Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (19 page)

Just before midnight, Danny’s iPhone buzzed. A text from his roommate. Tamerlan got nervous; he demanded to know who it was and what the text said. Danny said it was his roommate, asking in Chinese where he was and telling him that there had been gunshots at MIT. Tamerlan laughed. “Oh, something happened in Cambridge?” he said. Barking at Danny for instructions, Tamerlan used an English-to-Chinese app to text a clunky reply. “I am sick. I am sleeping at a friend’s place tonight.” But it came out garbled, not the way one would ordinarily respond. The roommate texted back and asked if he was sure he was okay.
If you’re not
, she wrote,
let me know
.
If you are
, she said,
you don’t have to write back
.

About ten minutes after the first text, Danny’s phone rang. It was his other roommate, suspicious about Danny’s cryptic replies. Tamerlan was furious. “Who is this?” he demanded. “Who is calling you?” He picked up the gun, pointed it at Danny, and told him to answer. “If you say a single word in Chinese,” Tamerlan said, “I will kill you right now.” He ordered Danny to tell his roommate, in English, that he was sleeping at a friend’s place. Danny didn’t answer the call in time, but the roommate quickly called back. Danny was nervous. He was praying. He knew a small mistake could cost him his life. The roommate asked where he was. Danny didn’t even say hello. He said he would be sleeping out tonight. “Why are you speaking in English?” his roommate asked. “Are you okay?”

“I have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

“Okay,” his roommate said.

Click.

“Good boy,” Tamerlan told him. “Good job.”

Now more than an hour into their meandering journey, the brothers drove along the Charles River, back toward Boston, in search of gas. Crossing the Charles into Cambridge, the SUV came upon two gas stations, a Shell station on the left and a Mobil on the right. Tamerlan steered into the Shell station, pulling the right side of the car up to the gas pumps. Dzhokhar got out to fill up using Danny’s credit card. Danny, back in familiar territory, began thinking again about an escape, especially with Dzhokhar out of the car.

 • • • 

D
zhokhar quickly knocked on the window. “Cash only,” he said. Danny knew this was good news. He knew Dzhokhar would have to walk into the store, away from the car. Dzhokhar asked Danny how much money it took to fill the tank. Danny said he didn’t know. Tamerlan told his brother to buy $50 worth and peeled off the money.

Danny watched Dzhokhar head inside, trying to decide if this was his moment. Not only was he now alone with Tamerlan, but the doors were unlocked. Tamerlan had unlocked them to let Dzhokhar out and had never bothered with the relocking. But Danny, employing the cool calculus of an engineer, knew he had to still do several things almost instantaneously: unfasten his seat belt, open the door, and jump out. He rehearsed the sequence in his head. He knew that if he wasn’t quick enough, Tamerlan would kill him on the spot.
This is your best chance
, Danny thought to himself.
It’s your moment
. His fear, the image he played on a loop in his head, was that they would drop him off at some distant spot, tell him to run, and then shoot him in the back as he fled. Unless he could get away, he convinced himself, this would be his fate.

Even without looking at him directly, Danny could see that Tamerlan was preoccupied. He had stashed the gun in the driver’s door and was fidgeting with a GPS device. Danny collected his thoughts and counted quickly to four in his head, allowing himself one more integer than the typical three count, given the gravity of what he was about to do.

One. Two. Three. Four. Go.

In a flurry, Danny released the seat belt with his left hand and opened the car door with his right. He scrambled out, slamming the door behind him. He felt Tamerlan try to grab him, Tamerlan’s hand brushing against his. But Danny had tucked his left arm into his body. Tamerlan couldn’t get a grip. Tamerlan reacted fast, but Danny had him beat.

“Fuck!” he heard Tamerlan shout. “Fuck!”

