Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (29 page)

Her willingness to put herself at the center of one of the most public places imaginable was an inspiring and hopeful thing, rippling well beyond the baseball stadium. It was a marker, too, of how far she had come. Jane had spent three months in hospitals and hundreds of hours in physical therapy. She had undergone at least twelve surgeries. She had returned to school, as her older brother, Henry, had done back in the spring. The Richard family’s burden had been far heavier than any family should ever bear. Bill and Denise had nursed their own serious injuries while they mourned Martin’s death and helped Jane adjust to life as an amputee. But, they reported four months after the bombing, “
we are making progress on this long, difficult and painful road forward.” For her parents, Jane was a source of wonder—and, at times, exhaustion.
One thing she loved was Irish step dancing. From age four, she had attended a dance school near her house. The hope was that in time, she would be able to return to the school and continue the hobby. It wouldn’t happen right away, that much was clear. But she was determined. She had already begun practicing at home. “Watching her dance with her new leg,” her family said, “is absolutely priceless.”

 • • • 

H
e sat alone, confined to a small cell in a federal prison hospital an hour northwest of Boston. It was a week after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been pulled from the boat in Watertown. A narrow window and food slot were now his only regular links to the outside world.
US marshals had quietly transferred him there overnight from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where the ambulance had first brought him after his capture. The federal prison hospital, in the town of Ayer, sat on a sprawling former army base known as Fort Devens. Just days before, Dzhokhar had enjoyed the freedom of sleeping in his college dorm room. Now he was one of more than one thousand inmates and defendants locked away under the constant watch of guards. This was where he would stay—with severe restrictions on his access to mail, media, phone calls, and contact with other inmates and visitors, even his defense team—as criminal proceedings against him began.

In June, a federal grand jury handed up a thirty-count indictment against Dzhokhar, charging him with using weapons of mass destruction to kill and maim, as well as the fatal shooting of Sean Collier. Seventeen of the charges carried the prospect of the death penalty. The decision on whether to pursue a death sentence would ultimately be made by the US attorney general, Eric Holder. Dzhokhar’s trial would then follow.
In announcing the indictment, Carmen Ortiz, the US attorney in Boston, detailed how Dzhokhar and Tamerlan had bought fireworks for the powder, ordered bomb-making parts, and downloaded instructions on how to assemble their devices. She would not characterize the note Dzhokhar had scrawled in the boat as a confession, but she said the brothers’ motive in attacking the marathon was apparently to protest US foreign policy. Ortiz also said that she had met with the relatives of the victims and with survivors. “Their strength is extraordinary.”

At his first public appearance two weeks later, Dzhokhar offered no hint of remorse or contrition. Before his federal court proceeding, he sat in a holding cell with guards observing him through surveillance cameras. At one point,
he decided he had a message to send: He lifted his hand toward a camera lens and flipped up his middle finger. Soon after,
he came into the courtroom in ankle chains and an orange jumpsuit, his left arm in a cast and one eye swollen. During the seven-minute hearing, he fidgeted in his seat. He studied prosecutors as they talked. He glanced, at times, at the more than thirty survivors and family members watching the proceeding. When he finally spoke, in a climax both mundane and riveting, the accused terrorist leaned over a microphone and repeated, “Not guilty,” as each charge was read—in a thick accent that startled his high school friends in attendance, who remembered him speaking perfect English. As he was led away afterward, he blew a kiss to his two sisters, one of whom was sobbing. The other held a child in her arms. John DiFava, the MIT police chief who had come to watch, said as he walked from the courtroom that Dzhokhar wasn’t worth a single tear. “I’d like to grab him by the throat,” he said.

