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

by Helman, Scott

  McGillivray had difficulty accepting his perceived deficiency, but the adversity lit a fire inside him. He decided he would never be outworked, never accept that he couldn’t do something. The feelings of helpless anger became his fuel, which he soon funneled into running. It was the perfect sport, the ideal antidote to his experience with coaches and teams. As he would explain decades later, “No one can cut you from running.” In 1972, as a seventeen-year-old, he decided cockily that he would run the Boston Marathon. He informed his grandfather, Fred Eaton, with whom he was very close, and Eaton said he would be out on the course, near mile twenty-four, to watch for him. But McGillivray hadn’t bothered to train. He had no idea what he was doing, and he collapsed about two-thirds of the way through. Eaton waited for hours before going home. When they finally talked by phone, his grandfather told him to make this day a lesson: If you’re going to do something, do it correctly. He hadn’t earned the right to run the Boston Marathon. They made a pact. “You train for next year,” his grandfather told him. “And I’ll be there, too.”

  Two months later, his grandfather died of a heart attack on his way home from the grocery. McGillivray endeavored to keep his end of the bargain. He trained hard for the 1973 marathon. The day before, he came down with a brutal stomach virus. He entered the race but felt miserable. He was a sorry sight. His mother, seeing his condition, had tears streaming down her face when he passed her at the halfway point. He pushed on until he was near mile twenty-one. Then his body gave out. Defeated, he leaned against a wrought-iron fence. As it happened, the fence surrounded Boston’s Evergreen Cemetery, the very place they had buried his grandfather. McGillivray realized his grandfather had been right—he was there to watch him after all. McGillivray knew that he had to make good on their deal, so he picked himself up and finished the race. It was the first of what would be forty-one consecutive completed Boston Marathons, many of them coming hours after the official finish, after he had honored his race-directing duties.

  Over his life, McGillivray had worked in the toy department of a local discount store. He had been an actuary for a benefits firm. Once he had even interviewed to be a flight attendant, stuffing his platform shoes with tissues in an attempt to reach the minimum height requirement. But he had been right as a kid: He was destined for sports. After opening an athletic shoe and apparel store in Medford, he got into the race-management business, and that became his calling. His own athletic exploits were legion—running his age in miles every year around his birthday, trying to swim across the English Channel, and participating, with his son Ryan, in what was then, according to Guinness World Records, the largest-ever game of Duck, Duck, Goose, on the field of the Lowell Spinners, a single-A affiliate of the Red Sox. Often his wild endeavors had a charity component—he had helped raise millions for cancer research and other causes over the years. They were also about self-esteem, about pushing himself as far as he could. His unrelenting drive was a marvel to everyone around him. He had long outrun those teenage feelings of inadequacy, but he would never stop trying. As his mother wrote in her diary, “Once Dave starts running, maybe he’ll finally be able to get some rest.”

  • • •

  She was in the best shape, physically and mentally, of her life. Shana Cottone had stopped drinking five months earlier, in the fall. It had not been easy, over the long winter, to adapt her life to fit the decision. It still seemed impossible, at times, for the twenty-seven-year-old to find new ways to socialize. That was partly a hazard of her job: Shana was a police officer in Boston, and so were a lot of her friends, and they liked to go to bars together when they were off duty. In one way, it was a kind of therapy. They saw a lot of hard things at work, things that other people didn’t understand and didn’t really want to hear about. It could be isolating. Sorting through the craziness with other cops was a ritual of healing and of bonding, and alcohol had seemed an essential part of the process.