Danny sprinted between the passenger side of the Mercedes and the gas pumps and darted toward River Street, not looking back, drawn to the lights of the Mobil station on the other side. He didn’t know if it was open or not. He prayed it was. The angle he was running at, he figured, would make it difficult for Tamerlan to shoot him. He glanced quickly to see if any cars were coming but barely gave it any thought.

He dashed into the Mobil station, talking rapidly at the clerk behind the counter. Danny implored him to call the police. “They are terrorists!” he said. “They have guns! They’re trying to kill me!”

Danny begged him to lock the door, but he wouldn’t. The clerk was skeptical.

“Please call 911!” Danny pleaded, crouching behind the counter. “Please call 911!”

The clerk then heeded his cry and picked up the phone. Danny ran into the storage room as the man dialed, shut the door behind him, and sat down. The clerk brought the phone to him, passing it to him through a crack in the door. Danny was terrified. If the brothers stormed in, he was cornered. He feared they would come and shoot him dead at any second. The police dispatcher on the line told Danny to relax, to take a deep breath. “Come quickly,”
he said. “Please.” A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door.

It was the attendant. “Sir,” he said, “the police are here.” Danny walked outside the room, elated to see the swirling blue lights. He told the officers everything—that they were the bombing suspects, that Tamerlan had even boasted about what they had done, and that they had guns. The police asked if Danny knew where they were headed. Maybe back to Watertown, Danny said. He knew there was an easy way to find out. Danny told the police that not only was his iPhone still in the Mercedes, but that his car had a GPS and roadside assistance system they could track. Danny told them what it was called—mbrace—and gave them his full name and address, so they could identify the car. Police called Mercedes from the store.

In the hours ahead, police would laud Danny’s quick thinking, saying his escape had helped avert further mayhem. Indeed, for the first time since Monday’s bombing, investigators, even if they weren’t certain of the brothers’ names, now had a way to track the suspects’ location in real time. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were still on the loose—armed, dangerous, their intentions unclear—but the trail was finally hot. All of Boston—much of the world, really—wanted them caught, wanted the week’s terror to end. But the brothers weren’t finished yet. Not even close.

Bullets in the dark

T
he report crackled across the radio in Joe Reynolds’s squad car. “Wanted for carjacking that occurred in Cambridge, possibly related to the Cambridge incident.” It was the voice of a Massachusetts State Police dispatcher. The Tsarnaev brothers had murdered Sean Collier. They had kidnapped Danny at gunpoint, then recklessly let him escape. No one knew where their plans would lead them next. But police were desperate to stop them, to put an end to a terrifying week. The dispatcher relayed Danny’s frantic account: that the marathon bombers had taken him hostage, threatened to kill him, stolen his car, and were on their way to attack New York next. In fact, the stolen black Mercedes was nowhere near New York. Pings from the vehicle’s global positioning system showed that the Tsarnaevs were less than five miles from their own apartment in Cambridge—and very near Reynolds.

Reynolds had spent seven years as a police officer in Watertown, an unpretentious community northwest of Boston known as a melting pot of immigrants, young professionals, and working-class families. He typically worked nights, and his midnight-to-8:00
A.M.
shift on Friday, April 19, had barely begun. At 12:42
A.M
.
, the voice on the radio issued a warning: The stolen car was on Dexter Avenue, a slumbering neighborhood of tidy houses and modest duplexes, where many residents decorated their homes with flower boxes. Reynolds turned onto Dexter, heading northbound. He drove a couple of blocks and then came upon the brothers, whose two vehicles, the stolen Mercedes and the green Honda Civic, were parked on the side of the road, facing south. He locked eyes with Tamerlan as he passed.

“I have the car,” Reynolds said into the radio. “Do you want me to stop it?”

“Don’t stop the car until I get there,” the patrol supervisor, Sergeant John MacLellan, replied. “Wait for help to come.”

