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

by Helman, Scott

  CHAPTER 12

  SHOWDOWN

  Bullets in the dark

  The report crackled across the radio in Joe Reynolds’s squad car. “Wanted for carjacking that occurred in Cambridge, possibly related to the Cambridge incident.” It was the voice of a Massachusetts State Police dispatcher. The Tsarnaev brothers had murdered Sean Collier. They had kidnapped Danny at gunpoint, then recklessly let him escape. No one knew where their plans would lead them next. But police were desperate to stop them, to put an end to a terrifying week. The dispatcher relayed Danny’s frantic account: that the marathon bombers had taken him hostage, threatened to kill him, stolen his car, and were on their way to attack New York next. In fact, the stolen black Mercedes was nowhere near New York. Pings from the vehicle’s global positioning system showed that the Tsarnaevs were less than five miles from their own apartment in Cambridge—and very near Reynolds.

  Reynolds had spent seven years as a police officer in Watertown, an unpretentious community northwest of Boston known as a melting pot of immigrants, young professionals, and working-class families. He typically worked nights, and his midnight-to-8:00 A.M. shift on Friday, April 19, had barely begun. At 12:42 A.M., the voice on the radio issued a warning: The stolen car was on Dexter Avenue, a slumbering neighborhood of tidy houses and modest duplexes, where many residents decorated their homes with flower boxes. Reynolds turned onto Dexter, heading northbound. He drove a couple of blocks and then came upon the brothers, whose two vehicles, the stolen Mercedes and the green Honda Civic, were parked on the side of the road, facing south. He locked eyes with Tamerlan as he passed.

  “I have the car,” Reynolds said into the radio. “Do you want me to stop it?”

  “Don’t stop the car until I get there,” the patrol supervisor, Sergeant John MacLellan, replied. “Wait for help to come.”

  MacLellan raced to the scene. Reynolds swung a U-turn. The brothers, driving both cars, pulled away from the curb and turned left from Dexter onto Laurel Street. Reynolds followed cautiously. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar then came to an abrupt stop after about one hundred feet, one behind the other, and hopped out. Tamerlan walked toward Reynolds’s police car, raised his arm, and began shooting from a distance of several houses away. Bullets cut through the darkness, dinging off the cruiser. Reynolds ducked below his dashboard and jammed the car into reverse, trying to gain distance from his attackers. As he peeled back about thirty yards, he radioed to dispatch: “Shots fired! Shots fired!”

  For more than three days, a coalition of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies had been hunting day and night for the marathon bombers, eager to finally put Greater Boston at ease. Now the showdown had arrived, in a town where police rarely had cause to fire their guns outside the practice range. Police officers, including those guarding the crime scene at MIT, sped toward the fight. They knew nothing of the brothers’ arsenal, which included a handgun and at least two kinds of homemade bombs. Dozens of cruisers lit up the night with their flashing blue and white lights. They converged on the bridges over the Charles River, all booking toward the action. With little time for police to coordinate, the scene would quickly turn chaotic. Officers flooded in, many from outside Watertown, and bullets began flying in many directions. The crossfire would prove nearly fatal to one of their own.

  As MacLellan rounded the corner in his brand-new black-and-white Ford Expedition, a bullet pierced the windshield, buzzing so close to his face that it lodged in his headrest. He took cover behind the engine as he tried to wrestle his semiautomatic AR-15 out of its locked case. When he couldn’t get it, he put the Expedition back into drive, jumped out, and let it roll toward the brothers as a diversion, which he thought might buy him time to take cover or get a better shot at the assailants. There was little refuge on that stretch of Laurel Street; the lone tree nearby was barely a foot in diameter. MacLellan dashed behind it. A third Watertown officer, Miguel Colon, had pulled up to the scene. He turned on the spotlight of his police car. A bullet blew it out almost immediately.

  By now, Laurel Street slumbered no more. Neighbors awoke to a battle so improbable they assumed the commotion had to be something far more benign. Peter Kehayias, a sixty-five-year-old restaurant chef, figured it was kids playing with firecrackers. He opened a window in the TV room of his two-family house.

  “Get the hell out of here and go to your own neighborhood!” he shouted.

  “Get inside and shut your window!” an officer yelled back. The Tsarnaevs were right there in the street.

