Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (15 page)

From billions of pixels, a break

A
in’t no love in the heart of the city
, his message began.

It was just hours after the bombing, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was already on Twitter, commenting on the tragedy as if watching it all unfold from a distance. As if he were just another pot-smoking, soccer-playing, social media–savvy nineteen-year-old college kid in a hoodie.

Stay safe people
, he wrote.

At 2:50
P.M.
on Monday, the bombers had walked away from Boylston Street and disappeared into the city’s thrum, havoc burning in their wake. With surgeons racing to save lives, with police standing vigil over bodies, with investigators combing the wreckage for evidence, and with the public panicked at the prospect of more bomb blasts, one, and perhaps both, of the Tsarnaev brothers went grocery shopping. According to a receipt later recovered by police, at least one of the brothers made a purchase at a Whole Foods store across the Charles River in Cambridge, about a half mile from their family home.

Tamerlan seemed to lay low after slipping away from the marathon; authorities later declined to share what, if anything, they knew of his movements after he dropped his backpack outside Marathon Sports. Dzhokhar was a different story. At 12:34
A.M.
Tuesday, he returned to Twitter, posting a message more opaque, more serious than his first after the attack:
There are people that know the truth but stay silent & there are people that speak the truth but we don’t hear them cuz they’re the minority
. Twelve hours later, around lunchtime on Tuesday, he showed up at Junior Auto Body in Somerville, a short walk from the family’s home on the Cambridge-Somerville line. He wanted to pick up a white Mercedes that he had left two weeks earlier, a car he had said belonged to a girlfriend. The rear bumper wasn’t fixed yet. Dzhokhar told the mechanic, Gilberto Junior, he would take it anyway.

“I need it now,” Dzhokhar said.

Normally he was relaxed and pleasant, chatting about soccer, weed, and girls. That Tuesday, Dzhokhar appeared anxious. He was biting his nails. His knees shook so much that Junior thought the kid had been popping pills.

 • • • 

T
he proximity of the bombing to world-class hospitals had been one blessing. The abundance of commercial and retail buildings near Copley Square would prove to be another. Shops and banks lined Boylston Street on both sides of the finish line area, from the Lord & Taylor department store on one side to the Sugar Heaven candy store on the other. Businesses occupied the upper floors. The Boston Public Library was right there, too. The array of retail outlets and attractions made Boylston a huge draw for consumers and visitors; it also meant security video cameras were just about everywhere. For law enforcement, this held huge promise. At least one of the cameras had almost certainly picked up the bombers walking through the vast crowd at the finish line. The trick was figuring out which one. “
We were very confident that there were enough cameras down there that we were going to capture something,” said state police colonel Tim Alben. “The sheer volume of stuff made it difficult to sort through.”

Within minutes of arriving at the scene Monday afternoon, Boston Police commissioner Ed Davis sought out Sergeant Detective Earl Perkins, a video specialist with the police department’s intelligence-gathering unit, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center. Davis directed Perkins to hit up every potential source of video up and down Boylston. Perkins and his team, working alongside state police and FBI agents, quickly began tracking down store owners and managers, collecting footage from them, and converting what they received to formats that allowed for efficient review. In addition to the stores, marathon spectators were another potential source of video, as many had used their smartphones to capture the triumphant finishes of loved ones. The bombers must have walked right by at least one of them. In the hours that followed, the FBI set up a special website where the public could easily upload video clips.

Investigators gathered raw footage from anyone they could find. Kiva Kuan Liu, a twenty-three-year-old Boston University graduate student, had been filming for a documentary near where the first bomb exploded. She was summoned to Tufts Medical Center around 10:00
P.M.
to be interviewed. In a drab hospital meeting room, four investigators grilled her. When her memory failed her, they persisted. “They were very picky about details,” said Liu, who was not injured in the blast. Liu volunteered her Panasonic video camera, which she had borrowed from BU. Every clip, every camera, every snippet that authorities collected could be the one that unlocked the case. There were thousands of images to look through, but time was short. With every hour that passed, the risk of the bombers’ escape, or of another attack, seemed to grow.

