Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (21 page)

Doctors had saved Heather’s left foot on Monday night. The surgeons had rapidly assessed and responded to the damage, opening up the inside of her undamaged right thigh, removing blood vessels, and grafting them into place where the veins inside her foot had been destroyed. They had said from the start that the transplant might not work, and that if it failed she might face a dire choice. Amputation was not off the table. After the transplant, when the doctors touched her foot to see if the nerves were functioning, she had feeling in some places and none at all in others. But blood was circulating again. Doctors who gathered at her bedside were heartened by the sounds they heard through their Doppler probe, a handheld device used to detect blood flow. Heather dared to hope that she would keep her foot.

She had since returned to the OR for two more surgeries. In the last one, doctors had surveyed the damage and repairs, and they had assessed how well the foot might one day function. Then they had come to present her with their findings. Their tone was solemn; the news they brought was not good. The blood was flowing, but her foot was ravaged; if and when it fully healed it would be hell to live with. The decision was hers and hers alone, but it was clear: The doctors thought she should amputate. If she kept the foot she had been born with, she would never run again, they told her. She might be able to walk on it someday. Her left leg would be shorter than her right; she would suffer chronic pain and need more operations. And still her foot would always look deformed. The hospital arranged for her to talk to people who had faced the same decision. One man who came to see her had kept his leg after a motorcycle accident. He suffered chronic pain and addiction to painkillers, and ten years later, he chose amputation. “I wasted ten years of my life,” he told her. She wondered, as she listened, if she really had a choice. She was in tremendous pain; every time the nurses changed the dressing on her foot, it became excruciating. She tried to imagine steeling herself to the suffering, maybe for years. The thought—the dread she felt—gave her a moment of clarity.

Meanwhile, the people close to her were struggling, too. Her mother, Rosemary, found the thought of Heather losing part of her leg almost unbearable. Then, after listening intently to the surgeons, she discovered the alternative scared her even more. She reached her own conclusion but said nothing to her daughter. The choice had to be Heather’s. Her mother did not want to sway her.

To Heather’s close friend Jason, who had stayed by her bedside all week, the talk of amputation seemed to arise out of nowhere. On Wednesday, he had seen her foot for the first time since she’d left Boylston Street in an ambulance. He had braced himself for the worst as the nurse pulled off the sheet. But the foot had looked more normal than he expected—at least the top of it did; he couldn’t see the bottom—and the sensors placed on it to check for circulation had broadcast the much-desired thump of flowing blood. Listening, Jason felt a rush of joy. It was working; it was going to be okay. He stepped out into the hallway with two other friends who were there, who had also been at the marathon. They wrapped their arms around one another’s shoulders. All three were crying tears of happiness.

It seemed like the next thing Jason knew, everyone was talking about amputation. He didn’t understand—how could the outlook be so dire when everything had seemed to be going so well? The problem, he gathered, was the underside of the foot; there was no good way to reconstruct it. He heard the doctors’ dark prognosis, the predictions of more pain and suffering. Still he resisted, clinging to a hope that had quickly faded. After one doctor talked to Heather in her room, Jason followed him out into the hall.

“She’s my best friend in the whole world,” he implored. “Is there any chance?”

“The decision is hers,” the doctor said. “But what I said in there is true.”

That night Jason and Heather sat alone in her room. No one had rushed her to decide, but Heather knew the time was coming. “What do you think?” she asked.

“I think you’ve got to try and save it,” Jason said.

“I don’t want to lose it,” Heather agreed. But she could not ignore the warnings, either, from those who had already made the painful passage she was facing. She was, at her core, a practical-minded person. She had always made decisions based on information, not just emotion. There was no way to know for sure which path would bring more pain. She could only make her choice and commit herself completely.

 • • • 

D
avid King was up early Friday morning. The surgeon had to be in Dover, New Hampshire, north of Portsmouth, before 8:00
A
.
M
.
, to give a lecture at a hospital there. It was a commitment made long before the marathon. He got coffee and went to the gym, and then he started reading the news on his phone. When he realized what was unfolding in Watertown, he wanted to skip the trip and stay in Boston. What if more violence erupted and he was needed at the hospital? He called in to work and asked to stick around, but his boss told him to head north.

