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

by Helman, Scott

  By 2003 she had earned an MBA from Providence College, attending school at night while working full-time. When she went looking for a new job in 2007, Raytheon and Dunkin’ Donuts both made offers. A global defense and aeronautics firm with more than seventy thousand employees, Raytheon won her allegiance. It offered her more money, and its HR department was bigger. She became an expert in compliance, handling large, randomly scheduled government audits. She specialized in discrimination claims, defending the company’s managers when they were accused of wrongful treatment of employees. It was the work no one else wanted to do, yet Heather liked it. She liked problem solving—untangling thorny conflicts and guiding them toward resolution.

  A decade of advancement had left no doubt: She had what it took to be successful. Now she had to figure out what to conquer next. When she decided, in 2009, to move from North Providence to Newport to be closer to her job, she had thought she’d try it for a year. She wasn’t sure if she would like it—insular and privileged, a historic resort town and a party destination, Newport was its own world in more ways than one. She hadn’t counted on the closeness of the friendships she would find there, the kinship and belonging that would cast a spell. She wanted to step beyond the bars and parties to see what else there was, but she knew she would miss those things, and especially the people, after she moved on. The summer ahead could be her last in Newport, and Heather intended to make the most of it. Tomorrow’s trip to Boston would help kick the season off.

  • • •

  He was out in Boston’s Copley Square by 5:00 A.M. It was Sunday, the day before the 2013 Boston Marathon. Dave McGillivray walked the course of the 5K he would put on in a few hours for some 6,500 runners, one in a series of races and fitness events that always preceded the big one. He would record a critique of the day into his iPhone as he went, planning to write it up later. There were always lessons for next time, and he didn’t want to forget them. In his memoir, The Last Pick, he had quoted a Chinese proverb: “The palest ink is better than the best memory.” McGillivray was the kind of guy who had lots of credos, but that one he had followed faithfully.

  Thirty-five years earlier, he recorded a verbal diary of what was surely the craziest of all his crazy ventures. He arranged, in 1978, to run clear across the country, a stunt he had devised to raise money for the Jimmy Fund, a Boston charity that supported adult and pediatric cancer care and research. He wanted to start in Medford, Oregon, and finish in his hometown of Medford, Massachusetts. The first night on the road, he stayed at a campsite. A stranger gave him a portion of his fresh catch of fish. Over the next seventy-nine days, he ran across deserts, through the mountains, and into the plains, some 3,452 miles in all, a member of his support crew blasting music from a trailing moped. He and his team adopted a six-week-old puppy. McGillivray ran through rattlesnakes, nosebleeds, and grasshopper swarms. He lived on junk food, downing a six-pack of Coke after each day’s run. Outside Lincoln, Nebraska, he jumped aboard a moving coal train and off the other side because he didn’t want to wait for it to pass. His family, through phone calls and news reports, charted his progress as he went. On the night of August 29, he ran into Fenway Park to a boisterous welcome, taking two laps around the field before the baseball game, showered with cheers and proudly donning a Red Sox cap tossed to him by relief pitcher Bill Campbell.

  If that was a high point, almost twenty years later McGillivray would find himself at his lowest, when he and his first wife divorced. Here was something he couldn’t remedy with preparation and training. Hard work wouldn’t just push it away. He was devastated. He hated subjecting their two young sons to the breakup. He prayed, sometimes by the hour, that he could get through another day. At one point, near rock bottom, he called his sister Susan and said maybe he should just end it all. Susan was his lifeline, and she helped him bounce back. He eventually remarried and had three more children. McGillivray, in his memoir, described marathons as an apt metaphor for his life. He had run through heartache, and also through joy. “There are hills and valleys. The weather changes from year to year,” he wrote. “Mostly, though, at the end of the day, it’s up to me to get the job done.”

  The job, on this Sunday, was to make sure the day’s fitness events all went well, and that everyone was geared up for tomorrow. Later on, he stopped by the runners’ expo. He checked in with his marathon team. The day felt slow, which was how he liked it. There was little to report, little that required his urgent attention. The copious planning of the organizers was paying off. They were going to have a good race.

  • • •

  Shana worked on Sunday, her regular shift in East Boston. It would have been nice to have the next day free—Marathon Monday had been her day off on the schedule—but she had volunteered to work an extra shift. Patriot’s Day might not be a big deal anywhere else, but in Boston it was a holiday, and that meant double pay. The extra money in her check would make it worth it. She had worked the marathon before; the crowds were laid-back, and the mood would be festive. Boston could be a cranky place. If there was one day when the old city felt carefree, it was Marathon Monday.

  Shana had warmed to Boston the moment she arrived, a decade before, in the spring of 2003, on a visit to Northeastern University. She was a junior in high school on Long Island, getting ready to apply to colleges. She had never been to Boston; that was part of its appeal. She knew she wanted to go someplace new, and her love for the city was instant and complete. “Something clicked and I knew I wanted to be here,” she said. “I loved how old it was and how safe it felt. . . . Even the air smelled right.” She was seventeen that spring. The memory of September 11, 2001, a year and a half earlier, was still fresh; the fear the attack had inspired had been imprinted on Shana and everyone else in New York. Her father was working a construction job in Manhattan that day, and for several terrifying hours, her mother was unable to reach him. New York City never felt the same to her again. In Boston, even after she left the cocoon of college life to join the police department, she never felt vulnerable the way she had in New York. She experienced moments of chaos—a suspect resisting arrest, a victim sobbing in her arms—but they were only moments. It never felt like the world was unraveling.

