Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (23 page)

The sense of liberation Friday night was real, and in many ways deserved. The week had indeed been hard on just about everybody. Since 2:50
P.M.
on Monday, Boston had been in terror’s grip. The sense of release could hardly have been more welcome. It was easy, though, for most of the celebrants to shout, and to sing, and to broadcast their civic pride in the
BOSTON STRONG
T-shirts that were suddenly everywhere. It was easy for them to crack open a Sam Adams that night or pour a shot of Jack. It was easy to go to bed knowing that they could wake once again to a peaceful city, restored to its rightful sense of order. It was easy to look forward to the next morning’s Starbucks ritual, thankful that your son’s baseball game was back on.

But for Heather Abbott, for Billy and Patty Campbell, for all the wounded and the grieving families still reeling from Monday’s attack, there would be no such unburdening. There would be no luxury of exhalation. The week had ended for everyone else. Not for them. In many ways, it never would.
As Krystle Campbell’s brother put it, “I’m happy that nobody else is going to get hurt by these guys. But it’s not going to bring her back.” The only thing to do was to move forward, one day at a time, in hopes that tomorrow would be better than yesterday.

Starting toward normal

I
t began with a handful of small American flags tucked into the barriers that blocked off Boylston Street. Almost by the hour, in those first uncertain days after the bombing, the makeshift memorial grew, becoming strangely powerful and enduring, a place of pilgrimage and reflection for the thousands of people who flocked to Copley Square. It was as if by getting close, by breathing the air, they might understand what had happened there. Many felt compelled to leave a token, some symbol of their grief or solidarity. And so the bouquet of flags became, too, a rising pile of race medals, candles, and rosary beads. It swelled with running shoes and baseball caps and arrangements of fresh spring flowers, purple irises and yellow daffodils and white lilies. It became, as the days went by, a free-form shrine, adorned with hockey pucks, a bag of Boston Baked Beans candy, and clamshells bearing messages like “Boston will run again.” Everything had its place—the stuffed Wisconsin badger, the quartet of elf figurines with
B
s scrawled on their pointy hats, and the quilt of handwritten note cards, left by visitors from around the world:

Houston Loves Boston

Greece Loves Boston

Tibet Stands with Boston

Colombia is with Boston

We will not submit

May the light outshine the darkness

Kevin Brown first saw the memorial on Thursday, three days after the bombing. The fifty-eight-year-old carpenter had tried to get into the Cathedral of the Holy Cross for the interfaith service with President Obama, drawn there by heartache and a love for the city of Boston. The big stone church was full, all of its seats taken, so he joined the milling crowd outside. After the service, Brown walked to Back Bay, where he came upon the memorial. He spent hours there that day, at the eastern edge of the cordoned-off crime scene, in the quiet company of hundreds of others seeking solace. He returned the next day, and again the day after that. When the police ordered the sprawling memorial moved out of the street, he was one of dozens of volunteers who formed a human chain and passed the items down to their new home on a wide swath of plaza in front of the Bank of America at the corner of Boylston and Berkeley Streets. Later, when the city moved the memorial to its third and more lasting home in Copley Square, Brown dutifully followed. It had become, for him, a kind of calling.

The square, named for the colonial portrait painter John Singleton Copley, is in many ways the heart of Boston. The memorial to the bombing victims lay between the Boston Public Library, the oldest publicly funded library in the country—with its Beaux-Arts façade, interior murals by artist John Singer Sargent, and the motto
FREE TO ALL
carved above its doors—and the rustic stone profile of Trinity Church, a Romanesque tour de force by the architect H. H. Richardson. Both buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places, as is Old South Church across the street, its Venetian Gothic tower rising above a congregation first established in 1670. Even in a place as history-steeped as Boston, it was hard to find another square boasting three such landmarks. Over the centuries, it had hosted many more. Copley was home to many of the city’s best-known institutions before they moved elsewhere: Harvard Medical School, MIT, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston University, Emerson College, and Northeastern University all started there. It was a remarkable run of history for a swath of land that began the nineteenth century as an 850-acre tidal marsh, part of the Charles River estuary, and was filled in with sand and gravel to relieve overcrowding in the city in the 1850s. The massive job of creating the new neighborhood took decades—the work went on even in the middle of the Civil War and, at its peak, saw some four hundred train car loads of fill delivered to Back Bay daily. The landscape that arose on that hard-won foundation became a thing of beauty, an elegant embodiment of the city’s loftiest ambitions.