  Shana had been on the job five years. Her first assignment was in West Roxbury, but it hadn’t really clicked; the neighborhood on Boston’s outer edge had one of the lowest crime rates in the city, and it felt like people didn’t really need her there. When her probation period ended, she had asked to be transferred to Roxbury, an inner-city neighborhood with a similar name but a lot more trouble on its streets. When she got there, the district was beginning an innovative project aimed at bringing psychiatric help to troubled residents through policing. Some officers were wary of the assignment, which demanded that they respond to calls in tandem with a civilian, a social worker trained in crisis intervention. Shana was intrigued. Paired up with the clinician, she quickly found her niche. They roamed the neighborhood together, stepping in to defuse domestic conflicts, suicide threats, out-of-control teenagers. Shana loved the sense of potential in the work, the promise of making things better. She thrived in the role, assisting in more than three hundred incidents. One involved a six-year-old boy in a Spider-Man costume who had pulled a butter knife on his foster parent. Shana talked to him as she loaded his booster seat into the back of her cruiser, trying to keep the mood light so he wouldn’t be afraid. Before she dropped him off for a mental health evaluation, the little boy gave her a sticker shaped like a heart. Shana stuck it to the back of her badge, where it remained—an invisible reminder, worn over her own heart, of what mattered most to her about her work.

  She cared about her job, and she knew she was making a difference. When the day came that her drinking affected her work, it was a slap in the face, and the shock of it brought instant clarity. It had happened back in the fall. She had gotten angry about something on a day off, and before she thought about it, she had acted on the anger. Word of what had happened made it to her supervisors, and the fallout had gotten in her way at work. It was the first time that had ever happened, and she knew it had to be the last. So she had made her decision and never looked back. On the first day of October 2012, Shana had gone to Western Massachusetts, to a residential treatment program for first responders. She hadn’t had a drink since.

  Coming back from treatment was scarier than going. She was moving to a new assignment in East Boston, where she didn’t know the place or people well. She figured they had heard where she had been, and she didn’t know if they would judge her for it. She focused on the parts of her life that were stable—the house she had purchased on a quiet street in Hyde Park, at Boston’s southern tip; the pet beagle named Monkey she adored. The winter passed. She found ways to bring the skills she had developed in Roxbury to her new beat, developing relationships with homeless people and addicts, earning their trust, and talking to them about getting sober.

  In time, something unexpected happened. People started coming to her—friends, colleagues—telling her that they, too, wanted to stop drinking. In quiet conversations, one-on-one, they confessed that they didn’t know how to go about it, and asked for her help. Shana did what she could. People had gone out on a limb for her in her darkest moments, and she wanted to repay the debt.

  • • •

  “No—K-R-Y,” she would say, quick to correct the assumption that her name began more conventionally, with a C.

  “Oh, excuse me; I’ve never heard it spelled like that,” the chastened adult would reply.

  “Well, you have now,” young Krystle Campbell would say back.

  That was Krystle—self-assured, outspoken, and in charge. She was born in Somerville and grew up in Medford, a solidly middle-class city north of Boston that her parents had chosen for the schools. Her grandmother always put her in dresses and loved to curl her hair. Krystle would then try to straighten it. In the summers, her parents, Billy Jr. and Patty, took Krystle and her brother, Billy III, up to New Hampshire. One year they bought a twenty-eight-foot camping trailer, which they kept parked at a campground. It became their summer home. They put down white rock around it, planted flowers, and built a platform, where they kept a tent for toys and Nintendo. Patty and the kids stayed up there
full-time after school let out, and Billy Jr. drove up on weekends and sometimes during the week. The setting, with swimming, a waterslide, dances, races, and activities for kids all season long, was ideal for families, many of whom came back year after year. Those sweet, slow summer days lasted until Krystle and her brother were teenagers, and then adolescent concerns back home—friends, young love, sports schedules—made it harder to get away.

  As Krystle got older, her father still called her princess. She took up the clarinet, played softball, and began waitressing as a teenager. She graduated from Medford High School in 2001 and went on to community college, eventually earning an associate’s degree and transferring to the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she got close to a bachelor’s degree but didn’t finish. Together with her reddish hair, big blue eyes, and mile-wide smile, Krystle’s animated personality and authenticity gave her a presence that wasn’t easily forgotten. “You’re not supposed to have favorites, but you do,” said Tony Szykniej, who taught her in middle school band. “She definitely was one.”