MacLellan raced to the scene.
Reynolds swung a U-turn. The brothers, driving both cars, pulled away from the curb and turned left from Dexter onto Laurel Street. Reynolds followed cautiously. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar then came to an abrupt stop after about one hundred feet, one behind the other, and hopped out. Tamerlan walked toward Reynolds’s police car, raised his arm, and began shooting from a distance of several houses away. Bullets cut through the darkness, dinging off the cruiser. Reynolds ducked below his dashboard and jammed the car into reverse, trying to gain distance from his attackers. As he peeled back about thirty yards, he radioed to dispatch: “Shots fired! Shots fired!”

For more than three days, a coalition of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies had been hunting day and night for the marathon bombers, eager to finally put Greater Boston at ease. Now the showdown had arrived, in a town where police rarely had cause to fire their guns outside the practice range. Police officers, including those guarding the crime scene at MIT, sped toward the fight. They knew nothing of the brothers’ arsenal, which included a handgun and at least two kinds of homemade bombs. Dozens of cruisers lit up the night with their flashing blue and white lights. They converged on the bridges over the Charles River, all booking toward the action. With little time for police to coordinate, the scene would quickly turn chaotic. Officers flooded in, many from outside Watertown, and bullets began flying in many directions. The crossfire would prove nearly fatal to one of their own.

As MacLellan rounded the corner in his brand-new black-and-white Ford Expedition, a bullet pierced the windshield, buzzing so close to his face that it lodged in his headrest. He took cover behind the engine as he tried to wrestle his semiautomatic AR-15 out of its locked case. When he couldn’t get it, he put the Expedition back into drive, jumped out, and let it roll toward the brothers as a diversion, which he thought might buy him time to take cover or get a better shot at the assailants. There was little refuge on that stretch of Laurel Street; the lone tree nearby was barely a foot in diameter. MacLellan dashed behind it. A third Watertown officer, Miguel Colon, had pulled up to the scene. He turned on the spotlight of his police car. A bullet blew it out almost immediately.

By now, Laurel Street slumbered no more. Neighbors awoke to a battle so improbable they assumed the commotion had to be something far more benign.
Peter Kehayias, a sixty-five-year-old restaurant chef, figured it was kids playing with firecrackers. He opened a window in the TV room of his two-family house.

“Get the hell out of here and go to your own neighborhood!” he shouted.

“Get inside and shut your window!” an officer yelled back. The Tsarnaevs were right there in the street.

“Give up—there’s no way out,” Kehayias heard an officer yell at the brothers. “Give up.”

Tamerlan offered a taunt in return. “You want more?” he said. “I give you more.”

Kehayias’s wife, Loretta, a special-education teacher in Cambridge, picked up the phone and called 911:
“
Do you people realize there is a cop out here and there are two guys? They’re shooting at him!”

The reply was immediate: “Yes, we know, lady.”
Click
.

Dzhokhar helped Tamerlan load a fresh clip into a gun. Next he reached inside the car for a duffel bag. The battle had just begun, and now it took an ominous turn. The brothers began hurling homemade explosives at police, including pipe bombs and then something more alarming. Dzhokhar pulled out a larger pressure cooker bomb—the kind of device he had used to murderous effect on Marathon Day—and tossed it toward police. The explosion shook the neighborhood and set off a bright yellow flash, momentarily turning midnight darkness to day. Lizzy Floyd was crouching with her husband beneath a bedroom window on the second floor of their home. The force of the explosion knocked a framed photograph of a New Hampshire harborside scene off her shelf.