The week following the bombing, Brown spent hours there, day after day, helping to organize the maze of mementos on the pavement at the edge of the square. He felt a welcome sense of purpose; the simple routine gave him comfort. Three weeks before the marathon, Brown had lost his mother. Isabelle Brown was ninety when she died, after a long, full life, and he hadn’t expected it to hit him like it did. His mother had been a pillar of strength—she raised eleven children while working two jobs after Brown’s father became disabled—and she and her fourth son had enjoyed an unusually close relationship. “We were exactly alike,” Brown said. “We clicked. I made sure she was treated like a queen.” His careful work at the memorial became, in part, a tribute to her.

Soon Brown was spending twelve hours a day at the site, taking on the role of unofficial caretaker. It comforted him to see the reverent crowds who gathered at all hours, to hear them saying prayers and singing hymns, to watch them unlace their sneakers, leave them there, and walk home barefoot. He loved the children who approached to ask, ever so politely, where to hang the drawings they had made. It gave him peace to light the candles on the ground as darkness fell, to replace the dead flowers with fresh ones, and to talk with those who wanted company. He met the governor and the vice president’s wife, Jill Biden, a runner who stopped by to leave her shoes beside the others. People brought him cups of hot coffee and fresh rolls of tape. They passed him cash and told him to buy what was needed: more flowers, more candles, sheets of plastic to cover the place when it rained. He served at their will; they had made the place together.
It was hard to explain what it meant or why it mattered, but one visitor, Sally Graham of Dorchester, came close: “In some ways, it says to me [that] good does outweigh evil.”

A carpenter from Indiana had built three wooden crosses for the memorial, one each for Martin, Krystle, and Lingzi, the victims who had been killed at the finish line. Visitors draped rosary beads over each one; every day, Brown carefully rearranged the heavy, tangled necklaces so the name on each cross could be easily seen. After people began asking about a cross for slain MIT police officer Sean Collier, Brown built a fourth cross just like the others, roughly three feet tall. He carried it to Boston on the bus and subway from his home in Brockton, a blue-collar city twenty-five miles to the south. Brown’s daily trek to the memorial took ninety minutes each way; the commuter train would have been faster, but it cost twice as much and he could not afford it. A serious back injury had prevented him from working much in recent years.

The same day Brown brought the fourth cross to Boston, Collier’s father showed up and stayed at the memorial for hours, helping the caretaker paint his son’s name on the cross. “Boston needed a place to heal,” Brown said later, reflecting on the outpouring he witnessed. “I never thought it would grow so big and last so long.” His family didn’t understand what he was doing in a far-off Boston park, but he believed his work there had clear purpose. If the memorial became an eyesore, the city would take it away, leaving people—leaving him—with no place to grieve.

 • • • 

O
n Saturday, the day after the citywide lockdown and the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, residents woke to a perfect spring day, buds in the trees and forsythia blooming brilliant yellow. They reveled in the leisurely routine of a normal—or almost normal—Saturday: pancake breakfasts and kids’ soccer games; dog walks and birthday parties. Boylston Street was still closed, and David Henneberry’s Watertown backyard was still teeming with FBI agents, as it would be for more than a week. But elsewhere it was possible to begin moving on from the harrowing five-day ride that had just ended. The day felt like a gift, and to some, a celebration of endurance and resilience. “
Yeah! We’re alive!” one resident, Roberta Nicoloro, shouted, greeting her neighbors with hugs after emerging from her home in Watertown.

The assault that began with two backpacks on the sidewalk had inspired, from the start, a posture of defiance. A few hours after the explosions, two Emerson College students opened up a laptop and designed a simple T-shirt they could sell to raise money for the victims, a way to transform helplessness into useful action. For a slogan, they chose
BOSTON STRONG
, a local adaptation of the
LIVESTRONG
campaign made famous a decade earlier by cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong. It was simple, more about the place than the event, and it struck the right tone, the two students thought. They ordered 110 blue-and-yellow shirts and hoped for the best. Within a day or two, their rallying cry had struck a chord, becoming universal shorthand for the way the city wanted to be seen—and to see itself—after the tragedy: unbroken and unbowed. It appeared on city buses and on billboards, on stickers and wristbands, on baseball hats and storefronts. Mayor Menino embraced it, and beloved Red Sox slugger David Ortiz did, too, in his own memorable way. “This is our fucking city, and nobody is going to dictate our freedom,” he told the cheering crowd at Fenway on Saturday. “Stay strong.” Within two weeks, the Emerson students, Nick Reynolds and Chris Dobens, would sell more than forty-seven thousand T-shirts, raising $716,000 for the victims.

