Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (24 page)

This was not exactly how Menino had envisioned the twilight of his term. He could not have foreseen a period so demanding and emotionally draining. In some terrible way, the bombing on Boylston Street seemed to complete a cycle that had begun a dozen years earlier, on a sparkling September morning at Logan Airport, when two planes roared down the runway, rose above the sunlit water, and turned south, headed for New York.
That day, September 11, 2001, had been among the worst Menino had faced. Boston’s connection to the attack on the World Trade Center towers was an enduring source of pain and frustration for him. At the time, he had wondered in private if his city would be next, and now, more than a decade later, his fear had finally been realized. There was no comparison between the scale of the events, but this one was his.

The bombing was an unprecedented moment, and yet Menino’s read of it was characteristic, infused with his optimism and pride in his hometown. He saw a city that would be stronger for the experience. He lauded the teamwork among city, state, and federal agencies that had come together, more or less seamlessly, and he was moved by the actions of ordinary people, like the college students who raised more than half a million dollars selling T-shirts. He imagined keeping the spirit of collaboration alive, using it to fuel progress in other areas. “
We’re a big city, but we are also a small city,” Menino said the day after Boylston Street reopened to the public, as he sat having lunch on the patio outside the Lenox Hotel. “Helping neighbors out: That’s what this renewal is all about.”

 • • • 

W
ith money continuing to pour in for the victims, the end of Marathon Week brought another surge of feeling, this one for the first responders. The Boston Bruins invited twenty-six of them to their home game at the TD Garden on Sunday, and after the final buzzer, brought them onto the ice for an emotional ceremony. Most of those honored were police and firefighters, but David King was there, too, looking slightly uncomfortable in his sport jacket, holding his six-year-old daughter’s hand as they waited for his name to be called. “Brad Marchand, meet Dr. King!” came the booming voice of the announcer. The Canadian forward skated over, pulled off his black-and-gold jersey, and handed it to the doctor as the crowd lingering in the seventeen-thousand-seat rink roared its approval. King was not an avid sports fan by any stretch, but in that moment, feeling the warmth of the gesture, it didn’t matter. “That was the coolest thing that ever happened, at least to me,” he said later, after the jersey had been signed and framed and hung in a prominent spot on the wall of his office at Mass General.

It was, for King as for many of the police there on the ice with him, a striking departure from everyday routine in a world where their efforts were not always appreciated. Caring for trauma patients was not like working in other specialties, where doctors sometimes built long relationships with patients. King’s patients often appeared at 2:00
A.M.
with gunshot or stabbing wounds, and it sometimes seemed to him that they expected to be saved, and took it for granted, no matter how many hours and how much effort it took. When he went to check on such patients the next day, introducing himself as “the doc who fixed you,” it was rare to hear a word of thanks. “When’s breakfast?” was a more common response. Looking back over the course of his trauma career, King could count on one hand the patients with whom he had connected deeply and stayed in touch. Never in his life, before the marathon bombing, had he felt such gratitude for the work he did, and the feeling was at times a little overwhelming.

 • • • 

B
oylston Street, a place usually packed with people and life, remained desolate. Up close, it looked like a movie set: Gatorade cups strewn everywhere, folding tables, water bottles, and barricades left in disarray. As if bombs had gone off everywhere.
On the weekend following the attack, Dave McGillivray and a small marathon team got their first chance to return. The city wanted to reopen Boylston as soon as possible, and the remnants of the marathon had to be swept away first. After getting permission from the FBI, they put on full-body hazmat suits and began the messy work of cleaning up, of restoring Boylston to its normal state. On Saturday, they worked on the street, clearing away the race debris. On Sunday, a couple of McGillivray’s deputies cleaned the medical tent. It was not a pleasant task. They were surrounded by the evidence of Monday’s trauma and by reminders of the hasty exits, like the unclaimed bags with runners’ bib numbers attached. They tried to remain stoic, to stay focused on the work. “I’m as emotional as anyone, but I also gotta get beyond it and get the job done,” McGillivray said. “That’s my calling. That’s what God put me here for.”