With Dzhokhar awaiting trial under lockdown,
the body of his brother Tamerlan would lie unburied for weeks, the subject of an ugly fight over whether a dead terrorist deserved the same decorum afforded everyone else. Tamerlan’s wife, Katherine Russell, had decided not to take his body after his death; she would return to using her maiden name and move with her daughter back into her parents’ home in Rhode Island. Dzhokhar was in custody and his parents were back in Russia. Tamerlan’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, together with Tamerlan’s sisters, finally claimed the remains from the state medical examiner more than two weeks after the bombing. The body was first transferred to a funeral home in North Attleborough, south of Boston, where about twenty protesters soon gathered. It was then taken to Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Parlors in Worcester, whose owner, Peter Stefan, was known for providing burial services for the poor and unwanted. The body would remain there for six days while Tsarni and Stefan tried to find a burial plot. Tamerlan’s mother, Zubeidat,
wanted to bring her son’s body back to Russia, but she lacked the money.
Tamerlan wouldn’t be laid to rest in Cambridge—the city manager preemptively denied him a cemetery deed, saying that his burial there would not be in the city’s interest. Tom Menino took a similar stand in Boston. Protesters began picketing outside the funeral home, arguing that Tamerlan’s body did not deserve traditional burial privileges. The standstill threatened to drag on for days.

Then
Martha Mullen stepped in. A mental health counselor from Richmond, Virginia, Mullen had heard about the protests on NPR. “It portrayed America at its worst,” she said. “Jesus says [to] love our enemies. So I was sitting in Starbucks and thought, maybe I’m the one person who needs to do something.” Mullen researched Muslim burial traditions and requirements and contacted Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia, which responded within an hour that it could provide a plot for Tamerlan at Al-Barzakh Cemetery, in the nearby town of Doswell. Then she contacted the Worcester Police Department, which had been providing around-the-clock protection for Stefan. A plan was crafted to spirit Tamerlan’s body out of Worcester in a rented van. Tamerlan was buried on his right side in an unmarked grave, facing toward Mecca.

 • • • 

T
hey parked his truck in front of the church, the shiny black Ford F-150 he’d gotten two months earlier. The truck bed was filled with flowers. Bunting hung from the front bumper. A sticker with the MIT police insignia was affixed near the driver’s door; another sticker on a window said
R
EST
IN
P
EACE
O
FFICER
S
EAN
A. C
OLLIER
.
This was how Collier’s family, friends, and fellow police officers said good-bye to the promising young cop ruthlessly murdered by the Tsarnaevs, at a private service in a town north of Boston. Officers from the Somerville Police Department, which Collier had been about to join, led the way out. A few months later,
Collier acquired the municipal badge he’d always wanted. In front of family and police from around the state, he was posthumously made a Somerville police officer at a ceremony at city hall. “Sean has been called many things over the past four months,” said Collier’s brother, Andrew. “But one of the things Sean would be the most proud to be called is a great cop.” His badge number, 310, would remain unused by the department, the slot standing vacant in his memory.

Around the country, total strangers—many of them runners—were moved by what they saw in Boston and sought ways to help. The month after the bombing, Marsha Strickhouser, a public relations manager from Clearwater, Florida, helped put on the Boston Memorial Run in nearby St. Petersburg. Runners held candles, heard from competitors who had taken part in the Boston Marathon, sang “Ave Maria,” and then set off on an untimed 2.62-mile run through the streets. The run raised about $20,000 for the One Fund. “It was something that happened to our country, not just Boston,” Strickhouser said.
That same spirit drove the One Run for Boston, a 3,300-mile coast-to-coast relay run begun in June that raised tens of thousands of dollars. From Venice Beach, California, across Route 66, through the Ozarks, and eventually onto Boylston Street, the route involved 319 legs and more than one thousand runners, each carrying a baton with a GPS transponder. Marathoner Nicole Reis, whose father, John Odom, was badly injured in the bombing after coming to watch his daughter,
capped off the benefit run by pushing her dad across the finish line in a wheelchair shortly before 1:00
A.M.
one night in early July.

Allison Byrne was among thousands of marathoners, spectators, and responders who came together to rerun the course’s final mile at a Boston event later in the spring known as #onerun. Byrne was one of the only runners seriously injured in the April bombing.
She was nervous about participating, knowing she would have to pass the very spot where shrapnel had brought her down, where she’d lain on the ground fearing for her life. But that fear wasn’t enough to keep her away. This was a woman who had been so determined to complete the race on Marathon Day that she had asked the nurse at her side, Nancy Shorter, if Shorter could carry her across the finish line. “We’d love to,” Shorter told her. “Don’t think that’s going to happen.” Nearly six weeks later, with her husband beside her in the cold rain, Byrne finally did make it across. She had finished the race.