Law enforcement had set up their primary command and control post at the Westin. But they also commandeered the Lenox, a hundred-year-old luxury hotel right on Boylston Street between the two bombing sites, turning the whole place into a technical operations center. The 214 well-appointed guest rooms housed federal agents and other law enforcement officials who had come in from around the country to help. Evidence-gathering teams took over the hotel’s function rooms. Over seven days, Davis said, the place came to resemble a military reservation, with local, state, and federal authorities in every nook working the investigation. “You’d go into the bar and there’d be twenty people having lunch talking about the case,” Davis said. “And then you’d go upstairs and there’d be fifty people in the main ballroom, and everybody was handing out assignments. A very, very dynamic place.” It was also a haven of sorts, with its lamplit lobby, carved lion heads, and low-slung leather armchairs. Outside the windows, beyond the front door that had been broken by the crowds desperate to escape the bombs, teams in Tyvek hazardous waste suits picked up evidence.

The Lenox had been fully booked, as always, for the marathon, with guests including elite runners from around the world. After the bombing shut down the neighborhood, guests couldn’t get back to the hotel. The staff spent days packing up every guest room and shipping belongings back to those who had fled. The influx of FBI agents was disconcerting, but it gave the hotel staff a purpose. Most volunteered to keep working, determined to show the police the same hospitality as guests who paid $400 a night. It was not a perfect fit—some of the hard-nosed cops roaming the place hardly knew what to do with all the solicitous inquiries about their needs, and they kept their rooms so neat housekeepers couldn’t tell which rooms were occupied—but as the week went on and their exhaustion peaked, the agents’ appreciation of their plush accommodations deepened. “Some of them pulled me aside and said, ‘You know, we’re usually in a tent, barely eating, using Porta-Potties, and to be able to take a hot shower . . .’ That helped us get through it, too,” hotel sales director Scott Grigelevich said.

Hotel workers also took comfort in the generosity of other businesses that rallied to help them feed 1,500 investigators a day at a time when trucks could not get through with their regular deliveries. When food supplies at the Lenox ran dangerously low, the general manager of the nearby Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel walked over with an enormous slab of bacon on his shoulder. Smith & Wollensky, a Back Bay steak house, sent lunch for seven hundred people. Still, the work could not distract the hotel staff completely. Tending to business that week in his office on the second floor of the hotel, Grigelevich said, “There were times I couldn’t stand to look out the window at the baby carriages” still sitting abandoned in the street. He longed for the disarray below to be swept clean. But no clean sweep would come for days, until agents had recorded every detail.

Investigators used two locations to sift through all the security footage that was coming in. The first was a room at the Lenox, where Perkins had set up his temporary headquarters. Authorities also took over a cavernous, century-old former army warehouse in the Black Falcon Cruise Terminal in South Boston. Half of that space was converted into a video center, the operation growing to include a number of computers, where shifts of investigators sat and carefully combed through frame after frame. The heavily secured space, right on Boston Harbor, wasn’t heated, so they brought in mobile heating units and piped warm air in through wide yellow ventilation tubes. The other half of the warehouse was used for evidence collection. Investigators gathered bloody clothing and other debris brought over from Boylston and arranged it, starting around 11:00
P.M.
Monday night, in a manner that mimicked the scene of the bombing. It looked, to Davis, like one of those big hangars where crash investigators try to reassemble downed airplanes.

Between the Lenox and Black Falcon, investigators spent hour after hour reviewing video, looking for something that didn’t belong.Different cameras offered different angles, different levels of quality, and thus varying degrees of use to those working the case.
The repetition could be numbing. One agent reviewed the same video clip four hundred times. Everyone yearned for a breakthrough, some suspicious movement or odd-looking bystander to emerge from the billions of pixels filling their vision.

 • • • 

B
y Tuesday afternoon, Dzhokhar was back on campus at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, acting like he had no care in the world, walking nonchalantly around his dorm, Pine Dale Hall, and chatting with acquaintances. “
He was not startled. He was not scared. He was not anything,” student Andrew Glasby said. “He was just the same old Dzhokhar.” Dzhokhar even offered Glasby a ride back up toward Boston later in the week.

