Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (9 page)

 • • • 

A
long with the families and young children, college students jammed the Boylston sidewalks. Standing near the Richards out in front of Forum,
Lingzi Lu was one of them. She was twenty-three years old, a graduate student from China studying statistics at Boston University. She had just learned on Sunday that she had passed an important exam, and it had put her in a happy mood. Monday morning, over breakfast with her roommate at their Arlington apartment, Lingzi had toyed with the idea of going to the marathon. She decided that she would, after doing some work on a project; her friend Zhou Danling wanted to go, too. They had made their way to the finish line. Now they stood close to the runners bearing down on the finish, the day’s great drama unfolding an arm’s length away.

 • • • 

S
he wasn’t in the marathon, but
Alma Bocaletti was still running. Running along the sidelines. She and six others had gone to support another friend, Natalie, who had entered the race. They’d made matching black-and-white T-shirts with the image of a sunflower. They’d drawn up posters. They’d bought a bouquet of yellow balloons, so Natalie could find them in the crowd. After seeing Natalie pass at mile seventeen, they hopped on the train to Boston hoping to see her at the end, too. Bocaletti wanted to go all the way to the finish line but was worried she wouldn’t make it before Natalie crossed. So she took off running, figuring she’d reconnect with her friends later. She dashed up to a spot in the crowd near Marathon Sports, where the flags of all the countries stood. The freckled face of a stranger turned around.

“Who are you waiting for?” Krystle Campbell asked her with a smile.

“I’m waiting for a friend,” Bocaletti said, explaining that Natalie had crossed the thirty-kilometer mark a little while ago. “How about you?”

Krystle pointed to her friend Karen, standing nearby. “Her boyfriend just crossed the thirty-K, too,” she said.

Bocaletti’s friends then caught up with her. One of them had Bocaletti’s phone. Using the tracking system, she could see now that Natalie was nearing the finish. She went back up to Krystle to show her Natalie’s location on the phone. Krystle smiled.

“Oh, yours is coming any moment now,” she said.

“Yes, if my calculations are correct, any moment,” Bocaletti said.

It was about 2:45. A woman in front of both of them, who was right up against the barricade, took a phone call and walked away. That left open a prime spot in the front row, a perfect spot for viewing. Krystle had as much right to it as anyone. But she didn’t move forward. She smiled, shifted over, and let Bocaletti go up front.

 • • • 

H
eather finally made it to Boylston Street. Crossing over from Fenway Park, she and her friends had gotten lost in the marathon street closures, just like last year, but they were having a good time, and the slight delay didn’t bother them. They walked up the sidewalk on the same side as Forum, approaching with the restaurant to their left. The door to the bar was open. A bouncer was checking IDs. Moving closer to the door, her friends in front of her, Heather peered into the bar. It didn’t look as crowded as she had expected. She didn’t see anyone she knew, not yet. In a minute, when they were inside, she would get a better look.

 • • • 

O
n his own now,
Tamerlan Tsarnaev continued walking eastbound toward the finish line. Dzhokhar moved a little farther east, too, then stopped on the sidewalk in front of Forum, a few feet behind eight-year-old Martin Richard. Lingzi Lu was nearby, too. He eased his heavy backpack to the ground, letting go of the straps. A block away, close to where Krystle Campbell was standing, Tamerlan did the same. As Tamerlan waited in the crowd outside Marathon Sports, something about him—a lone man in a black baseball hat and dark sunglasses—drew the attention of Jeff Bauman, a twenty-seven-year-old who was at the race to watch his girlfriend run. The man with the backpack wasn’t cheering or clapping for the runners; he seemed out of place, Bauman thought. For an instant, the two young men locked eyes. At 2:48, Dzhokhar called Tamerlan from a prepaid cell phone. They spoke for several seconds, then hung up. Each one then started moving down the sidewalk, leaving their packs on the ground behind them, their remote detonators close at hand. Tamerlan walked away from Jeff Bauman and Krystle Campbell and the other spectators standing near Marathon Sports. Dzhokhar walked away from Jane and Martin Richard and the rest of the children perched on the metal barrier, away from Heather Abbott and the others waiting outside Forum to get in. The brothers had made their commitment; there was no going back. The time was 2:49
P
.
M
.