  “Give up—there’s no way out,” Kehayias heard an officer yell at the brothers. “Give up.”

  Tamerlan offered a taunt in return. “You want more?” he said. “I give you more.”

  Kehayias’s wife, Loretta, a special-education teacher in Cambridge, picked up the phone and called 911: “Do you people realize there is a cop out here and there are two guys? They’re shooting at him!”

  The reply was immediate: “Yes, we know, lady.” Click.

  Dzhokhar helped Tamerlan load a fresh clip into a gun. Next he reached inside the car for a duffel bag. The battle had just begun, and now it took an ominous turn. The brothers began hurling homemade explosives at police, including pipe bombs and then something more alarming. Dzhokhar pulled out a larger pressure cooker bomb—the kind of device he had used to murderous effect on Marathon Day—and tossed it toward police. The explosion shook the neighborhood and set off a bright yellow flash, momentarily turning midnight darkness to day. Lizzy Floyd was crouching with her husband beneath a bedroom window on the second floor of their home. The force of the explosion knocked a framed photograph of a New Hampshire harborside scene off her shelf.

  Jeff Pugliese, a thirty-three-year veteran of the Watertown police force and a firearms instructor, had recently gone off duty when he learned about the firefight over his radio. He sped to the scene in his family’s minivan, jumped out of the car, and ran to the back of the houses on Laurel Street. He hopped a fence or two and then circled back, creeping down a narrow patch of grass mere feet from where Tamerlan was firing away. The two took shots at each other, nothing but two old Mercedes in a driveway between them. Peter Kehayias feared for Pugliese’s life. “Jesus, he is going to get killed,” he said to his wife. But Pugliese proved to be a much better shot than Tamerlan. Pugliese believed he hit Tamerlan a number of times. Tamerlan didn’t hit a thing, spraying bullets into the side of a house before seeming to run out of ammunition. He threw his gun at Pugliese, hitting him in the left arm. Tamerlan tried to run. Pugliese, with the aid of other officers, chased him down and tackled him in the street. Tamerlan, in a rage, continued to struggle, but Pugliese and MacLellan pinned him on the ground. As they reached for handcuffs, Reynolds looked up to see the lights of the Mercedes moving toward him. Dzhokhar had jumped in the SUV. Tires screeching, he had spun around and was barreling straight at the spot where the officers wrestled with his brother.

  “Sarge, Sarge!” Reynolds yelled. “Look out—he’s coming!”

  MacLellan jumped off. Pugliese grabbed Tamerlan’s belt and tried to pull him out of the way.

  “Jeff! Jeff!” MacLellan shouted at Pugliese. “Get off!”

  The car blew by. Everyone was sure Pugliese had been hit. But he had rolled clear at the last moment. The car missed him by inches.

  Tamerlan was not so lucky. Dzhokhar ran straight over his older brother, dragging him some thirty feet down the street as he fled west in Danny’s Mercedes. The headlight beams bounced up and down as the car rolled across the body with a sickening thump. Tamerlan was left lying on his stomach, clinging to the final moments of his life. He tried to lift up his head. Blood pooled around his body, streak marks visible on the street where the SUV had dragged him. Pugliese ran over, put cuffs on him, and pressed a foot into his back. Then he called for an ambulance. At long last, Tamerlan was theirs. Other officers chased Dzhokhar into the night. But with the gunfire in the st
reet finally gone quiet, police now faced another critical concern.

  • • •

  “Gunshots. Officer down.”

  The alert pierced the silence of the firehouse just before 1:00 A.M. Watertown firefighters Patrick Menton and Jimmy Caruso—both trained as emergency medical technicians—jumped into an ambulance and roared toward Laurel Street, Caruso at the wheel, Menton in the passenger seat. They said little as they drove. “Officer down” were about the most urgent two words imaginable. Even more so for Menton. His younger brother Tim was a Watertown police officer. Menton wondered: Is my brother in trouble?

  “Get some rubber gloves out,” Caruso told his partner as they raced toward the area. “Get ready.”