Boston’s embrace of the slogan was not without backlash. Critics of the way the city had handled the day of the capture, with its sweeping shutdown of just about everything, mocked Bostonians for calling themselves strong. “Last time I saw them they were cowering indoors,” observed one unimpressed out-of-towner in an online post.
Mental health experts voiced concern that widespread use of the term “Boston Strong” might marginalize those traumatized by the attacks, making them feel weak or discouraging them from seeking help. But if some people wore the T-shirts as a display of strength or defiance—an easy proposition for anyone not directly touched by the bombing—far more were drawn to the “Boston Strong” campaign as a way to publicly support the victims. There was the donation they were making—of the $20 paid for every shirt, $15 went to the victims’ fund—but there was also the unified message they were sending to the wounded men and women watching from the city’s hospitals:
We stand behind you
. The victims heard, and signaled their appreciation. Heather Abbott wore a personalized “Heather Strong” T-shirt. The Richard family wrote in a statement that “Martin was ‘Boston Strong,’ and now we all must be, for him and for all of the victims.” Billy and Patty Campbell later toured the memorial in Copley Square clad in the iconic blue-and-yellow T-shirts.

That impulse to help, which had inspired both the bystanders improvising tourniquets and the college students selling T-shirts, swept the city in the days after the attack, a philanthropic wave that surged over the most optimistic projections. The calls had begun flooding the mayor’s office and the governor’s office early Tuesday morning, the day after the bombing. They came from corporations and from individuals in Boston and around the country, asking what they could do to help and offering money. Menino and Patrick spoke briefly before the morning press conference that day at the Westin and agreed they must act fast to set up a fund for the victims. Menino gathered his team in his hospital room after the briefing and made a plan: They would recruit volunteers to run the fund, and solicit free office space, minimizing administrative costs. The mayor was adamant that it would be a single fund, an undivided pool of cash to provide the maximum benefit and equity. They would call it the One Fund; the website would be ready to go live that night. If they could bring in $10 million, Menino thought, that would be a success. But the calls kept coming, more than he ever imagined. By the end of the first week, they had reached $20 million; by summer, the total would climb past $60 million. “People wanted to give $1 million, half a million, matches,” Menino said. “Everybody was saying, ‘I don’t need to be recognized.’ I’d never seen anything like that.” John Hancock Financial, the lead sponsor of the marathon, gave the first $1 million gift. Athletic shoe maker New Balance gave $1 million; other corporations lined up behind them. The Red Sox initially contributed more than $600,000, a figure that would grow, with help from partners, beyond $2 million. Millions more streamed in online from individuals around the world. Menino reached out to Ken Feinberg, the administrator of the 9/11 victims fund and a Massachusetts native, to ask for his help in distributing the payments.

The last thing Menino needed or expected at such a critical moment was the Internal Revenue Service getting in his way. The mayor had been firm from the start: that the money would go to aid, not administration, and that the setup would be simple and streamlined. He wanted a few volunteers in a donated room processing incoming checks as fast as they could.
But the IRS was cool on his plan, Menino said, telling him, in essence, “Just a minute, Mr. Mayor.” For reasons the mayor found utterly uncompelling, the IRS wanted donations channeled through a city or state agency. They wanted him to organize a fund-raising event. The mayor was furious at the interference. “Why?” he demanded to know. “We already have the money, and we don’t need the bureaucracy.” He started calling everyone he could think of who might intervene, all the way up to Vice President Joe Biden. Finally, something shifted—maybe it was all the phone calls; maybe it was the erupting IRS scandal over its screening of political groups—but in mid-May, the One Fund received its tax-free designation.

Barely two weeks before the marathon bombing, Menino had stood in Faneuil Hall and announced that he would not seek a sixth term in office. It was a deeply emotional moment for him, saying farewell to the city he loved and had served for a record two decades—a onetime insurance man, elected mayor after a decade as a little-known city council member from Hyde Park, a neighborhood on Boston’s southern fringes. He was seventy, and despite his recent health problems, he vowed to use his remaining time well: “I have nine months left—just think of what I could do in nine months! We could have some real fun.” In truth, his legacy was more or less cemented by this point: He was the fabled urban mechanic, focused on the little things that make city life work: the throwback pol with a long memory and reach into every neighborhood. He would never win eloquence awards—some had nicknamed him “Mayor Mumbles,” fondly or not so fondly—but his twenty years in city hall had been untainted by scandal, and his stamina was unmatched. Polls showed that Menino had personally met more than half the city’s residents, an incredible yet completely believable feat, given his near-constant visibility at parades, cookouts, ribbon cuttings, and tree lightings.