Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (18 page)

On the night of Thursday, April 18, Collier was nearing the end of his 3:00-to-11:15
P.M.
shift. In the days after the marathon bombing, DiFava had ordered additional security for the MIT campus. Collier was stationed at the corner of Vassar and Main Streets, near Cambridge’s Kendall Square, a typically placid neighborhood that served as Boston’s unofficial headquarters for innovation and technology. Collier was positioned at a spot where drivers would sometimes take a chance, making an illegal shortcut through campus to avoid a red light. Putting an officer there both discouraged cut-throughs and provided a high-profile police presence for the MIT community, at a time when no gesture of reassurance was too much. Around 9:30
P.M.
, DiFava pulled his car next to Collier’s cruiser.

The chief asked his young officer what he was up to.

“Just making sure everybody behaves,” Collier told him.

The two men chatted easily for several minutes. And then DiFava pulled away.

Shortly before 10:30
P.M.
, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, their photos now plastered everywhere, drove undetected toward the MIT campus in the green Honda Civic. They had packed the car with five explosive devices, a Ruger P95 9mm semiautomatic handgun, additional ammunition, a machete, and a hunting knife. They approached Collier’s cruiser from behind. As Collier sat behind the wheel, they ambushed him, shooting him five times at close range, twice in the head. An assassination. “He didn’t stand a chance,” said DiFava, who was home barely a half hour before getting the devastating news from his deputy.
The two bombing suspects then sought to steal Collier’s weapon but couldn’t figure out how to remove it from its locking holster. Within minutes, the Tsarnaev brothers were gone, their attempts to add a gun to their stash having ended in failure.

As news of the shooting spread around campus, to the media, and to Boston-area police, the awful truth emerged.
The beloved twenty-seven-year-old with big promise and a bigger heart, the man who loved his new black Ford F-150 truck, who loved country music, who paused at noon when Boston’s country music station, WKLB-FM, played the national anthem, was gone. The grief, though, was accompanied by an even greater sense of urgency. After three quietly tense days of investigative work, the sirens were blaring again. The Tsarnaev brothers, five hours after their photos had been broadcast worldwide, had resumed their reign of terror—police officials knew it in their gut. The murder of a campus police officer was highly unusual. Surely it was connected, even if much of the public—assuming they were even still awake—wouldn’t know of the link until morning.

Collier’s death would be a
violent prelude to a violent night, making the president’s visit to Boston Thursday morning feel like a distant memory. State police colonel Tim Alben was in Springfield, in Western Massachusetts, when he got the call from one of his deputies. State troopers, he was told, were on the scene at MIT. Ed Davis had already gone to sleep. He awoke to a similar phone call. The commissioner got up, got dressed, grabbed his gun and his badge, and hustled out. He ordered police out in force on Boston streets. He wanted bars and hospitals on high alert. From the moment they heard the news, neither man had much doubt: The terrorists had struck again.

Hell in a Mercedes

T
he man jumped out of his car. He approached Danny’s passenger window, talking loud and fast, and rapped on the glass. Danny lowered the window. The man reached inside and opened the car door from the inside. He climbed in, shut the door, pointed a silver handgun at Danny, and demanded money. Danny, who had grown up in China, assumed that he was the victim of a classically American violent crime, a stickup. He told the man that he didn’t carry much cash, but to take anything. He handed over $45 from inside the armrest. He gave the man his wallet. The man then asked Danny an unexpected question: Had he heard about the bombing at the Boston Marathon? Danny said he had. “I did that,” the man replied, his voice full of pride. “And I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.”

Danny’s heart dropped. He had been following the news closely enough, had studied the surveillance images of the suspects. But he had not recognized Tamerlan Tsarnaev sitting inches away in the passenger seat, not thinking he was this skinny, this white. He couldn’t believe what was happening.
How could this be possible?
Danny thought. Tamerlan’s instructions to him were simple: “Don’t be stupid.”