The lecture, at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital, was supposed to be about the latest strategies for replacing fluids after blood loss in trauma patients.
No one is going to want to hear about that
, King thought as he drove up I-93 to I-95 and over the border. On a day like this, with the drama still unfolding, he was sure the doctors in New Hampshire would prefer he talk about the bombing and his hospital’s response. The week had been a whirlwind—he hadn’t had time yet to reflect on what had happened, let alone assemble any notes or photographs—but he usually did just fine speaking off the cuff. The lecture room was packed when he arrived, the crowd much bigger than its normal size. As he had expected, everyone wanted to know about the bombing. His talk, King told them as he began, “was advertised as something else, but that’s not what you want to hear about. I’ll tell you the story through my eyes, and if you’re bored, you can leave.” He started talking. Two hours later—long after the lecture had been scheduled to end—the room was still full of people.

The drive to and from New Hampshire was the first time King had had to himself since Monday, the first real chance he’d had to think about the week. The high-octane surgeon—who always had music playing, often at top volume, whether he was exercising or writing e-mails—chose to drive in silence that Friday morning. He found himself reflecting on his time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thinking about the many soldiers he had treated who had lost their legs. If every one of those cases became big news, like the plight of the marathon victims, he wondered, would it change public attitudes about the wars? He understood why this event was different—these things weren’t supposed to happen
here
, in the US, and these victims hadn’t made a choice to head into harm’s way—but it still bothered him that wounded soldiers so rarely inspired a similar flood of public outrage and concern.

In between his musings at the wheel, King got on his phone with a
Time
magazine reporter. The hospital had been flooded with interview requests from around the world, and King had volunteered to respond to some of them, squeezing calls into his few breaks between patients. He felt a responsibility to make sure the facts were reported correctly and calmly, and he saw an opportunity, too, to help the public understand the work he and his colleagues were doing. He talked to the
Time
reporter as he drove, the answers to the questions coming to him easily. He felt like he had the right words, like his brief sojourn north had helped him process the chaotic events. By 11:00
A.M.
, the doctor was back in the city. He drove his car home to Cambridge, then walked across the river to the hospital, ignoring the order to shelter, intent on getting to work. The streets were empty, the morning unnaturally silent. The bomber was still at large, and Boston was a ghost town.

 • • • 

T
hey were starving when they arrived in Harvard Square around 2:00
P
.
M
.
Deval Patrick was with about a half-dozen state troopers in full-body gear. Nobody had eaten in hours. They pulled up to Charlie’s Kitchen, a longtime Cambridge fixture. They were happy to find the place open. Patrick had to laugh at the irony of it:
We know we’ve asked everyone to remain indoors and businesses to close, but, hey, can you make us some cheeseburgers?
Everyone in the restaurant applauded the troopers when they walked in. Patrick had just come from visiting Mount Auburn Hospital, where Dic Donohue was recovering from surgery. Patrick couldn’t see Donohue but spent time with his wife and his brother. The governor was gratified to see all the support Donohue seemed to have, including from colleagues at the transit authority and in law enforcement. After the meal at Charlie’s, Patrick returned to the State House. Exhausted, he lay down on a couch in his office, not bothering to even take off his shoes. He didn’t have the energy for that.

Less than an hour later, his cell phone rang. It was the White House. The president was on the line. Obama, with whom Patrick had been close for years, asked him how he was doing, whether he had everything he needed. The president had been following the investigation closely. “He was very current,” Patrick said. They talked about the possible threats that were still out there, what they knew of the intelligence. They discussed the latest development, which involved promising police searches in New Bedford, a former whaling city on the state’s south coast; authorities had picked up a ping down there from one of Dzhokhar’s electronic devices. Then Patrick and Obama discussed the shelter-in-place request. Obama told Patrick what Patrick already knew: that they’d have to lift the request soon, regardless of whether they had found the suspect. They couldn’t ask people to stay in lockdown forever. Patrick told the president they planned to wrap up the house-to-house searches by the evening, and then they’d tell the public to resume their lives, carefully.