Jeff Pugliese, a thirty-three-year veteran of the Watertown police force and a firearms instructor, had recently gone off duty when he learned about the firefight over his radio. He sped to the scene in his family’s minivan, jumped out of the car, and ran to the back of the houses on Laurel Street. He hopped a fence or two and then circled back, creeping down a narrow patch of grass mere feet from where Tamerlan was firing away. The two took shots at each other, nothing but two old Mercedes in a driveway between them. Peter Kehayias feared for Pugliese’s life. “Jesus, he is going to get killed,” he said to his wife. But Pugliese proved to be a much better shot than Tamerlan. Pugliese believed he hit Tamerlan a number of times. Tamerlan didn’t hit a thing, spraying bullets into the side of a house before seeming to run out of ammunition. He threw his gun at Pugliese, hitting him in the left arm. Tamerlan tried to run. Pugliese, with the aid of other officers, chased him down and tackled him in the street. Tamerlan, in a rage, continued to struggle, but Pugliese and MacLellan pinned him on the ground. As they reached for handcuffs, Reynolds looked up to see the lights of the Mercedes moving toward him. Dzhokhar had jumped in the SUV. Tires screeching, he had spun around and was barreling straight at the spot where the officers wrestled with his brother.

“Sarge, Sarge!” Reynolds yelled. “Look out—he’s coming!”

MacLellan jumped off. Pugliese grabbed Tamerlan’s belt and tried to pull him out of the way.

“Jeff! Jeff!” MacLellan shouted at Pugliese. “Get off!”

The car blew by. Everyone was sure Pugliese had been hit. But he had rolled clear at the last moment. The car missed him by inches.

Tamerlan was not so lucky. Dzhokhar ran straight over his older brother, dragging him some thirty feet down the street as he fled west in Danny’s Mercedes. The headlight beams bounced up and down as the car rolled across the body with a sickening thump. Tamerlan was left lying on his stomach, clinging to the final moments of his life. He tried to lift up his head. Blood pooled around his body, streak marks visible on the street where the SUV had dragged him. Pugliese ran over, put cuffs on him, and pressed a foot into his back. Then he called for an ambulance. At long last, Tamerlan was theirs. Other officers chased Dzhokhar into the night. But with the gunfire in the street finally gone quiet, police now faced another critical concern.

 • • • 

“
G
unshots. Officer down.”

The alert pierced the silence of the firehouse just before 1:00
A.M.
Watertown firefighters Patrick Menton and Jimmy Caruso—both trained as emergency medical technicians—jumped into an ambulance and roared toward Laurel Street, Caruso at the wheel, Menton in the passenger seat. They said little as they drove. “Officer down” were about the most urgent two words imaginable. Even more so for Menton. His younger brother Tim was a Watertown police officer. Menton wondered:
Is my brother in trouble?

“Get some rubber gloves out,” Caruso told his partner as they raced toward the area. “Get ready.”

EMTs are instructed never to enter an unsecured crime scene. This lesson is drilled into them: If you’re hurt, you’re useless. But as their rig rolled down Laurel Street, Caruso and Menton tore up that rulebook. In the chaos of the crossfire, Richard “Dic” Donohue, a thirty-three-year-old police officer with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, had been shot in the thigh. “
I’m hit!” Donohue yelled when the bullet struck him. His partner tackled him, to get him out of the line of fire, and then tried to find the wound and apply pressure. Two Harvard University police officers, Ryan Stanton and Michael Rea, rushed over with tourniquets to stanch the flow of blood. A Boston cop, Ricky Moriarty, began doing chest compressions.
Donohue’s condition deteriorated quickly. He was at grave risk of bleeding to death. “We’re losing him! We’re losing him!” one neighbor heard desperate voices screaming. “Get an ambulance here now!” A dazed Jeffrey Ryan stumbled out on his porch on Dexter Avenue to witness the frantic efforts to save Donohue in his driveway. Police asked for towels, and he and his wife rushed some out. “We need to get him out of here!” officers shouted in the darkness. “He’s bleeding bad! We need to go!”