It had all begun with a text message. At work earlier that night, Danny—who asked to be identified only by his American nickname—had gotten a message from a friend. Nothing special, just a quick note, a simple hello. He was busy, so he didn’t answer right away. He worked late, not getting out until 10:00
P.M.
Afterward, he needed to unwind. So he took his black 2013 Mercedes-Benz ML350 out for a spin in the darkened city. Just him, his music, and the hum of a car he had come to love. It was his little ritual, his way to relax, his right arm usually on the wheel, his left resting on the door. His life, at that moment, had seemed ascendant: from a province in Central China, to graduate school at Northeastern University, to a start-up in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, the hub of the Boston-area technology industry.

On this night, the Thursday after the marathon bombing, he tried to drive down to Boylston Street, but it was still closed. So he took a route that roughly tracked the Charles River, no destination in mind, eventually ending up on Brighton Avenue, in a dense neighborhood west of downtown, home to thousands of college students. Suddenly, he remembered: He’d never written his friend back. He pulled to the curb to text a reply. Just as he was starting to type, he saw, in his mirrors, an old sedan slam to a stop behind his Mercedes. It struck him as strange—the speed and suddenness seemed out of place.
People don’t park like that
, the twenty-six-year-old thought to himself.
Maybe our cars had scratched and I didn’t notice
, Danny thought.
Maybe the other driver wants to swap information
. It was nearly 11:00
P.M.

After Tamerlan got in, he ordered Danny to start driving—right on Fordham Road, right again on Commonwealth Avenue—the start of an achingly slow ninety-minute odyssey through the peaceful, sleepy streets of Greater Boston, the outside world oblivious to the unfolding terror inside the dark Mercedes. As the night deepened, Danny thought these were very likely his final minutes alive. He silently analyzed everything Tamerlan said and how he said it, mining for clues about where and when he might be killed.
I don’t want to die
, he thought at one point.
I have a lot of dreams that haven’t come true yet
. He privately gamed out the scenarios: Should he plot a white-knuckled escape from the car? Should he beg for mercy? Should he just wait it out, hoping he would eventually be let go?

 • • • 

“
I
t’s not so easy,” Danny replied when Tamerlan first told him to start driving. He was nervous, his hands shaking. He could barely control the wheel, the car veering out of lane. Tamerlan, not wanting to draw attention, told him to relax. Drive like nothing happened, he told him in a calming voice. Play it cool. Danny’s heart was pounding.
Just don’t kill me
, he thought.
Don’t hurt me.

They continued west. Tamerlan asked Danny where he was from. “I’m Chinese,” he said, thinking it might help to emphasize that he was not American.

“Okay, you’re Chinese,” Tamerlan said. “I’m a Muslim-American.”

“Chinese are very friendly to Muslims!” Danny assured him. “We are so friendly to Muslims!”

As they talked, Danny cast himself as a recent immigrant with no friends and limited command of English. He apologized for his halting speech. In truth, he was hiding behind that self-portrait, trying to buy time to strategize. Trained as an engineer, he made scrupulous mental notes of street signs and passing details, even as he abided Tamerlan’s command not to study his face.

“Don’t look at me!” Tamerlan shouted at one point. “Do you remember my face?”

“No, no, I don’t remember anything,” he said.

Tamerlan laughed. “It’s like white guys—they look at black guys and think all black guys look the same,” he said. “And maybe you think all white guys look the same.”

“Exactly,” Danny said, though he thought nothing of the sort.

