those emotions of shock, of anger in the early stages, and then finding out that one of the three victims was actually a young lady from our city, just compounds the sadness and the anguish,” said Medford’s longtime mayor, Michael McGlynn, who reached out to the Campbells on Tuesday and would help them navigate the rocky weeks to follow.
The Medford High School Lady Mustang softball team dropped their heads for a moment of silence at its Wednesday game and dedicated the balance of the season to Krystle.
Later that evening, the city came together at Grace Episcopal Church for a prayer service. Many other tributes, benefits, and rituals of mourning followed.

The shattering news rippled, too, through the cousins, the aunts, the uncles, and other relatives, through her extended family at Summer Shack, through her new colleagues at Jimmy’s, and through the many other lives Krystle had touched. The general sense of shock was now painfully, impossibly specific. “
Of all the people that were there, and three were killed, and one is Krystle—it’s unbelievable,” said Bryan Conway, a boat captain who worked alongside her on the harbor islands. “
I would like to say that she was in a better place now but she’s not,” another friend wrote on Facebook. “Because THIS is her place—right here, right now, with her family and friends smiling, laughing, and making everybody’s day better.”

Maybe it was her outspokenness, or maybe it was the red hair, or the distinctive blue eye shadow. But college professors who had had her in class a decade or more before—professors who had known hundreds of students since—remembered her instantly when Krystle’s name hit the news. Robin Gomolin had taught her in sociology classes at the University of Massachusetts Boston and spent time with her in a study group that used to meet Saturday mornings.
Krystle, to her, was a striver, someone who hadn’t always had it easy but so badly wanted to do well in school. Tuesday morning, Gomolin was driving over the Charles River in her car when she heard the name on the radio.
It couldn’t be
, she thought. She asked her daughter to check it out. Her daughter texted her a picture and Gomolin’s heart sank. Robert Tarutis, whose Western civilization class Krystle had taken at community college in the fall of 2002, had much the same experience.
The minute he saw her picture on the Web, he knew it was the same charming, talkative Krystle he’d known when she was a nineteen-year-old. “Even after all those years, I remembered the name and the face,” he said. “That was a very sad day.”

For most of Greater Boston, the rest of Marathon Week would be a fearful experience, with threats of further attacks and deep apprehension that the bombers were still out there. For the Campbell family and for Krystle’s friends, it would be a week of unrelenting sorrow. Instead of organizing the next get-together, the next family gathering, the next night out, they were now planning her final rite of passage. They arranged for a wake at a local funeral home on Sunday evening, and a funeral service at St. Joseph Church, right in Medford center, on the following Monday morning. It was, for some who knew her, a classic case of not knowing what you have until it’s gone. “She was stolen,” Bryan Conway said. “She was
stolen
.”