It had not been easy, for anyone, to put the street back together. The evidence—the ball bearings and nails shot by the bombs with lacerating force; the fragments of the brothers’ backpacks—all of that was gone, collected and sorted and labeled and sent to crime labs for processing. The blood and the orange FBI spray paint had been removed from the sidewalks, steamed away in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, eight days after the bombing. But residents and business owners let back in later that Tuesday had found a street frozen in time. Hotel workers had to sweep up broken glass and mop up blood from tiled floors, left behind by injured people who had run inside seeking safety. “
I’m just trying to pull it together,” said Mark Hagopian, operating partner of the Charlesmark Hotel. “It’s eerie. It just feels haunted a little bit.” Employees at other businesses found more shattered windows and bloodstained carpets, half-eaten pizzas and half-empty bottles of beer, swarms of fruit flies and rodents that had moved in. The losses to Boylston Street businesses were staggering, with early estimates in the tens of millions of dollars and little clarity about how much would be covered by insurance.

In the midst of the mess were countless poignant reminders of the joyful way Marathon Monday had unfolded until 2:50
P.M. GO LAURA GO
, read a small sign tucked into the corner of one store window.
Sharon Maes returned to her apartment near Forum wearing the same bright green pants and orange sweater she had been wearing when the second bomb exploded, as she cowered in her doorway a few feet away. She had left without her wedding ring; her husband had left without his wallet. “We don’t even know if we locked the door,” she said. Coming home triggered conflicting emotions. “I’m happy, but I’m sad,” she said. “I’m very confused about how it will feel.” There would be one last private gathering on the Boylston sidewalks before the street’s strange separation from the city ended. As darkness fell on Tuesday, Mayor Menino, under a cold rain, escorted a few dozen family members of the victims to the two blast sites. They huddled together beneath a tent, looking out at the place where their loved ones—who had gathered there to celebrate—had instead faced death.

If there was one moment that most powerfully symbolized the promise of better days ahead, it came before dawn on Wednesday, April 24, nine days after the explosions left their mark.
At 3:35 that morning, police officers lifted the barricades blocking Boylston Street and stacked them on the sidewalk. With no further ceremony, the street reopened to cars and pedestrians, its empty stores and restaurants and sidewalks ready to return to business. As the sun came up, coffee shops hummed with activity. Two panhandlers got back to work at the corner of Exeter Street. Everything looked normal from a distance, except for some boarded-up windows,
but if you watched closely, you could see it: hitches in the foot traffic past the bombing sites, people pausing to absorb the new significance of the two places on the sidewalk. Up the street at the victims’ memorial in Copley Square,
a new sign had appeared in the days just before Boylston reopened, asking:
CAN YOU FEEL A BRAND-NEW DAY?
It was the feeling that the city had been longing for, and with the crime scene gone, it seemed to finally be a possibility.

At Marathon Sports, right where the first bomb had gone off, manager
Shane O’Hara had gone back in with the store’s owner on Tuesday, at the eight-day mark. A crew from ARS Restoration Specialists—experts in reclaiming places where bad things had happened—had already done the worst of the cleanup, ripping up the rug, removing the tiles, and ridding the storefront of bloodstains. Even with the progress, the place in many ways looked as it did when they’d left—nearly full beer bottles, empty apparel racks, broken hangers. O’Hara felt uncomfortable in there, like he was snooping around in his own store. His sense of unease was amplified by what they all now knew about the first bomb’s toll, the young life—Krystle Campbell’s—that had been taken right outside their door. “It was just a disgusting feeling that day,” he said. The next day, Wednesday, O’Hara and his staff tried to rebuild; the owner was eager to reopen. They straightened up the front of the store. O’Hara scrubbed his office. He put away an extra register they had taken out for the weekend of the marathon, typically a peak time for sales.
I’m starting all over again
, he thought.

When Thursday came, emotions among the staff ran high. They took a group picture. They had pizza together. They made some speeches. They shared tears. Then they were finally ready to face the world again. After the bombing, O’Hara and some of his colleagues had made a pact that they wouldn’t go out the front door of Marathon Sports again until the store was open—that they would use only the back entrance until customers were allowed inside. The last time O’Hara had been through the front door was a week ago Monday, when he’d been tending to the wounded on the sidewalk. Afterward, using it just didn’t feel right. Around 2:00
P.M.
, the staff tore down the paper covering the front of the store, walked together to the front door, and threw it open. Outside, a crowd of people had gathered, maybe two hundred strong. O’Hara and his staff formed a line to welcome them in. At first, no one moved. Someone started clapping, and then everyone started clapping. O’Hara and the others led customers inside. It was gangbusters from the opening minutes. The support from the public that day, and in the days that would follow, was cathartic. The outpouring would never erase the tragic memories that O’Hara and his colleagues carried. But it was a start.

