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

by Helman, Scott

  • • •

  Max Kerman, twenty-five, was getting ready for bed as Dzhokhar careened down Spruce Street in the Mercedes. A former high school football and basketball standout, Kerman heard the distant gunfire and stepped out on the second-floor porch to investigate. Just then the car came into sight, flying up a hill, its front end damaged, one headlight out, and the passenger-side windows blown out, Dzhokhar not bothering to slow at a tight curve. About forty-five seconds later, Kerman estimated, an unmarked police cruiser came up the hill with lights blazing, then slowed in front of his house. Kerman pointed down the street and screamed at the cop: “Keep going! Keep going!” Having left his older brother in a heap, Dzhokhar had smashed into Joe Reynolds’s squad car and then made it only about a half mile away before he dumped the Mercedes and took off on foot. It would prove to be enough of a head start. As police chased after him, they were slowed by three things: the rush to save Donohue’s life, parked police cars clogging the road, and fears of unexploded bombs in the abandoned SUV. Within minutes, the uncommon brilliance of the early morning firefight had given way to a pursuit through the darkness.

  When officers came upon the battered Mercedes, they approached it warily. They didn’t know if Dzhokhar was still hiding inside, or whether he had booby-trapped it with explosive devices. Eventually, they determined that no one was in the car and that it posed no risk. “He probably didn’t even realize how effective he was being,” Davis said. “They were all focused on the car, and he got into backyards and managed to hide out.” Scores of police swarmed the neighborhood and began checking houses. They did a room-by-room search of Austin Lin’s house on Spruce Street before evacuating Lin and his grandmother to the police station. Residents of six other nearby houses were hustled out in bathrobes and sweatpants—most of them clutching cell phones—for the night. “They had SWAT teams, dogs, and the National Guard going through backyards and checking basements and garages,” said Mary Karaguesian, who watched from her home. “But they didn’t find him.” Police thoroughly swept Kerman’s backyard several times.

  Dzhokhar enjoyed an added advantage: He was able to exploit out-of-town officers’ unfamiliarity with Watertown. “It wasn’t like everybody just watched him go down the street,” Deveau said. “One of the disadvantages that we have is the rest of the officers aren’t familiar [with the area]. We know Watertown. My guys know Watertown. So when they’re yelling he’s on whatever street, ninety-five percent of the people that are here—if not more—have no idea what that street means.” As the minutes ticked by, there was a dreadful sense that Dzhokhar was going to elude them, that he was slipping away. “You’re in the middle of perhaps the most stressful set of crimes you will ever deal with as a police officer,” said Tim Alben, the state police colonel. “One person on the scene is dead or dying; a police officer sustained life-threatening injuries. And in the middle of this, this kid has fled into the neighborhood.”

  Police would later recover only a handgun and a BB gun from the shooting scene. In the heat of the pursuit, though, officers assumed Dzhokhar was armed, possibly with a suicide vest. “They didn’t want to see an officer blown up,” Deveau said. Search teams with dogs were called in—Boston police had dogs, as did the state police, local departments, and federal agencies. But with so many people around, it was difficult for them to pick up the scent. Officers found blood and urine at a nearby house, but still, the trail dried up. One bloodhound sent officers in the entirely wrong direction. Dzhokhar had smashed his cell phones so he couldn’t be tracked. Police decided to pull back, regroup, and devise a fresh plan. After all the drama, and getting so close to capturing Dzhokhar, the manhunt was back on.

  Within a half hour of Dzhokhar’s escape, Boston Police superintendent William Evans was in Watertown. It had already been a long day for the thirty-two-year veteran of the Boston Police Department, who earlier in the week had completed the Boston Marathon himself. Evans was assigned to secure the area where the firefight had just ended. “It was an ugly scene,” he said. Indeed, this quiet corner of Watertown became one of the most complex crime scenes in the history of the Massachusetts State Police. More than 250 shell casings and several IEDs—exploded and not—would be recovered throughout the neighborhood. Investigators collected the remains of a pressure cooker bomb that had detonated into the side of a parked car. A stop sign riddled with bullet holes was removed from one corner. Houses were pockmarked. Laurel Street had to be evacuated. An entire community had been traumatized. And relief was still nowhere in sight.

  • • •

  Dr. David Schoenfeld was reading on his couch early Friday morning when the gunfire and explosions erupted near his Watertown home. Anticipating massive casualties, he told his wife good-bye and bolted out the door to the hospital where he worked—Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in the heart of Boston’s medical district. Less than ten minutes after he arrived in the emergency department, his instincts were proven right. The wounded man who came in, however, would test the sacred credo by which doctors and nurses operated—that your first task is always to save the patient’s life, regardless of who the patient is.

  At about 1:20 A.M., EMTs wheeled in Tamerlan Tsarnaev, handcuffed, unconscious, and near death. His tattered clothes had already been cut away. More than a dozen police officers surrounded him. Emergency crews were performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on him. His injuries were severe—burns on his right shoulder, multiple gunshot wounds, and a gaping slash on his torso. Trauma teams had been alerted that one or more people injured in the gun battle, possibly a suspect, or a police officer, or both, were on the way, and they wore protective gowns and gloves. They checked Tamerlan for radioactivity with a Geiger counter—a rarely used protocol, but one that felt appropriate here—but they found none. “I don’t think people were worried for their safety,” Schoenfeld said. But “we knew this was not a normal night for trauma.”

  Doctors placed a breathing tube in Tamerlan’s throat and tubes in his chest to release pressure from his lungs. Schoenfeld helped coordinate the efforts to save Tamerlan’s life, grabbing a tray with instruments for the team to use to cut open his chest and check for heart damage. But Tamerlan had lost massive amounts of blood from his wounds and was suffering cardiac and respiratory arrest. Doctors could not revive him. They declared him dead at 1:35 A.M., about fifteen minutes after he was brought in.