Agony on Boylston Street

C
arlos Arredondo made the sign of the cross with one hand. “
God protect us,” he said. Then the man in the cowboy hat ran across the street, toward the spot where a ball of white fire had just erupted. He began tearing down the fencing in his way. He could see people in a pile on the sidewalk, some of them missing legs. Arredondo knew trauma, more than any man should. He’d lost one son to combat in Iraq in 2004; he had been so distraught when the marine detail came to tell him the news that he lit himself on fire. Seven years later, his surviving son committed suicide. In the mayhem on Boylston Street, Arredondo dropped the American flag he’d been carrying, leaned over a gravely injured young man, and asked him his name. He could feel his sons’ presence protecting him. “It’s okay,” he told the man at his feet, trying to calm him.

 • • • 

T
wenty yards from the finish line,
Bill Iffrig was running down the left side of the course, on pace, at age seventy-eight, to complete his third Boston Marathon. The thundering force of an explosion hit him hard, a massive wall of noise. He knew it was a bomb. His legs collapsed beneath him and he crumpled to the ground.
This might be it
,
he thought.
This will be the end of me
. Lying on the pavement in his orange tank top and black shorts, he looked up to see three police officers running at him, drawing their weapons. “Are you okay?” one of them asked.

 • • • 

P
erched near the finish line with her grandchildren, Ana Victoria was eager to see her daughter, Vicma Lamarche, make it across, having traveled all the way from the Dominican Republic for the marathon. When the explosion rocked the sidelines, she frantically gave the children to Vicma’s husband and ran toward the smoke. Victoria knew that Vicma, given her pace, was unlikely to have reached the finish yet. But she didn’t care.
I’m going to find my daughter
, she said to herself. Quickly overwhelmed by the scene, by the blood, by the vast needs of the wounded, she felt helpless and scared. She dropped to her knees, eyes closed, mouth open, hands pressed together at her lips.
Make it stop
, she prayed.
Please don’t let these people die.

 • • • 

I
nside Marathon Sports, Shane O’Hara had just popped open a Guinness and poured it into a coffee mug. This was a workday, but it was a celebration, too, a day-long toast to the running community. There, inside the tidy storefront, O’Hara was helping a former employee try on a pair of running shoes when he felt a massive boom rattle through him. The building shook. The front window went white with smoke. O’Hara ran to the door, alarms, screaming, panic ringing in his ears. He found a dazed woman shrouded in smoke and helped her into the store. He noticed blood running down her lower leg, under her black jeans, and onto the tile. He got down and put his hand gingerly on her calf, feeling for the wound. Blood covered his fingers, its warmth reminding him of the fresh cow’s milk he used to handle on the farm where he grew up. His Adidas sales rep, standing nearby, grabbed some shorts off a rack and pressed them tight against the woman’s leg.

O’Hara ran back outside. He started ripping away the metal scaffolding that separated the sidewalk from the street. It had become a lethal barrier, blocking emergency responders from reaching the wounded. He ran in and out of the store, delivering clothes from the racks to bleeding victims and the people helping them. All around him he saw overwhelming damage. “Stay with me,” somebody said to one woman, her head resting on a helper’s lap. “Stay with me.”

Out there on the sidewalk, just for one still moment, O’Hara felt everything fall away. A calm came over him, the world slowing to a crawl. He didn’t know what was next, if another explosion would follow, if he and everyone around him were about to die. Was he satisfied with what his life had been? He decided that he was. His mind was at peace. He was willing to accept whatever came. And then just like that, the sensation passed. He threw himself back into the pressing work of trying to save lives.

It was there, right outside the store O’Hara managed, that Krystle Campbell had stood seconds before, watching the runners finish, hanging with her friends, taking part in one of the Boston sports traditions she so loved. Now she was on the ground, her head tipped back to the sky. She had suffered devastating wounds to her torso and lower extremities, worse than those of anyone around her. A Georgia emergency room physician and other rescuers tried desperately to save her. They rushed her to the medical tent, but it was too late. Her pulse had slipped away.