The only way forward

A
ll week long,
Heather Abbott had been waiting.

She had been waiting with her friends to get into Forum when the second bomb exploded a few feet away. Then she had waited on the ground for someone to help her, and for an ambulance to make it down the street. After doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital saved her badly damaged foot, Heather had waited to see if the transplanted blood vessels would take, and what her prospects of a normal life would be. Finally she had made her decision, the hardest she had ever faced. She was ready to move on, yet here she was, waiting again. Her fourth and final surgery—the surgery that would set her new course—had been scheduled for first thing Monday morning, one week after the bombing. The morning had been busy, though. Her surgeons had fallen behind. They kept postponing the time of her operation, first by one hour, then again. This delay was excruciating. Now that she had made up her mind, she wanted it all behind her. She needed to stop dwelling on what was about to happen and start figuring out how to deal with it.

Heather had decided to amputate her left leg below the knee. In the end, after long consultation with doctors, and with people who had faced the same choice, she had felt surprising clarity. The pain she had fought all week was almost unbearable. Living the rest of her life that way, in discomfort and on medication, was not something she was willing to accept. Neither was the likelihood that she would be unable to walk normally, or run. If she kept her mangled foot, doctors told her, it would never look the same. With a prosthetic leg, she could look almost like herself. Heather knew she had to be honest about what mattered to her. She wanted to live an active life; she wanted to look healthy and normal and attractive. If she couldn’t do those things, could she be happy?

Her friend Jason had been with her the night before, on Sunday, when a nurse came to mark her left leg for the surgery. The below-the-knee amputation meant her loss would be easier to cope with than those of some other victims, whose legs had been amputated higher up. To give her a full range of prosthetic options, though, doctors would take some healthy tissue, higher up on Heather’s leg, as well as her devastated foot. She could have opted to lose just the foot, but her doctors and other amputees explained that the highest-tech, most lifelike new prosthetics—those that would allow her the greatest range of motion and activity—were designed to replace the foot, ankle, and lower leg. As more advanced prosthetics were developed, some amputees who had lost a foot were even opting to go back to surgery and give up part of their leg, in order to gain a higher quality of life. Heather didn’t want to go only halfway and then regret it. But the thought of her losing more than just the foot pained Jason; he had struggled, from the start, with the thought of any kind of amputation. Heather tried to reassure him that the choice was for the best, and that she had made her peace with it.

After he had gone and she was alone in her hospital bed, the finality of what was coming hit her with full force. Heather was almost always collected and rational, strikingly so. The young doctor who had taken her into surgery the night of the bombing told her later he had never seen a patient stay so calm with injuries so severe. But the week had been cruel. The rising hope of its early days—when it had looked like her foot could be saved—had collapsed. In the nighttime quiet of the hospital, Heather broke down and cried.

 • • • 

M
edford was the city where he’d grown up, the city where he’d learned to love running and launched his career in race management. Dave McGillivray had returned many times since. But never for something like this. It was Sunday evening, six days after the marathon bombing. Krystle Campbell’s parents were holding their daughter’s wake at Dello Russo Funeral Home on Main Street. McGillivray had grown up with the Dello Russos. When McGillivray’s father died a few years earlier, the family had held his wake there. It was surreal to be back on this day, for this reason, but he knew he needed to make an appearance. With his presence, the marathon itself was sharing the family’s grief. McGillivray planned to meet a couple of colleagues from the Boston Athletic Association at the funeral home. One was Amy Dominici, a consultant who’d worked on the race for years. McGillivray called Dominici when he arrived, asking where she was. She told him she was already in the line, which snaked down the block and all the way around a corner. McGillivray parked his car and went to find her. When he did, he couldn’t believe where they were standing. It was the street where he’d lived as a young boy. His childhood home, the two-family his grandfather had built, with the basement playroom his father had added for the kids, stood only a few houses away.

The line moved glacially. Dominici went to the front to see if they could get in quickly ahead of the others. McGillivray hated to cut lines, but he wasn’t wild about spending two or three hours waiting, either. The funeral director then ushered Dominici, McGillivray, and Tom Grilk, the executive director of the BAA, inside.
In a room near the entrance, photos from Krystle’s life were arrayed on poster board—Krystle in a New England Patriots jersey; at Fenway Park; in a wedding party on a beach. In nearly every shot, her signature smile radiated.
McGillivray was nervous about meeting her family. He didn’t know what to say. He let Dominici take the lead.