By 5:00
P.M.
, with Dzhokhar still at large, William Evans, his police officers, and the rest of the tactical teams back in Watertown were feeling the weight of their work. They were living off bottled water and granola bars. Bathrooms were hard to come by. They were beat from lugging their heavy gear around all day under the sun. The exhaustion, coupled with the frustration of not having found their man, left police spent. “Some of my officers were calling for release,” Evans said. “I said, ‘Let’s hang in there. Let’s hang in there.’” As evening approached, Ed Deveau, the Watertown chief, began to worry what all this meant for his community. Where was this guy? Had there been a carjacking police never heard about, giving Dzhokhar a vehicle to escape in? “My other concern was that it was going to be dark in an hour and a half or two, and it was going to give him a chance to move again if he was still here,” Deveau said.

Patrick knew, by day’s end, that it was time to go back before the cameras. What he had wanted to say—what everyone hoped he would say—was that after hours of searching police finally had their suspect in custody. But that was not in the script. Instead he had to deliver the truth: that authorities did not know where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was. That after a long, difficult day of methodical searches, there was little to show for it. The Boston Red Sox and Boston Bruins had called off their games. The Big Apple Circus was in town, but there were no clowns or elephants or trapeze acrobats. The city had more or less ground to a halt. And yet the dragnet had come up empty. On the way out to Watertown, where he planned to announce the end of the shelter request, Patrick picked up Menino at the Parkman House, the city-owned mansion where the ailing mayor had been recuperating.

Around 6:00
P.M.
, the governor stepped up to a bouquet of microphones at the Watertown command post, a blend of determination and disappointment evident on his and other leaders’ faces. Menino was by his side in a wheelchair, frustrated by how little they had to report but convinced Dzhokhar was contained in Watertown, and that the shelter order should not drag on any longer. “We can return to living our lives,” Patrick said, urging residents to use extra vigilance. Mass transit would reopen immediately. It made for an odd and unsatisfying juxtaposition—residents were being told to resume their lives, but that a terrorist who had helped kill and maim scores of people could still be right there in their midst. “There were the inevitable questions: Are you saying we’re safe? Did he get away?” Patrick recalled. “We answered what we could.” Patrick himself was still on edge, too, but he understood that they couldn’t keep the shelter request in place indefinitely. “Any one of the decisions around the response you knew had consequences, good or bad,” he said. “The worst thing would have been not to make decisions. You have to keep moving.” Patrick said he had come to understand that you could trust the public with information—that you could be up-front about what you did and did not know, and that people would respect that. “I’m not saying there was unanimity in support for what we had to do,” he said. “I think people basically got that we were trying to do what was in their best interest.”

In the car on the way home, Patrick felt drained. And he felt uneasy.
Is this going to be a long, painful period of uncertainty?
he thought.
Where could this guy be? Is he up under some house, dead?
The governor called home, where his wife, Diane, and his daughter Katherine had been looking after each other. They decided that, on his way back, he would pick up Thai food from a place in Quincy that they liked, called Pad Thai. They had found it on Yelp a while back. Diane and Katherine placed the order; Patrick didn’t have enough brainpower left to do it himself. Comfort food for an uncomfortable night.

“He’s in custody! He’s in custody!”

A
ll day long,
David Henneberry had been looking out his window at the two fuzzy paint rollers lying on his lawn. They weren’t supposed to be there—they had fallen out from under the shrink-wrap cover on his boat. He was itching to go put them back where they belonged, but he didn’t want to disobey police. Already, officers driving up and down his street had spotted him on his back steps smoking a cigarette. They had waved, with a look that said,
Okay, but that’s far enough.
There were helicopters hovering overhead. Henneberry figured if he got up on a ladder and started messing around with the boat, they would see him and angrily order him back inside. He understood that the situation in Watertown was serious; he was trying to respect authority, he really was. But as he stood there smoking just outside his back door, gazing down at the rollers on the grass not twenty feet away, he felt a nagging irritation. For a guy as meticulous as Henneberry—especially when it came to his twenty-four-foot Seabird powerboat—even that trace of disarray was hard to take.