An awful coincidence had unfolded: Over the course of a few hours, Sean Collier and Dic Donohue, friends, former neighbors, and classmates from the MBTA Transit Police Academy, had both been shot—one fatally, the other barely hanging on. Like Collier,
Donohue had grown up north of Boston, in the well-kept suburb of Winchester. He was an avid runner, competing in cross-country and track in high school. He graduated from Virginia Military Institute in 2002, majoring in history. He served as a US Navy officer before joining the MBTA police force in October 2010. Earlier in 2013, he had received a commendation for helping to save someone else’s life, having rushed into the Chinatown T station to stem the profuse bleeding of a stabbing victim. He and his wife, Kim, had a six-month-old son, Richie. As it happened, Donohue’s grandfather several generations removed, Lawrence Brignolia, had won the 1899 Boston Marathon, the first Massachusetts man to do so.

Late Thursday night,
Donohue had been one of the officers responding to the scene of Collier’s murder, hitting the lights in his cruiser as soon as he heard that an officer was down. Once he found out what happened, he sent a few solemn text messages to friends, breaking the tragic news: It was Sean. Like other officers, he then raced to Watertown once reports of the firefight started streaming in.
He got to the scene, jumped out of his car, and began firing alongside other police. Then he was hit.

With Donohue down, Caruso went to the rear of the ambulance to retrieve the stretcher, but officers had already carried Donohue from the driveway and put him in the back. The stretcher never left the truck. Donohue had a three-quarter-inch wound at the top of his right thigh, a single bullet having severed his femoral artery. He was in cardiac arrest. He had no pulse. His eyes were open. His color was gray. “He was deceased” is how Caruso would describe it later. No one by his side, though, was going to let him die. Caruso ripped Donohue’s blood-soaked pants apart, desperate to find the source of the bleeding. He grabbed two multitrauma dressings, big gauze pads, and pushed them into the wound. Menton provided breathing for the breathless patient, using a “BVM,” a bag valve mask, which sent puffs of air into Donohue’s lungs. Alongside them, State Trooper Christopher Dumont, who had jumped aboard, began performing CPR. “We need a driver! We need a driver!” someone shouted. Moments later the ambulance lurched forward.

Caruso and Menton were so consumed with their tasks that both assumed the other was driving.
Behind the wheel in the front of the cab was Menton’s brother Tim, the Watertown police officer who moments before had been involved in the shoot-out, a bullet having pierced his windshield.
Tim Menton didn’t really know how to drive the ambulance, but he figured it out, speeding toward Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, the closest emergency room available, arriving within minutes. His actions proved to be critical. “If we didn’t have three people in the back of the truck, I don’t know how it would have worked,” Pat Menton said. “Because we were each doing a vital thing to save his life. We had to go.” Caruso kept pressure on Donohue’s wound at the hospital, letting go only when Donohue was wheeled into surgery. By the time doctors got to him, he barely had any blood left in his body. It took them forty-five minutes to get his heart beating again. The Menton brothers reunited in the hospital parking lot—Pat hadn’t realized that it was his brother driving the rig. It turned out that Tim, before climbing into the ambulance, had been one of Donohue’s first caregivers, using a towel to apply pressure on his wound. It was there in the parking lot that they smelled it—the awful, metallic odor. Tim hadn’t known how to release the ambulance’s emergency brake. They’d driven nearly two miles to the hospital with it on.

Donohue’s wife, Kim, was asleep in their home around 1:30
A.M.
when she was awoken by her son’s cries. “The baby just went nuts—just was hysterical,” she would later tell
CBS News
. As she tended to him, the doorbell rang. She opened the door to see Steven O’Hara, a sergeant with the MBTA police. She knew instantly what his presence meant. “You are my worst nightmare,” she told him, her mind racing. “Tell me if Dic is dead, right now,” she said. “Don’t walk in this house; don’t come past that door. Tell me if Dic is dead.” He was still alive, O’Hara told her. But only just. When she got to Mount Auburn Hospital, they had a priest waiting. They handed her Dic’s phone, his badge, his wedding ring. After his eight hours of surgery, she was finally allowed to see him. He looked, to his wife, like he was dead. She pulled the doctors aside. “He has to come through,” she implored. “It’s not a question. You can’t come back in this room and tell me anything else.”