“We’re all here from the BAA,” she told Krystle’s mother, Patty.

“I’m sorry,” Patty said, “I don’t know what that is.”

It was a humbling moment for McGillivray. He realized how much bigger than the Boston Marathon this was. He grew uneasy, wondering if Krystle’s family would hold him responsible somehow. All of this had happened at
his
race, after all. Without the marathon, there would have been no bombs. Their daughter would still be alive.

Dominici explained that the BAA was the organization that staged the marathon.

“Oh, how nice of you to come,” Patty said, and then she and Dominici shared a laugh about how young Patty looked. McGillivray was relieved. It had gone okay. Dominici had successfully broken the ice, and he had paid his respects. They left soon after.

With hundreds of mourners still in line, Dello Russo had to keep its doors open beyond the four hours set aside for the wake. One of those waiting, Melanie Fitzemeyer, thirty-nine, was a former babysitter of Krystle’s.
The skin on her forearm was still pink from the tattoo of Krystle’s name she’d had inked into her flesh the night before. “
I’m here because my heart hurts,” said another woman in the line, Barbara Moynihan, fifty-six, who had gone to school with Krystle’s father. “I have two daughters, and if I lost one of my daughters—there are just no words.” When the sun set, the wait to get into the funeral home grew windy and cold. Few, if any, gave up.
As the first wake or funeral for any of the Marathon Week victims, the night had become a vessel for public grief, the first opportunity to shake a hand, give a hug, offer words of condolence. For hours, Patty and her family gamely received the goodwill, much of it from perfect strangers. Krystle, they understood, was a symbol of a city’s sorrow, but she was more than that to them. She was a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, a niece.

The next morning, under a bright blue sky, hundreds of friends, family, neighbors, well-wishers from Medford, and dignitaries packed into St. Joseph Church in the center of the city to bid Krystle good-bye.
About two hundred people were still waiting to get in when the church hit capacity. Police and spectators lined High Street. An honor detail of firefighters formed a corridor leading up to the church doors, snapping to attention and saluting as pallbearers passed with the casket. A solitary church bell tolled as the crowd fell silent. When the service was over, the pallbearers carried Krystle’s casket back outside and into a waiting hearse. Krystle’s mom, dad, and brother walked out behind it, her seventy-nine-year-old nana, Lillian, whom she had nursed through ill health, following closely behind.

The funeral procession journeyed a mile or so up the road to Medford’s Oak Grove Cemetery, the place where, as it happened,
Dave McGillivray had mowed the grass as a kid. There, too, not everyone could fit, so they cut off the flow of cars. At first, before Krystle’s family got there, mourners stayed back from the grave. When the family arrived, the crowd filled in around them.
A hush fell over the gathering. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” said the Reverend Chip Hines, the pastor of St. Joseph Church, reading from the Letter of Saint Paul to the Philippians. In the months ahead, Krystle’s final resting place would be marked with a reddish gravestone bearing her photograph within the outline of a heart. It would blossom with red, pink, and orange flowers, a faded blue Red Sox cap, an angel figurine with shamrocks. On this day, a week after her death,
her friends had trouble leaving her for the last time. Krystle had always surrounded herself with people. She had loved good company more than anything. She had been a devoted confidante, a beloved coworker, a big piece of everyone’s sunshine. But her friends also knew that Krystle would want them to move on, to seize the promise of their own lives. As her friend Tim Getchell later explained, “She’d kick our asses if we just sat around and cried.”

 • • • 

B
rian Fleming spent the week making lists of names. From the moment the bombs had exploded, the director of the Boston Police Department’s peer support unit had been focused on one task: figuring out which officers could be at psychological risk from what they had witnessed that day. He started with those working at the finish line, in what he called “the bull’s-eye”—the center of the mayhem. They were the ones most likely to suffer traumatic stress. From there he moved outward, to the police in the surrounding rings of impact: one step, two steps, three steps removed from the action. The research took days. Together with his tiny staff, Fleming interviewed first responders who had been on Boylston Street and studied photographs and video clips, trying to make sure he didn’t miss anyone. All of them would be summoned to a debriefing, a meeting to talk about what they had seen and felt and done. It didn’t matter if they thought they needed it or not. The group sessions would start Monday, a week after the bombing, and they were mandatory.