 • • • 

T
hat’s not a cannon
, Boston firefighter Sean O’Brien thought when he heard the first explosion.
Maybe a transformer?
He was standing in front of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, a couple blocks before the finish line. “Obie, that’s a bomb,” the firefighter next to him said. Right then, a second explosion tore through the sidewalk across the street. The first blast had happened in front of Marathon Sports, at 671 Boylston Street. The second explosion, just twelve seconds later, detonated one block to the west, in front of Forum restaurant, at 755 Boylston. Both spots were packed with afternoon crowds. Those who could ran for their lives, away from whatever might happen next—a third bomb? A fourth? Many, like O’Brien, thought the first blast was some kind of accident. When the second echoed, they knew it was something much worse.

O’Brien’s thoughts raced first to his wife and his four daughters. In an instant, he sorted through his recent interactions with them and found them acceptable. No fights, no harsh words would stand among their final memories of him. Then he moved forward, over the barricade toward the bomb scene, the wounded walking toward him in a daze. He could smell the burning. He looked back across the street, near the spot where he’d just been standing, and saw a little girl’s bag, pink with flowers, abandoned on the sidewalk.
That one’s next
, he thought.
I know it
. He waited for the pink bag to blow up.

 • • • 

T
he first explosion had rippled the surface of Jason Geremia’s drink as he stood near the bar inside Forum. Conversations around him stopped midsentence. Smiles faded, replaced by looks of confusion. “What was that?” the bartender asked. The sound was loud, but far enough away that it wasn’t clear what had caused it. Jason turned to look at the front entrance and saw his friends Michelle and Jess standing in the doorway. He didn’t see Heather Abbott, who was supposed to be with them. Just then the second blast blew his friends into the bar. They were stumbling forward, falling, as he grabbed them and pulled them to the back, away from Boylston Street and whatever had just happened. Everyone else was stampeding the same way.

 • • • 

B
righid Wall threw her six-year-old son onto the ground when the second bomb exploded some ten feet away to their right. She lay across him on the sidewalk, her pregnant belly beneath her, and looked back over her left shoulder at the dazed people covered with black soot. She saw a man struggling to stand up; she realized he was struggling because he was missing a leg. The urge to flee seized her then, pushing away shock and fear, and she scanned the ground, looking for the bag that held her car keys. She stood up. Her husband grabbed their son and nephew. A stranger picked up her four-year-old daughter and they all ran into the Starbucks next door to Forum, blood and broken glass and spilled coffee under their feet. People were screaming but the children were silent—waiting, she realized, for someone to make them safe.

 • • • 

S
earching in the smoke for one of his friends, Mike Chase came across a man holding seven-year-old Jane Richard in his arms. “We gotta do something here,” said the man, an off-duty firefighter named Matt Patterson. Chase, a high school soccer coach who had been watching the race, grabbed the belt Patterson had wrapped around the child’s thigh and pulled it tight. Her leg was in bad shape. Jane’s father, Bill Richard, was nearby, holding on to his oldest son, Henry, who was not badly hurt. Chase looked down and saw his missing friend, Dan Marshall, kneeling on the ground over another little boy. Others bent to join him, trying to help Martin. “My son, my son,” the stricken father said. There was nothing anyone could do.

 • • • 

A
llison Byrne was so eager to finish the race that she was sprinting down Boylston. She saw the first explosion and veered away from the left side of the street. She felt the second bomb’s impact before she heard it. Something black hurtled toward her legs. It was an iPhone-sized piece of shrapnel, and it lodged in the meat of her left calf. With her good leg, she dove to the right, somehow crashing through the metal barricades on the opposite side of the street. Alone and scared, she lay bleeding on the sidewalk.

“Oh my God, I can’t die!” she screamed. People trampled over her, desperate to escape. “Please don’t leave me,” she pleaded, making eye contact with some as they ran over her.