  The residue of 9/11, the fear and the desire to take back some kind of control, was part of what drew her to law enforcement. Another driving force was her childhood. On her street, in her Long Island town, Shana’s house had been that house: the one with the parents who fought, where the police sometimes were called. Not that many years had passed since she was a kid, and Shana vividly remembered how it felt to face the cops in her living room—the crippling sense of her own powerlessness, the certainty that nobody was hearing what she said. Becoming a police officer herself gave her some control over such chaotic moments. Now, when the kids she met in troubled homes turned away and told her that she didn’t understand, Shana explained to them that she really did. Mostly, though, she listened. She focused on the kids in the middle of bad situations, because they still had time to turn out differently.

  Shana had used the tension in her childhood home as motivation. It drove her to get good grades, to get out and go to college. By the time she was nearly done at Northeastern, she knew what she wanted to do. With a handful of classes left before graduation, she left school to enter the police academy. It was time to move her education to the streets. Now it was five years later, and with the turmoil of last fall behind her, she felt like she had been given a second chance. She had done good work before, but now that she was sober, she felt a sense of limitless potential. She was more and more convinced that things had happened for a reason. She had made her decision to stop drinking and stuck to it, and hard as it had been, it had made her stronger.

  Shana felt clearheaded, fit, optimistic. Ready for anything. And her day tomorrow at the marathon should be easy. Her friends would be at the finish line, and they would stop by to see her. It promised to be a fine day in her favorite city.<
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  • • •

  Krystle made her plans for Monday. She seemed to have friends everywhere. A group of them arranged to meet downtown. Some would be going to the Red Sox game. Then they would gather together near the finish line, maybe hit a bar along Boylston. The weather looked promising. The boyfriend of one of her close friends was running. Maybe they would get to see him cross.

  • • •

  David King laid out everything he would need in the morning: his Newton running shoes; his race bib, number 2594; the Vaseline to put between his toes. He took a picture of the pile and posted it on Facebook. Then he made himself a dry gin martini. The only thing left to do was sleep, and that was easy. King was used to sleeping in fits and starts on call at the hospital. He had once napped on the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport during a firefight, lifting his head occasionally at the snap-snap-snap of the gunfire, and lying back down when he decided it wasn’t that close. Sleeping at home was a luxury. Once his head hit the pillow, nothing could get in his way.

  • • •

  Shana was almost religious about wearing her bulletproof vest. It wasn’t required after the first year on the job, but she wore it anyway. You never knew when you were going to need it. But for a shift near Copley Square on Marathon Monday, the vest was overkill—even Shana could see that. It was heavy, and she would be on her feet all day. The streets would be full of police; she would be surrounded by backup. Tomorrow was one day when she would feel safe without it.

  • • •

  By Sunday night, the forecast had assured cooler weather for this year’s marathon. For Heather, that meant resigning herself to wearing her brown leather boots—again. By April, she was ready to break out some lighter shoes. This was New England, though. Patience was required. Spring was close, but not yet in full bloom. Plenty of warm days were coming; plenty of time for open-toed shoes and bare ankles.

  • • •

  Dave McGillivray observed his typical rituals on the eve of the marathon, grabbing a quiet dinner and then returning early to the solitude of his hotel room. He kept the radio and TV off, to focus. He went through his mental checklist, visualizing, over and over, the next day’s events in minute detail. He sat at the table with his laptop open, reviewing the notes he’d made from prior marathons. He kept his phone and two-way radio close, to field any reports of trouble. By 9:30, he was in bed. He put his phone on vibrate and went to sleep with it in his hand, so he wouldn’t miss a critical call or text. He felt a calmness. We got this, he thought.

  CHAPTER 2

  DIMMED FUTURES,VIOLENT TURN

  Two brothers in descent

  The voice had begun speaking to him again.

  It was 2012, almost a full decade after Tamerlan Tsarnaev had arrived in the United States with his family. He was about twenty-six and living in Cambridge, an unemployed immigrant from southern Russia with an intensifying interest in Islam. He was going nowhere. And the voice inside his head—the one that had first spoken to him years earlier—was growing more adamant. He never knew when it would come, but when it did, he alone was privy to its commands. As a young man, he had felt like there were two people inside his head, or so he told his mother. The voice, Tamerlan explained to a friend, had become more demanding with age, ordering him to do things, though he never said what. “He was torn between those two people,” said Donald Larking, sixty-seven, who attended mosque with him and spoke to the Boston Globe about a side of Tamerlan never previously reported. “He said that several times.”