The scale of the undertaking was unprecedented. A typical stress-inducing “critical incident”—a shooting or the death of a child, for example—might involve half a dozen officers out of a force of two thousand. They would gather for a single session to talk about it. Fleming’s team normally ran two or three such meetings a month, including some for members of police departments elsewhere. When the list of marathon responders was finished, it included 650 people. It would take nine days and fifty-seven sessions to reach them all. Some of the discussions lasted two hours; others stretched to five or six. Sitting together in classrooms at a union training center, they reviewed what had happened when the bombs went off, filling in the blank spots for one another. They discussed their own reactions. They learned about the most likely symptoms of stress—anxiety, insomnia, tics—and how to handle them in a healthy way, without becoming isolated or obsessed. “We try to get it out so they don’t bury it,” Fleming said.

The discussions were led by a special team of forty BPD officers, who worked regular police shifts but were also trained to help their peers. In addition, the New York City Police Department sent eighteen retired and active officers, all similarly trained, to assist. The added manpower was appreciated, and so was the message that their presence sent. If anyone came in thinking the meetings were overkill or a needless formality, the sight of the NYPD changed their attitude. “Then they knew it was serious business,” said Fleming. “No one has the experience they did.” When the New York officers talked about how 9/11 affected them, it gave the Boston officers permission to open up.

Everything that happened in the rooms was confidential. Still, the push for honesty was an uphill battle. “Cops don’t want to bare their souls,” said Fleming. Despite the heavy emphasis on protecting privacy, some worried that something they said would leak out. Some were afraid of being seen as weak, in a job where strength was everything.
I’m okay, I’m fine
was their default position. Sometimes Fleming thought “fine” ought to be a red flag. So his team kept at it for weeks and months, chipping away at the resistance over time, making phone calls and meeting people for coffee. After the mandatory sessions were over, as he kept making the rounds, he sometimes found a cop he thought should go for counseling. Just try it once, he would suggest. If you don’t like it, okay. Months later, in the fall, there would be calls from officers who had just begun to connect their symptoms to the bombing. The calls could keep trickling in for years.

The events at the marathon finish line had been tough for everyone, veterans and rookies alike, but the more experienced responders at least had previous experience with trauma. There had been a lot of young officers at the finish line that day; some of them saw their first dead body on Boylston Street. After it was over, the youngest, greenest cops were the ones most likely to rush back to work. They were eager to prove they could handle it: to show the world that they were fine, whatever they had seen.

 • • • 

S
hana Cottone knew she needed some time off. On Saturday, the day after the dramatic capture in Watertown, she packed up her car and her pet beagle, Monkey, and headed south to New York, where she had grown up. She had yet to make sense of what had happened at the finish line. She badly needed a change of scenery and a few days away from TV. When she drove onto the ferry that would take her to Long Island, it was clear to her how much the week had seeped into her head. She was anxious the moment she got on the boat, hypervigilant in a way she had never been before on this easy homeward trip across the water.

Working her regular beat in East Boston the previous day, Shana had been riveted by the manhunt. She flipped on the radio while driving to work at 5:30
A.M.
and discovered what had happened overnight. The death of Sean Collier hit her hard.
That could have been any one of us
, she thought. Two of her friends lived in the zone that was locked down; imagining how nervous they must be, she called one of them to offer reassurance. She sent a text message to a fellow police officer, a good friend, to remind him to wear his bulletproof vest. All week she had been waiting for something to happen. Even as the door-to-door searches dragged on all day, Shana felt in her gut that some resolution was coming. She had promised Roseann and her family that the bombers would be captured, and she felt a personal responsibility. At one point she stepped into a bar on her beat to check for the latest updates on TV. Later, she heard some other police officers discussing possible outcomes; one said the cops should kill the suspect when they found him. Shana could not resist interrupting. “Keep your opinion to yourself,” she said sharply. “Some people want to see him tried in court.” When police finally surrounded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the boat, Shana’s adrenaline surged. She watched the standoff on the TV in the lunchroom at the station, jumping around like a kid in her excitement, sending updates via text message to Roseann’s sister. She felt almost giddy with relief when it was over.