It was one of many moments in their strange conversational chess match, Danny playing up his outsider status and playing down his wealth—he claimed the car was older than it was, and he understated his lease payments—and Tamerlan trying to make Danny feel sufficiently at ease, so he wouldn’t do anything to draw attention to the car. When Tamerlan asked him what he was doing in the United States, Danny didn’t tell him he had a job, in part because he didn’t want Tamerlan to think he had any close relationships with people—people who might grow worried about Danny’s whereabouts and call the police, which he feared might drive Tamerlan to do something rash. Better to figure out his own way out of this, Danny thought. So he told Tamerlan he had just finished a graduate degree at Northeastern and been in the United States only eighteen months. “Oh,” Tamerlan said. “That’s why your English is not very good.” It seemed to help that Tamerlan even had trouble with Danny’s pronunciation of the word “China.” In truth, Danny had come to the United States in 2009 for a master’s degree, graduated in January 2012, and returned to China to await a work visa. He came back in early 2013, leasing the Mercedes, moving into a high-rise with two Chinese friends, and diving into his work at a start-up.

Eventually Tamerlan put the gun on the armrest, satisfied that Danny was behaving as directed. He asked for the PIN for Danny’s ATM card. Danny contemplated giving him a fake one, but thought better of it. When he told Tamerlan his PIN, Tamerlan asked him if the number was his birthday. It was really the birthday of Danny’s close friend, but Danny didn’t want him to think that he had any friends, lest Tamerlan think someone was waiting for him. So he told Tamerlan it was his girlfriend’s birthday, and that his girlfriend lived in China.

“Does anyone care about you?” Tamerlan asked him.

“There is no one who cares about me,” Danny replied.

Tamerlan wanted to know about Danny’s roommate: Were they friends? “No,” Danny assured him, even though he was quite close to his roommate, a woman from China he’d met on his first trip to the United States. They had sat next to each other on the plane. She had gone to Northeastern University, too. Danny was driving fast. Tamerlan asked him to slow down, not wanting a police car to notice them. Directed to a quiet neighborhood in East Watertown, Danny pulled up as instructed on an unfamiliar side street, steering to the curb behind a parked Subaru. Tamerlan got out of the car, taking the key from the ignition, to prevent Danny from speeding away. He ordered Danny into the passenger seat, making it clear he would shoot him if Danny attempted an escape. Danny hopped out of his car, walked around the back, and got in on the passenger side.

 • • • 

A
sedan had stopped behind them. It wasn’t until now that Danny realized that the car, a green Honda Civic, had been following them the whole time. A man got out and approached the Mercedes. The passenger door was still open, and the man was standing right next to him. This time, Danny had no trouble recognizing the face: It was the skinnier, floppy-haired suspect in the photos and videos released by investigators earlier that evening. He didn’t know either of their names yet, but he was face-to-face with Tamerlan’s younger brother, Dzhokhar. For several minutes, with Danny in the passenger seat, the brothers transferred heavy objects from the smaller car into Danny’s SUV.
Luggage
, Danny thought, hearing four or five pieces being loaded inside.
Maybe they’re trying to run away
. That’s how the script would play out if this were a movie, he figured. Tamerlan got behind the wheel. Dzhokhar climbed in the backseat. Danny’s hopes for release were dashed. He was a hostage; he’d better get used to it.

Tamerlan asked Danny how to operate the transmission, and Danny showed him. They pulled away, cruising over side roads in silence. They turned onto a dead-end street. A dread came over Danny.
Is he going to kill me there?
he thought as he looked ahead at the darkness where the road stopped. But Tamerlan made a U-turn and kept going through the quiet neighborhood, no other cars around, no people, no lights. Tamerlan had told Danny that both brothers had guns.

“Are you going to hurt me?” Danny finally asked him.

“No, relax, man,” Tamerlan said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Tamerlan explained that they planned to drop him off somewhere remote, and that he would probably have to walk several miles to find anybody. If he was lucky, Tamerlan said, someone would come pick him up. Danny was hardly relieved, though. He didn’t quite buy it. If it were him, he thought, he wouldn’t do that. Surely the brothers knew Danny would call the police as soon as he could. Why put themselves at risk of capture?
They have already killed a lot of people
, Danny thought.
It wouldn’t matter if they killed one more
. Running through his mind were scenes from the life he might not live to see: his hopes for the burgeoning start-up, and the girl he secretly liked in New York.
Oh my God
, he thought,
I have no chance to meet her again.