  Once, Tamerlan had embodied the hopes of his immigrant parents. He’d been a gifted boxer with Olympic dreams. His mother had doted on her oldest son, convinced he would bring honor to the family. That was all buried in the past. The family had collapsed. His parents had split and fled the country. Tamerlan had been unsuccessful at virtually every one of his endeavors in America. He had been blocked from participating in national Golden Gloves boxing events. He hadn’t found work. He’d dropped out of college before earning a degree. With thirty not too far in the distance, the tall, muscular young man who once seemed confident and focused now looked increasingly angry and unmoored, spending hours watching Islamic YouTube videos on his computer.

  In November 2012, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Tamerlan sat listening to a guest imam at the family’s Cambridge mosque. The imam said that Muslims were permitted to celebrate certain secular holidays, including Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. Tamerlan was outraged. He leapt to his feet, angrily denouncing the imam. After the service, mosque elders sat with him. “He was listening, but he was pretty emotional,” said one of the men, Ismail Fenni. “He was standing by his views.” Not long after that, Tamerlan reacted with similar outrage to a sign posted at the nearby Al-Hoda Market, a Middle Eastern grocery that specializes in halal meats, which are prepared according to Islamic law. The sign advertised halal turkeys for Thanksgiving; Tamerlan demanded to know why Muslims were being encouraged to participate in an American holiday. A few months later, in January 2013, he erupted again at the mosque. At a Friday prayer service shortly before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he shouted at the imam for holding up the late civil rights icon as a worthy example to follow. Others in the room told Tamerlan to stop. “Leave,” they ordered the angry young man. “Leave now.” Tamerlan stormed out of the building.

  More instability loomed. The family’s landlady, Joanna Herlihy, had decided, after long giving the Tsarnaevs a break on the rent, that she needed to charge a higher rate for their third-floor apartment in Inman Square. The apartment had been the one constant in the Tsarnaevs’ ten turbulent years in America, and now Tamerlan was on the verge of losing it. Herlihy told him that he needed to move out by June. He was shaken, but he understood. The apartment had once hummed with the noisy, crowded ambitions of his volatile family. By this point, in early 2013, it was a shell of what it had been, long emptied of any constructive aspirations. When Tamerlan went there now, there was only a computer screen to keep him company. Losing the place was all but a formality. The home the Tsarnaevs had built—or had tried to build—was already gone. In its wake, one lost, isolated young man remained. Or perhaps there were two.

  • • •

  He joined the crowd near Copley Square on that April afternoon, another youthful face among the happy masses. He was there to hang out with a friend and cheer on the runners like everyone else. The Boston Marathon was one of Boston’s signature public events, and in the spring of 2012, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wanted to be part of it. On a typical April Monday, Dzhokhar, whom friends knew as Jahar, would be in one of his freshman classes at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. But this was Patriot’s Day, which meant no school. So he and his best friend, Steve, had headed up to Boston. They had arrived too late to see the top finishers, but in plenty of time to cheer on the rest, grab some pizza, savor the sunshine, and, as was often the case with Dzhokhar, smoke a joint. He had two essays due by noon the next day, but those could wait. “We were just chilling,” Steve said.

  Dzhokhar’s soft features and mop of hair only added to his relaxed aura. But it was a façade. He was no ordinary, aimless college boy. He was a young man who, like his older brother Tamerlan, was in the midst of a troubling transformation. Dzhokhar, eighteen, a former high school honor student and wrestling team captain, was foundering in his studies and losing his sense of direction. He had, soon after arriving on the Dartmouth campus, become the leader of a small group of friends who shared interests in global affairs, thrill-seeking, and getting stoned. He had also established himself as a high-volume pot dealer, pulling in about $1,000 a week, and sometimes more, according to several college friends. The money helped pay for luxuries previously out of his reach—designer shoes, trips to New York clubs, Cîroc vodka, and psychedelic drugs. He liked to court danger, and occasionally carried a gun to protect his valuable stash. He sold drugs out of his dorm room with the door propped open. He was as brazen as he was charming.
He was the one friends relied on to sweet-talk campus police out of getting them in trouble. He was beginning to skid in college, but he seemed nonchalant, or perhaps in denial. If his future held any promise, it was hard to discern. It was not yet too late for him to right his life’s wayward course. But he seemed to lean into his downward slide instead, picking up dangerous momentum as he went.

  • • •

  New Jersey was their first stop in America. They landed on a raw spring day in 2002, just the Tsarnaev parents and their youngest son, a quiet boy of eight named Dzhokhar. The other three children, for the time being, stayed behind with relatives. In his pocket, the father, Anzor, carried the phone number of Khassan Baiev, a prominent Chechen surgeon who lived in Needham, west of Boston. “He called me and said, ‘Please, can you help me. There is no one here to meet us,’” Baiev said. The Tsarnaevs stayed with the Baievs for a month and then moved into the apartment in Cambridge. Anzor started fixing cars, building himself a livelihood. Cruising around town in his battered van, he befriended both merchants and customers. He soon developed his own clients, many of whom were drawn to his competitive prices and spirited nature. “Anzor was tough as they come,” said Joe Timko, a supervisor at Webster Auto Body in Somerville, where Anzor did body work for several months. “He’d change a transmission right there on the street. I mean, he was a stone. But he was also very emotional. He always came right up and gave you a hug.”