  Her forceful disposition, though, did not make her self-centered. She was conscientious to a fault, often putting herself last. When her nana, her dad’s mother, got sick, Krystle moved in with her for eighteen months. It wasn’t a decision most twentysomethings would make. When friends asked her why, her answer was simple: “Because she needs me.” While working for Summer Shack, she took notice of one kid, an immigrant from Liberia, who worked for the state out on the islands. It was evident he didn’t have much money, so she regularly sent him home with leftovers—hamburgers, hot dogs, whatever was there. Wanting to preserve his dignity, she was careful not to call it a handout. Hey, we’ve got some extra food, she’d say. Why don’t you take it? She wrote letters to another islands employee when he was in jail for drunk driving, and then helped him try to find work when he got out. She knew the ferry crews often didn’t have time to get off the boat for lunch, so she’d bring burgers down to the docks.

  And she would do just about anything for her friends. Tim Getchell and his fiancée had both grown up poor. He came from the projects in Boston’s Charlestown section; she was from South Carolina. They wanted a wedding but didn’t have the money. Krystle told them not to worry. She took care of the whole thing at a seaside pub: tent, alcohol, pasta with red sauce, chicken parmesan. The night before the wedding, Getchell and his fiancée brought their families together for a small, modest celebration. They had bought simple cheese plates from the grocery. Then Krystle showed up with fifteen lobsters, steamers, and other seafood. She wanted to give the South Carolinians a proper taste of New England. “It was like she had you under her wing,” said Sean McLaughlin, a forest and park supervisor for the state who worked closely with her on the islands. “She had you.”

  In the waning days of her twenties, Krystle arrived at a crossroads. She needed to slow down, both at work and after work. The pace wasn’t sustainable. She had quit Summer Shack for a saner job at Jimmy’s Steer House, a restaurant close to her apartment in Arlington, a suburb northwest of Boston. It was meant to be a stepping stone. Her next jump would be to something grander, perhaps something high-end like the Ritz, or something she could make her own. She and Getchell used to daydream about starting their own floating tiki bar. Maybe it would pick revelers up near Logan Airport. Maybe it would bob around Boston Harbor, lit up like a tropical paradise. Whatever form it took, Krystle was ready to run something, to have her own gig. She was growing up. She had a serious boyfriend now, too. He was going to meet her parents, for the first time, on her upcoming birthday. It was a big one. She would be thirty years old.

  • • •

  The day before the Boston Marathon was almost as good as Marathon Monday, David King thought. It was a day off from his demanding job at the hospital, and he could spend it with his family. Best of all, they were going to the John Hancock Sports & Fitness Expo, the giant runners’ trade show that attracted eighty thousand people to a convention center every year in the days before the marathon. King was an admitted expo junkie, capable of wandering for hours through its dizzying maze of high-tech shoes, free energy bar samples, and other exhibits. He knew that standing on his feet all day was not the ideal way to spend the day before the marathon. But he couldn’t help himself. It was part of the buildup, part of the fun, and at this point, it was tradition—even if his wife, Anne, did not share his passion, and would spend much of her time at the expo asking when they could go home.

  They headed to the convention center on the train Sunday morning. King brought along his two young daughters, a large Starbucks coffee, and a couple of runner friends. Talk turned to King’s grueling race schedule. He had run the Miami Marathon in January, and in March he had traveled to New Zealand for his first IRONMAN triathlon, which included a full marathon as well as swimming and biking races. His friends wondered if something had to give, and if in running Boston he was being too ambitious. “Do you think you’ll finish?” one of them asked. King brushed aside the worry; the back pain he had felt after the triathlon was gone. Going all in was his nature; his leap from marathons to triathlons had been no surprise to those who knew him well. When his wife had trained for her first marathon, in Miami in 2007, King had watched her running ten, fifteen, or twenty miles and couldn’t understand the impulse. It seemed excessive, even ridiculous—who had time to run that far? Then he stood at the finish line of her race and felt excitement coursing through the crowd. The next day he signed up for his first marathon.