At 9:05
P.M.
Tuesday, Dzhokhar used his swipe card to enter the campus fitness center.
Fellow student Zach Bettencourt saw him there and mentioned his shock at the bombing. Bettencourt made a comment about this kind of thing usually happening in other parts of the world, and Dzhokhar agreed. “He was like, ‘Yeah, tragedies happen like this all the time. And it’s sad,’” Bettencourt told a reporter. Dzhokhar also posted more Twitter messages Tuesday, including one about a photo of a bombing victim. Internet rumors had swirled about the injured woman in the picture, claiming her boyfriend had planned to propose but found her dead.

Fake story
, Dzhokhar tweeted.

The next night, Wednesday, he stopped by a get-together at an Italian restaurant where some of his fellow intramural soccer players had gathered, students recalled. He slept in his room, number 7341. “
He was just relaxed,” one student said. Indeed, Dzhokhar appeared to be trying to resume his normal life, evidently unconcerned that he might be caught. Not only was he not in hiding—he was all over campus.

I’m a stress free kind of guy
, he had tweeted early Wednesday morning.

 • • • 

W
ith investigators working behind the scenes, the public and the media began sleuthing on their own. On sites like Facebook, Twitter, and reddit, social media users, relying on snippets of police scanner traffic and photos of the finish line, turned to crowd-sourcing to isolate and identify potential suspects. These online vigilantes may have been driven by good intentions, but they would, over the course of Marathon Week, finger the wrong young men, in some cases to damaging effect. In an apology posted a week after the bombing, Erik Martin, the general manager of reddit, a massively popular message-board site, wrote, “
Some of the activity on reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The reddit staff and the millions of people on reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened.”

In particular, reddit apologized publicly and privately to the family of Sunil Tripathi, a twenty-two-year-old Brown University student who had gone missing on March 16, a month before the marathon attack. For a time, much of the speculation on reddit and elsewhere online about the bombing culprits swirled around Tripathi, because of his perceived physical resemblance to Dzhokhar. Compounding the problem, a number of prominent figures in the press spread his name to their own followers and friends on social media.
The episode became a source of deep pain for the Tripathi family, already devastated by the young man’s disappearance. The very next week, Tripathi’s body would be pulled from the Providence River in Providence, Rhode Island. His tragedy had nothing to do with Boston’s.

It wasn’t just “new media” that got caught up in the speculation. On Thursday, April 18, the
New York Post
featured, on its cover, a giant photo of two young men from Massachusetts, later identified as Salaheddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaimi, at the finish line of the marathon, one wearing a backpack, the other carrying a duffel. Under the banner headline “BAG MEN,” the story said that authorities were looking for the two in connection with the bombing. Barhoum, a sixteen-year-old high school student, and Zaimi, twenty-four, a part-time college student who worked at a financial services firm, both lived in cities just north of Boston. Both had come from Morocco and were legal residents of the United States. Both loved running, which is why they were at the marathon. Being erroneously connected to the bombing probe, their lawyers said, damaged both of them emotionally. Weeks later they would file a defamation lawsuit against the
Post,
which would stand by its sensational presentation.

In the rush to figure out the real story, other mainstream media outlets got it wrong at times, too. On Wednesday, relying on a source familiar with the investigation, the
Boston Globe
posted a breaking- news report online that a suspect had been arrested and was on his way to federal court. Other media outlets, including the Associated Press and CNN, put out similar bulletins. Hundreds of reporters and photographers descended on the Moakley Courthouse in South Boston. The Coast Guard and Boston Police Department Harbor Patrol kept watch over nearby waters. Inside, courthouse staff flocked to the emergency magistrate’s courtroom, anticipating a hearing. They began discussing whether they should move the hearing to a larger courtroom with more seating, and whether to provide a live, closed-circuit feed to yet another courtroom, in anticipation of an overflow crowd.