  EMTs are instructed never to enter an unsecured crime scene. This lesson is drilled into them: If you’re hurt, you’re useless. But as their rig rolled down Laurel Street, Caruso and Menton tore up that rulebook. In the chaos of the crossfire, Richard “Dic” Donohue, a thirty-three-year-old police officer with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, had been shot in the thigh. “I’m hit!” Donohue yelled when the bullet struck him. His partner tackled him, to get him out of the line of fire, and then tried to find the wound and apply pressure. Two Harvard University police officers, Ryan Stanton and Michael Rea, rushed over with tourniquets to stanch the flow of blood. A Boston cop, Ricky Moriarty, began doing chest compressions. Donohue’s condition deteriorated quickly. He was at grave risk of bleeding to death. “We’re losing him! We’re losing him!” one neighbor heard desperate voices screaming. “Get an ambulance here now!” A dazed Jeffrey Ryan stumbled out on his porch on Dexter Avenue to witness the frantic efforts to save Donohue in his driveway. Police asked for towels, and he and his wife rushed some out. “We need to get him out of here!” officers shouted in the darkness. “He’s bleeding bad! We need to go!”

  An awful coincidence had unfolded: Over the course of a few hours, Sean Collier and Dic Donohue, friends, former neighbors, and classmates from the MBTA Transit Police Academy, had both been shot—one fatally, the other barely hanging on. Like Collier, Donohue had grown up north of Boston, in the well-kept suburb of Winchester. He was an avid runner, competing in cross-country and track in high school. He graduated from Virginia Military Institute in 2002, majoring in history. He served as a US Navy officer before joining the MBTA police force in October 2010. Earlier in 2013, he had received a commendation for helping to save someone else’s life, having rushed into the Chinatown T station to stem the profuse bleeding of a stabbing victim. He and his wife, Kim, had a six-month-old son, Richie. As it happened, Donohue’s grandfather several generations removed, Lawrence Brignolia, had won the 1899 Boston Marathon, the first Massachusetts man to do so.

  Late Thursday night, Donohue had been one of the officers responding to the scene of Collier’s murder, hitting the lights in his cruiser as soon as he heard that an officer was down. Once he found out what happened, he sent a few solemn text messages to friends, breaking the tragic news: It was Sean. Like other officers, he then raced to Watertown once reports of the firefight started streaming in. He got to the scene, jumped out of his car, and began firing alongside other police. Then he was hit.

  With Donohue down, Caruso went to the rear of the ambulance to retrieve the stretcher, but officers had already carried Donohue from the driveway and put him in the back. The stretcher never left the truck. Donohue had a three-quarter-inch wound at the top of his right thigh, a single bullet having severed his femoral artery. He was in cardiac arrest. He had no pulse. His eyes were open. His color was gray. “He was deceased” is how Caruso would describe it later. No one by his side, though, was going to let him die. Caruso ripped Donohue’s blood-soaked pants apart, desperate to find the source of the bleeding. He grabbed two multitrauma dressings, big gauze pads, and pushed them into the wound. Menton provided breathing for the breathless patient, using a “BVM,” a bag valve mask, which sent puffs of air into Donohue’s lungs. Alongside them, State Trooper Christopher Dumont, who had jumped aboard, began performing CPR. “We need a driver! We need a driver!” someone shouted. Moments later the ambulance lurched forward.

  Caruso and Menton were so consumed with their tasks that both assumed the other was driving. Behind the wheel in the front of the cab was Menton’s brother Tim, the Watertown police officer who moments before had been involved in the shoot-out, a bullet having pierced his windshield. Tim Menton didn’t really know how to drive the ambulance, but he figured it out, speeding toward Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, the closest emergency room available, arriving within minutes. His actions proved to be critical. “If we didn’t have three people in the back of the truck, I don’t know how it would have worked,” Pat Menton said. “Because we were each doing a vital thing to save his life. We had to go.” Caruso kept pressure on Donohue’s wound at the hospital, letting go only when Donohue was wheeled into surgery. By the time doctors got to him, he barely had any blood left in his body. It took them forty-five minutes to get his heart beating again. The Menton brothers reunited in the hospital parking lot—Pat hadn’t realized that it was his brother driving the rig. It turned out that Tim, before climbing into the ambulance, had been one of Donohue’s first caregivers, using a towel to apply pressure on his wound. It was there in the parking lot that they smelled it—the awful, metallic odor. Tim hadn’t known how to release the ambulance’s emergency brake. They’d driven nearly two miles to the hospital with it on.