The boat was Henneberry’s greatest pleasure. Now that he was retired from his job as a phone company installer, the sixty-six-year-old Watertown native had more time to enjoy it. In another month, he would have the vessel in the water, and he and his wife, Beth, would settle into their favorite routine. Beth would pack a lunch on Sunday mornings, he’d pick up the paper, and they’d head for the nearby Watertown Yacht Club. There they would hop aboard the
Slipaway II
and meander eastward on the Charles River, around the bend at the Eliot Bridge in Cambridge, past Boston University to the Esplanade. They would often drop anchor there, in the basin between MIT and Kendall Square on the Cambridge side of the river, and, across the water in Boston, Beacon Hill and the golden dome of the State House. They would take their time with the paper and their lunch, and then, when it felt right, make their way back. They loved how easy it was and how free it felt to get away from everything.

It felt like the opposite of all that on this particular Friday in April. They were stuck inside, like all their neighbors on Franklin Street, where Henneberry had lived for forty years. And the situation was unnerving. Somewhere in the area, the authorities said, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev could be hiding. Henneberry had been up late the night before—he was a night owl, a habit ingrained from his many years playing drums in bands at Boston nightclubs—and he had heard the gunfight erupt on Laurel Street. It was little more than half a mile away as the crow flies, across the backyards and quiet, tree-lined streets. He stayed up until 2:30
A.M.
watching the news coverage on TV. It almost seemed unreal that the violence that had erupted in Boston on Monday had come to his town, his neighborhood. Early Friday morning, one of Beth’s children called to make sure they knew of the lockdown. Beth peered sleepily through the blinds and saw a military vehicle stop on the corner outside. Police dressed in heavy tactical gear assembled on the streets.

The boat in Henneberry’s backyard was thirty-two years old, but it was nearly impossible to tell. He had owned it for eleven years, and he had been working on it the whole time. He had restored the cabin, crafted custom covers for the storage bins, laid in a new teak floor. The wood got seven, eight, nine coats of varnish—whatever it took for the shine to meet his standards. It was so glossy you could see your reflection. When winter threatened and it was time to store the boat for the season, Henneberry took pains to protect it from the weather. That was where the fuzzy white paint rollers came in. When the boat was sealed in protective white plastic, Henneberry liked to tuck ten or so rollers up under the bottom edge of the wrap, so it wouldn’t chafe against the boat and leave scratches. It was an extra, almost obsessive bit of care. Now two of the rollers were just lying there on the grass. Maybe, Henneberry thought, the wind had blown them out. Or maybe the wooden frame under the shrink-wrap had loosened up. As soon as he was allowed to venture that far, he would go outside and check it out.

He and Beth watched the 6:00
P.M.
press conference on the TV in their living room. They watched Governor Deval Patrick announce that “the stay-indoors request is lifted” and then ask the public to remain vigilant. “Remember there is still a very, very dangerous individual at large,” he cautioned. Then, as if realizing the ominous tone of his warning, Patrick added a note of reassurance. “We feel confident . . . we can return to living our lives,” he said.

It was all Henneberry needed to hear.
Well, they didn’t get him
, he thought.
He got away somehow, and now he’s in Boston, Worcester, wherever.
Beth was not convinced.
I wonder what they’re not saying
, she thought
. I think they think he’s still here.

“I’m going to check the boat,” said her husband, heading to the back door.