Death
, Danny thought at one point,
is so close to me
.

No, Danny concluded. He couldn’t count on being released. He needed to escape. But how? They continued on to Watertown center so Dzhokhar could withdraw money from a Bank of America ATM using Danny’s card. Dzhokhar got out of the car. Danny, shivering from fear but claiming to be cold, asked for his jacket, which was in the backseat. “Can I have my coat?” he asked Tamerlan, thinking it might offer a chance to secretly unfasten his seat belt. His only shot at freedom, he thought, would come while one of the brothers was out of the car. Tamerlan said no. A few moments later, Danny asked again, almost begging. “I’m really cold—can I have my jacket, please?” This time Tamerlan agreed, turning into the backseat to grab it. He checked the pockets and handed it to Danny. Danny unfastened his seat belt to put the jacket on.
I should run
, he thought, though all he could see were locked storefronts. Danny knew Tamerlan expected him to quickly put his belt back on. Danny tried to do it behind his back. The buckle clicked.

“Don’t be stupid,” Tamerlan said, sensing even without looking what Danny was up to. “Do it right. Do what you should do.”

“Sorry,” Danny said meekly, obeying his captor’s orders.

It was one of Danny’s lowest moments. Not only had a chance to run evaporated, now Tamerlan knew what he was thinking. Surely he would be on high alert now. Escaping would be more difficult. Dzhokhar returned to the car a few moments later. They continued west on Route 20, in the direction of Waltham and Interstate 95, passing a police station. Danny tried to send telepathic messages to the officers inside. He imagined dropping and rolling from the moving car. He felt hopeless.

 • • • 

B
ack in Cambridge, cops from Boston and surrounding communities descended on the area around MIT, heartbroken to learn of Sean Collier’s murder and now doubly motivated to hunt down the killers. Some went directly to the scene of the shooting, but many others fanned out to nearby streets, hoping to catch sight of something suspicious. Ed Davis met the MIT police chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, where Collier had been taken, and called in a Boston Police “critical incident” team to help Collier’s family. Davis sent ballistics and K9 specialists to MIT to assist state police in combing the scene for evidence. Police also chased a potential tip, which turned out to be a false alarm, to a hotel in Dorchester. A few miles west, the Mercedes cruised through the night, no one wise to who was inside.

 • • • 

D
anny studied the brothers as they drove, developing his own sense of them. Tamerlan seemed the bad guy, threatening and menacing. Dzhokhar came off as friendlier, chattier—asking questions, talking about music and iPhones, typical college-kid stuff. In the car, the discussion turned to how much money Danny had in his bank account, what his credit limit was, what year his Mercedes was, and whether he could take the SIM card out of his iPhone.
He doesn’t look like a terrorist
, Danny thought. He overheard them speak in a foreign language—“Manhattan” the only intelligible word to him—and then ask in English if Danny’s car could be driven out of state. “What do you mean?” Danny said, confused. “Like New York,” one brother said. But if the two fugitives were planning a dash out of town, they were remarkably slow to move, almost aimless in their actions. They didn’t seem headed for anywhere in particular. Three days out from the crime of the century in Boston, they displayed remarkably little urgency.

The tank nearly empty, they stopped at a gas station. The pumps were closed. After pulling away, Tamerlan asked Danny to turn on the radio and show them how to use it. The older brother then quickly flipped through stations, seemingly avoiding the news. He asked if Danny had any CDs. No, he replied. Doubling back, they returned to the Watertown neighborhood where Dzhokhar had joined them. Dzhokhar hopped out and seemed to fetch a CD from the other car.
FAIRFIELD STREET
, Danny read on the sign, thinking,
Maybe I’ll be alive and I can tell the policemen that
. The brothers popped in an instrumental CD that Danny thought sounded Middle Eastern, believing it to be religious music.