Then she heard a voice: “I’m not going to leave you.” The voice came from Nancy Shorter, who appeared like an angel as ash fell all around them. Shorter was a spectator, there with her husband and stepsons. But she was much more than that. A retired nurse, she had spent years working in the ER at one of Boston’s best hospitals. She quickly elevated Byrne’s leg, grabbed her husband’s jacket, and applied pressure to the wound. Byrne rested her head against the window of a bank. Shorter sat with her, then helped her into the backseat of a police car.

 • • • 

A
fter he heard the deafening explosions, Dr. Sushrut Jangi walked out the back of the marathon’s block-long medical tent and looked down Boylston Street toward the finish line. He saw smoke and a crowd of people running. “There are bombs,” a woman whispered at his side. Jangi, a medical volunteer who had spent the day treating chilled and dehydrated runners, felt the urge to flee. His hands began to shake, and he thought about slipping away. Inside the tent, someone in charge was speaking into a microphone, asking everybody to stay calm and remain with their patients. Jangi turned around and went back in. A nurse standing between two cots began to cry.

 • • • 

H
eather Abbott lay on the floor inside Forum watching her friends disappear, running with the crowd into the back of the restaurant. She had been just outside the door, waiting to get in, when she heard the first explosion; she had turned her head at the sound and seen smoke rising. Her first thought was of 9/11: some dislodged memory of TV coverage from that day, surfacing before she knew what was happening. Then, before she could think of anything else, the second explosion blew her through the door and into the restaurant. Her left foot felt like it was on fire. She tried to get up and couldn’t, and thought to herself,
I might die here. Everyone is running away. Who is going to help me?
She sat up and called out for help. It was hard to tell in the din if her voice was a scream or a whisper. She took care not to look at her foot, fearful that she might faint at the sight of it. She had to keep her focus on finding a way out. All at once a woman appeared beside her, a stranger asking for her name and praying out loud: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” The woman’s husband bent down, lifted Heather up, and carried her in his arms out the back door into daylight. Her foot was still burning, but she wasn’t alone anymore.

 • • • 

S
hana Cottone reached for her gun when the first bomb exploded. Something had gone wrong and she didn’t know what it was. Twelve seconds passed, the second bomb went off, and then, like so many others, Shana understood. They were being attacked and she was going to die. Fighting off the overwhelming urge to run away, she started ripping down the barricades along the sidewalk, moving into the drifting smoke in front of Forum.
She picked up strollers, the babies still strapped inside, and carried them into the middle of the street, where it seemed like they might be safer, as stunned parents followed her blindly. She put one stroller down on the open pavement and saw a woman lying nearby, on the pavement in the middle of the street. She was covered with abrasions, her blonde hair singed to black around her face. Shana knelt and looked into her eyes. The woman was awake. Shana took her hand and started talking.

“Talk to me,” she told the woman in the street. “Who did you come to watch? Where do you live?”

“I can’t feel my leg,” the woman said. She was bleeding heavily, one of her legs nearly severed. Shana looked down the street. Where were the ambulances? Why weren’t they coming?

“Your leg is there,” Shana said.

“I can’t feel it,” the woman insisted.

Shana wanted to call her by her name, to reach her through the fog of shock and pain and hold her there. She searched for one of the woman’s ID cards and found it: “I swear on my life, Roseann, your leg is there.”

Around them was a churning sea of chaos: terrified spectators running away; police and firefighters running in; bystanders whipping off belts and handing them to first responders. Across the bloodstained pavement, small desperate clusters formed around the most gravely wounded victims. Within each knot of kneeling people in the street, the focus narrowed to one face, one broken body, one makeshift tourniquet. Time seemed to slow down. The motions of people trying to help were frantic, video clips from the scene would later show, but in the moment, every action seemed to unfold as if underwater. Even to those who worked there every day, Boylston Street in those first minutes was utterly foreign, a place that looked and felt completely unfamiliar. Seconds felt like minutes; death hovered close. They would not be able to fend it off for long.

Lingzi Lu, the graduate student from China, was already gone. She had been standing in the crowd near Forum; now she lay still and silent on the ground, her lower body ravaged by the explosion.
Firefighters tried to revive her, but it was futile. They determined she was dead and covered her body.