Henneberry crossed the small backyard to his garage, a low-slung, tidy structure, white with green trim, built along with the house in 1890. He grabbed his stepladder, carried it outside, leaned it up against the side of the boat, and stepped up onto the second or third step. He rolled up a section of shrink-wrap that covered the side door to the boat, put a clamp on it to hold it up, and peered in through the sheet of clear plastic underneath. Sunset was an hour away—there was still plenty of light—and he could clearly see blood on the floor of his boat. There was no mistaking that deep crimson color. He looked forward, toward the cabin, and saw more blood there, under the seats. His eyes traveled back and forth between the two sets of bloodstains, his mind working to make sense of what he saw. His gaze shifted, to the deeper interior—that’s when he spotted the body on the other side of the engine box. The person on the floor had his back toward Henneberry, the hood of a sweatshirt pulled up over his head. The body remained perfectly still as Henneberry, stunned, backed away silently down the ladder. Later, he would not remember stepping off onto the ground.

He ran into the house. When Beth saw his face, she knew something bad was happening. Henneberry was shocked and confused, but he knew exactly who was in his backyard.

“I . . . there . . . He’s in the boat,” he managed to stammer. Beth grabbed the phone, dialed 911, and thrust it at him.

“This call is recorded,” the operator told him.

Henneberry recited his name and address. “There’s a body in my boat in the backyard,” he recalled saying.

“Sir, did you say there’s a body in your boat?”

“Yes, there’s someone in my boat,” Henneberry repeated. “And a lot of blood.” He stood at the kitchen sink, watching the boat out the window.

The operator told him that police were on the way. Then he asked if the man was still in the boat.

“I think so,” Henneberry said. “But I can only see one side.”

Then, without asking the dispatcher if he should, Henneberry decided to go back out and check. Cordless phone to his ear, he walked down the porch steps and back onto the grass. He moved closer to his six-foot wooden fence, peering down the side of it to check behind the boat.

“He’s still in the boat,” he assured the operator.

“How do you know that?” the operator asked.

“I’m looking at the other side,” Henneberry said.

As the operator ordered him to get back in the house,
Henneberry turned away from the boat. He was facing his pebble-covered driveway when police came running up it, weapons drawn, yelling, “Get back! Get down! Where is he
?
” He felt a wave of overwhelming fear—what if they thought he was the terrorist? Frozen there, the phone still in his hand, he saw one officer emerge from the pack, and he realized she was calling his name: “David! David!” He recognized Watertown Police Detective Jennifer Connors, whom he knew from the Watertown Yacht Club. The familiar face jolted him from his paralysis. She grabbed his arm and pulled him down the sidewalk, away from the house. “Jen, Jen,” he told her, “get Beth! She’s all by herself!”

 • • • 

A
round 6:45
P
.
M
.
, right after Henneberry’s 911 call,
William Evans jumped in his Boston police car with two lieutenants, racing toward Franklin Street behind a Watertown cop. State troopers and other police officers quickly descended on the property, too. Evans positioned himself in front of Henneberry’s house, looking straight up the driveway at the boat. He saw Dzhokhar poking at the tarp. Everyone at the scene began yelling. Police thought he might be trying to get a gun through. “We didn’t know what he had,” Evans said. “But given what he did at the scene of the marathon, given what he did during the shoot-out, and given what he did to the MIT officer, we knew we were dealing with a serious terrorist here who had weapons to the max.” Dzhokhar’s movements prompted someone to begin firing at the boat. Other officers immediately joined in, the shots ringing out through the quiet neighborhood. “Hold your fire!” Evans yelled. He believed they had the guy in their clutches, that things were under control. And he wanted to take Dzhokhar alive. The bullets stopped. Evans didn’t need guns. What he needed were SWAT officers who could get the suspect out.

Rich Correale, Mike Powell, and Nick Cox had spent all day searching homes and properties in Watertown. The SWAT team officers from the nearby city of Malden had just finished scouring an apartment complex. They were sitting out front of the building, talking to a supervisor from a Boston Police SWAT team working alongside them. Everyone was tired, ready to go home. Suddenly the supervisor got a call over the radio: A resident had seen some blood on his boat. “And we’re like, ‘Bullshit,’” Correale said. “‘This isn’t it.’” They had been chasing false alarms all day. This just seemed like another. Police on the radio called for SWAT units. The Boston squad was heading to the house and asked the Malden team to join. They agreed, reluctantly. “We were kind of dragging our feet,” Correale said. But as they walked to the van, the radio traffic intensified. Police had seen movement on the boat. The Malden guys heard “shots fired!” and raced to the scene.