  Donohue’s wife, Kim, was asleep in their home around 1:30 A.M. when she was awoken by her son’s cries. “The baby just went nuts—just was hysterical,” she would later tell CBS News. As she tended to him, the doorbell rang. She opened the door to see Steven O’Hara, a sergeant with the MBTA police. She knew instantly what his presence meant. “You are my worst nightmare,” she told him, her mind racing. “Tell me if Dic is dead, right now,” she said. “Don’t walk in this house; don’t come past that door. Tell me if Dic is dead.” He was still alive, O’Hara told her. But only just. When she got to Mount Auburn Hospital, they had a priest waiting. They handed her Dic’s phone, his badge, his wedding ring. After his eight hours of surgery, she was finally allowed to see him. He looked, to his wife, like he was dead. She pulled the doctors aside. “He has to come through,” she implored. “It’s not a question. You can’t come back in this room and tell me anything else.”

  • • •

  The rapidly unfolding Watertown battle, with the unique threat of homemade bombs and the crush of police, gave officers little chance to orient themselves at the scene in a coherent, strategic manner. Police converged on the Tsarnaevs from multiple points, many or all of them firing away; one account put the total number of rounds discharged at roughly 250. Just whose bullet it was that nearly killed Dic Donohue was not immediately clear—that would be up to authorities to determine over the ensuing months. Witness accounts in the days after the firefight, though, suggested that he was likely hit by friendly fire. Jane Dyson, who lived 140 feet away, reported seeing Donohue hit as police trained their guns on the black Mercedes, in the final volley of shots as Dzhokhar fled. Police at that point were the only ones doing the shooting—Tamerlan had already thrown his gun at Officer Jeff Pugliese. At least two other witnesses backed up Dyson’s account.

  As bad as Donohue’s wound was, the night nearly got much worse for police. Amid the chaos, there was a report that one of the suspects was attempting an escape in a black pickup truck. A short while later, a state trooper saw a black pickup near the scene. Evidently thinking it fit the profile, and without waiting to be sure, he raked the vehicle with bullets, emptying the clip of his M4 gun. But the black pickup carried two police officers, one from Boston and the other a state trooper, who were responding to the call like everyone else. The bullets, which left an S-shaped trail on the truck, somehow went between them, missing both men, but not by much. “It was very, very bad,” said Boston Police commissioner Ed Davis. In a separ
ate incident nearby, a bullet grazed another transit police officer in the buttocks. “The control of fire in a situation like that is something we really have to work on,” Davis said. In a military encounter, he said, you typically know where the good guys are, and where the bad guys are. “In this particular case, cops converged on that scene from three hundred sixty degrees. They hear the gunshots, that’s how they locate where the action is. But when they get there, they’re in a circle. And a circle ambush is deadly to everybody.”

  The fog of confusion extended beyond the immediate scene of the firefight. Several blocks away, officers at one point stopped a car they thought was suspicious. The police activity around the car only attracted more police, including Dan Linskey, the Boston Police superintendent in chief, who assumed this was where the fight was. Believing the man in the car to be hostile, officers had him on the ground and were stripping his clothes off to check for explosives. He was cuffed. “It’s him. It’s him,” someone said. “He’s not cooperating.” Police at this point were lined up on both sides of the man’s car, dozens of guns pointed at him. Linskey issued orders to get the man’s ID and run his license plate. It took several minutes for police to determine that the man lived nearby and was not one of the suspects. Linskey and other officers then had to run several blocks to reach the actual scene. There were a “significant amount of resources that were shunted” to the wrong spot, Davis said.

  As Watertown Police chief Edward Deveau said afterward, nearly all of the police officers in Watertown early Friday morning were from out of town. Most didn’t know the streets, didn’t know the neighborhoods. All they knew was that two bad guys were nearby trying to kill officers with bullets and homemade bombs. “Everybody’s doing the best they can,” Deveau said. “But it’s chaotic because of what’s going on.” No one doubted that assessment. No one faulted police for putting their lives on the line to go after the guys everyone so badly wanted—even more so following the cold-blooded execution of one of their own. It became clear, though, that the response early Friday held some lessons to be learned for next time—that as brave and savvy as some of the police actions were, there were also, in retrospect, some grave mistakes. Thanks to the work of his fellow officers, firefighters, and emergency room doctors and nurses, Dic Donohue had made it. But it had been way too close.