These moments were triumphs, signs of continuing progress, and they could bring an overwhelming rush of emotions. A few weeks after the bombing, when the Boston Pops Orchestra opened its 128th season at Symphony Hall, David King attended the concert as the special guest.
The trauma surgeon stepped onstage for the final encore, vigorously guest-conducting a rousing rendition of the orchestra’s signature anthem, “Stars and Stripes Forever,” played every July 4 on the Esplanade. Standing in the historic concert hall, arms pumping as the crowd rose to its feet and clapped along, King was overcome by the support from so many strangers. He had to fight back tears. At times it could seem like the city really had changed, its broken pieces somehow soldered back together more tightly than before.

 • • • 

H
er friends weren’t wild about the idea. Neither was Heather, at first. Forum, the bar and restaurant where she had been when the bomb took her foot, was finally reopening, and its owners had invited her to be there. It was the last business on Boylston Street to come back, a missing piece of the puzzle about to snap into place. The more Heather thought it over, the more she felt drawn to return. There were gaps in her memory that bothered her. As time passed, it got harder to ask others who had been there, to drag them back to that day against their will. If she saw it again, it might make the picture clearer. Her friends were wary, but they agreed to go with her.

The reopening was a spectacle, a pop-up party on the busy Boylston Street sidewalk in the middle of a picture-perfect late summer evening. A brass band from New Orleans kicked off the festivities, marching from the marathon finish line down the sidewalk to the restaurant’s refurbished front door. They settled in under the brand-new brown-and-red-striped awning and played “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Curious passersby paused to listen. People leaned out of passing cabs to snap photos. “Go, Boston!” someone yelled from a trolley. Traffic snarled; a helmeted policeman blew a whistle. The wait staff at L’Espalier, the acclaimed eatery across the street, gathered at a second-story window to watch the commotion. Heather appeared, wearing a long dress, and helped hold a blue-and-yellow ribbon across the front of the restaurant as the mayor cut it. Inside, the din of socializing filled the space that had been silent for so long. “Being here, I can see how the city is moving along with life,” said Carlos Arredondo, looking down at Boylston Street from an upstairs window, wearing his familiar cowboy hat. “It’s moving along beautifully. And I’m moving on, too.”

Downstairs, Heather sat at the bar receiving hugs and kisses from an endless stream of friends and well-wishers. A glass of wine sat untouched on the bar behind her. She looked happy and peaceful. A photographer approached to take her picture, and her friends gathered around, arms looped around one another’s shoulders. Earlier, she had ventured out to the back alley, where she had lain on the ground on Marathon Monday. She had stood at the back door looking down, searching for the grass she remembered lying on. Asphalt stretched in every direction. There was no grass, she realized. She had imagined it. A voice rose from the alley—one of Forum’s managers, thanking her for coming back.

“I’m going to have a good memory now,” Heather told him.

 • • • 

F
or weeks, people had been coming to Copley Square to pay respects, strolling quietly through the memorial that had grown there, studying the somber handwritten messages and photographing the rows of running shoes hung on metal barricades. In June, the city put out word that it was time to take down the weathered shrine and transfer everything to the archives. On the evening of June 24, a muggy summer night, the public gathered at the spot for one last time. Around 5:30
P
.
M
.
, police began moving everybody out to make room for a special ceremony for bombing survivors, their families, and the relatives of those who had been killed. A little while later they began arriving—the Richard family, with Jane in a wheelchair; Adrianne Haslet-Davis, the dancer who had lost part of her left leg; and others.
There was even a brazen imposter in their midst: Branden Mattier, twenty-two, who soon after would plead not guilty, with his brother, to charges that they had tried to defraud the One Fund of $2 million by falsely claiming that a long-dead aunt had lost a leg in the bombing. Tom Menino, Ed Davis, and other local leaders greeted the victims with hugs and words of encouragement. Menino, after climbing gingerly out of his SUV, pointed playfully at Jane Richard as he approached her family. He spoke gently to her surviving brother, Henry. As the family walked away, Henry’s mom put an arm around his neck. The memorial, in its first days, had been christened as a place of mourning and healing. Its final night would be perhaps its most poignant, the survivors gathered to observe another milestone’s passing while the city hummed on, duck boats and ambulances rolling by as always.