With the shelter request now lifted, the streets leading to Franklin were lined with people—“like a parade,” Nick Cox said. The Malden team dumped their van and ran the last quarter mile or so, in full SWAT gear, toward Henneberry’s house. Uniformed officers directed them to it. Correale, Powell, and Cox didn’t know what to expect. Was this it? Was this really him? They reached the bottom of Henneberry’s driveway. The boat sat just on the other side of two cars. As more officers arrived, snipers took positions in armored vehicles and in the windows of surrounding houses, their weapons trained on the boat. Correale, seeing guns pointed in several directions, got on the radio at one point and warned about the potential for deadly crossfire. Commanders removed some police from behind the boat.

Everyone’s attention turned to getting Dzhokhar out of the
Slipaway II
. Police were on edge, not knowing what his intentions were, what weapons he had, or how hurt he was. They kept their distance at first. They tried tear gas, to flush him out, but he didn’t budge. Instead the gas drifted down the driveway, where the Malden team was set up. “We got smoked,” Correale said. “The whole place cleared out.”
Around this time, an FBI tactical unit arrived and took command of the scene, behind a leader from the bureau’s Virginia-based Hostage Rescue Team; the FBI would later request that he not be identified by name. The FBI unit was composed of fourteen operatives, including three specialists in crisis negotiation. There were also two “breachers,” who had responsibility for preparing the scene for the operation; a K9 specialist, who coordinated all the responding K9 teams; three “assaulters,” who helped run the show on the ground; two communications specialists, one right near the boat and another in a vehicle a few blocks away; and two snipers, who got up on a building and provided cover for everyone else. The team leader quickly won the trust and respect of local police, taking their guidance into account, keeping them informed on next steps, and leading with firmness and unexpected humility.

A number of warnings had trickled in over the radio, and it was impossible, in the moment, to weigh their legitimacy. Hovering above in a helicopter, state police outfitted with thermal imaging equipment reported that Dzhokhar looked like he may be trying to start a fire in the boat; dozens of gallons of fuel might be on board. The FBI team leader calmly told everyone to back away. If the boat exploded, he said, the flash would come right down the driveway. “I know this is your party,” the leader told Correale. “But we’re going to want you to back up.” They knew that snipers would likely take Dzhokhar out if he tried anything, but the Malden SWAT officers were prepared for the worst. They’d been told that Dzhokhar had a weapon and had exchanged gunfire with police. Indeed, throughout the two-hour standoff, all kinds of reports were coming over the transom about Dzhokhar’s purported arsenal—that he had a rifle, that he was armed with an AK-47, that he wore a suicide vest. “I was under the impression these people had no regard for human life,” Powell said. “So I’m thinking this guy’s going to go out with the last hurrah, and he’s probably going to try to take as many out with him [as he can].”

At one point, around nightfall, Correale’s cell phone rang. It was his wife.

“Hey,” she said, “you know they have him in a boat?”

“Yep, I know,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the driveway.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me! You said you were just watching sidewalks!”

The FBI breachers launched at least four or five diversionary devices into the boat, which produced loud, bright explosions meant to stun and disorient Dzhokhar. The idea was to buy police and federal agents time to safely move in. State troopers had also positioned a BearCat—an armored, military-style vehicle with chunky tires—in Henneberry’s backyard. They tried to tip the boat over using the BearCat, but the trailer made that difficult. They punctured the tarp instead. Authorities at one point discussed sending a dog into the boat but concluded it wouldn’t do much good; a dog wasn’t going to cuff the suspect and bring him out. As the standstill continued, the FBI team leader came over to where Correale’s team had assembled, alongside a group of SWAT officers from the transit police and officers from a regional unit called North Metro SWAT. If Dzhokhar wouldn’t leave the boat on his own accord, that left one option for taking him alive: They’d have to go get him. The team leader put his hand on Correale’s shoulder. “We need to move fast,” he said. “Get your team. Get a plan together.”