  His intensity and drive had been evident since he was a boy growing up in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a small blue-collar city on the Massachusetts border. Drawn to the idea of firefighting, he started volunteering at the fire department as a teenager and signed up for EMT classes at night. He earned an EMT license as a junior in high school, and started working night shifts; instead of going home after school to do his homework, King would go out on calls with the local ambulance. In retrospect, his interest in medicine was obvious. Yet King never once imagined becoming a doctor. His father worked for the city as a laborer; his mother was a secretary. No one in his family had gone to college, let alone medical school. It wasn’t until he abandoned his plan to study engineering and transferred to the University of Tampa that he first considered becoming a doctor. Then he failed a botany class. Well, that’s it, someone told him. You’ll never get into medical school now, with an F on your transcript. As soon as King heard the word “never,” that was it. “Once they told me I couldn’t,” he recalled, “I said, okay, I’m definitely going.”

  Getting in was not easy—it looked, for a time, like no school would give him a chance. In a last-ditch effort to keep his dream alive, he applied outside the country, to a school in Grenada. Accepted, he excelled; then, against the odds, he applied for a transfer to the University of Miami and was accepted. Finally on his way to becoming a doctor, King decided to join the army reserve. He had been given a chance to learn lifesaving skills that very few people possessed; bringing those skills to American soldiers at risk seemed like the right thing to do. He was an intern in Boston, working long hours for terrible pay, when a recruiter came to his living room and commissioned him. Weary from a long on-call shift, King raised his right hand and recited the oath of enlistment, swearing to defend the Constitution, while his yellow Labrador retriever, Rachel, looked on, his only witness. The year was 2000. In 2001 America would go to war; King’s decision would put him on the front lines of two conflicts. After being sent to Iraq for four months in 2008, he went to Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, and to Afghanistan for three months in 2011. He saw terrible things and survived close calls. When a massive truck bomb injured dozens of American soldiers in Sayed Abad, Afghanistan, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, he dealt with the carnage. Another time an IED blew up people standing near him. He learned what fear really felt like, what true vigilance was.

  And he gained new reverence for his life at home. A lazy, simple day lik
e this was more precious to King now: wandering around the convention center with his wife and daughters; buying a new BOSTON MARATHON 2013 baseball hat to wear in the race tomorrow. The hat purchase was one of his marathon traditions. His runner friends objected; it was bad luck, some said, to wear a hat bearing the logo of the same race you were running in. You were supposed to wear a seasoned hat, one that had been with you in training or at other races. King dismissed the superstition. He always bought a new hat—the women’s version, to fit his small head. He had made it his ritual, and he wasn’t changing it now.

  • • •

  Heather Abbott had taken the day off from work, as she always did, so she could go to Boston with her friends on Marathon Monday. That was their tradition: They went to the Red Sox game in the morning, then to the finish line of the race. It meant getting up early and driving to Providence to take the train, but they laughed a lot along the way, swept up in the festive mood and the welcome break from routine.

  Heather was a runner, too—short distances, not marathons. Running was just one of her active pursuits, along with paddleboarding and Zumba dance fitness classes. She had a good time doing it, but she was also disciplined. It was like that with everything she did; her fun-loving side disguised a steely ambition. In high school, in the small town of Lincoln, Rhode Island, near Providence, she had thought about applying to the University of North Carolina. Her parents were baffled and resistant. She attended a small college in Massachusetts instead, but always felt she had been meant for a bigger place. She studied accounting—her mother had encouraged her to learn a skill—but she soon discovered a more engaging field: human resources, otherwise known as HR. Plunging into it, she learned on her feet, building an HR operation from scratch as the start-up she worked for grew from a dozen to one hundred employees. After going to work for a bigger company, with thirty-three thousand workers, in 2003, she traveled constantly, supervising HR departments in eight states. She had purchased her first condo, in North Providence, at twenty-four; a year and a half later, she sold it on her own and traded up to a bigger, better one.