  His death meant that somewhere, hiding in the cold darkness of Watertown, Dzhokhar was left with a new reality. He had helped kill his older brother. Whatever he would do now, whatever remained of his violent mission, it was now his to carry out alone.

  CHAPTER 13

  DISQUIET

  In a silent city, the hunt begins anew

  Dawn broke Friday on a still-life city. Streets empty. Sidewalks lonely. Stoops vacant. Businesses dark. Houses closed up. A transit system shut down. The clamorous night, with the frenzy over the terrorists’ photos, the killing of Sean Collier, and then the clash in Watertown, had given way to a silent morning, eerie and frightening in its tranquility. It was the last day of school vacation week. The weather looked promising. A perfect day to hit the playground, to ready a backyard garden for spring. Vacationing families were on their way home, their fridges empty, planning to pick up takeout for dinner. But this was not that kind of Friday. At daybreak, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his name now becoming known to the public, was still unaccounted for. With the strain of the week’s drama weighing heavily, and conviction mounting that the crisis needed to end, authorities turned to a radical plan: locking the whole city down until the second suspect was in custody. They knew the idea would be controversial—a major American city going dark to smoke out a wayward nineteen-year-old. Who had ever considered such a thing? Could it even be done? And yet no one would accept Dzhokhar slipping away again. No one could abide more violence.

  From the first moments after the shoot-out, as Dzhokhar’s trail went cold, Governor Deval Patrick c
onferred hourly with aides about the status of the hunt. By about 4:00 A.M., with no arrest at hand and the MBTA bus and train system about to start up for the day, Patrick and top law enforcement officials had a decision to make. Having ditched the Mercedes SUV, Dzhokhar was believed to be on foot. Watertown was now overrun with cops, so it was all but impossible for him to escape by car. That left public transportation: What if he managed to sneak onto a bus, or a train? Then he could get anywhere he wanted. Police had established a security perimeter in Watertown, around the area where Dzhokhar had slipped away. Patrick and law enforcement leaders devised what seemed like a prudent plan. They would ask residents within the perimeter to “shelter in place” while SWAT teams conducted house-by-house searches. They would suspend T service through Watertown. And they would ask people in surrounding communities to remain vigilant.

  But as the governor was on his way to make that announcement, he began receiving reports of suspicious activity elsewhere: a taxi suspected of carrying explosive devices that had reportedly come from Watertown and been stopped in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood; a police pursuit at South Station, a major transportation hub, and another at the federal courthouse nearby. Even though the FBI had zeroed in on two suspects—and one of them was now dead—the full complexion of the terror plot was still unknown. Were other accomplices out there lurking, waiting to strike again? “There was a high level of anxiety about, frankly, how much we didn’t know, and how big this might be,” Patrick said.

  Suddenly a more expansive lockdown seemed necessary. So Patrick turned to the playbook he and his emergency management team had employed with success before, though never for something like this. Just two months earlier, with a massive blizzard enveloping Massachusetts, Patrick had ordered everyone but essential workers off the roads and shut down public transportation. The sweeping decision had its critics—“tyrannical,” some complained—but it had the desired effect: keeping accidents to a minimum and allowing a more rapid and effective cleanup. The gravity of the terror threat now seemed to justify something even more sweeping. Still, this was a huge imposition—not only shuttering public transit but asking all of Boston and several neighboring communities not to go outdoors. Not to work, not to shop, not to play, not even to take the dog for a walk. The behind-the-scenes debate was a robust but collaborative one, with Boston mayor Tom Menino and other leaders weighing in. Everyone knew it was a major decision, one sure to spark dissent. And they were happy to let Patrick be the one who made it. “Everybody got that this was a big call,” Patrick said. “And that the governor gets the big calls.”

  Patrick went before the TV cameras in Watertown that morning and delivered the heavy, unsettling message to residents of Boston, Watertown, and the surrounding communities of Cambridge, Newton, Belmont, and Waltham, nearly 950,000 people in all: Stay inside, lock the door, and don’t open it for anyone but properly credentialed law enforcement officers. “There is a massive manhunt underway,” he said. “We’ve got every asset that we can possibly muster on the ground right now.” Nervous parents drew the blinds, trying to explain to their children why they couldn’t run out into the beckoning sunshine. Watertown prayed for its safety, watching columns of police in full SWAT gear canvass its streets. The same nagging thought crept into the minds of many: What if the bomber is hiding near my house?

  • • •

  Police drew up a map that included roughly twenty blocks around the spot where Dzhokhar had dumped the Mercedes. Using Google Maps, they divided the area into five quadrants. Tactical teams, each composed of as many as three dozen officers, then went to work scouring Watertown block by block. Tim Alben, the state police colonel, promised the governor they would not stop until they had Dzhokhar. “We are going to start going house to house on every single street,” Alben recalled. “We’re going to knock on every person’s door.” More dogs were brought in. Watertown issued reverse 911 calls to its residents about what was happening outside their windows. People began tweeting about the battalions of police trawling their sidewalks and backyards.

  Over the coming hours, the police tactical units knocked on hundreds of doors, from single-family homes to individual units of big apartment buildings. Watertown, in parts, was dense. There were lots of places to hide, which meant lots of places to check. They rooted through yards, sheds, barns, pickup trucks whose beds were loaded with debris. They looked under porches and in basements. They asked people if anything seemed amiss on their properties. Often, residents asked for the scrutiny, wanting police to search every room in the house, or to survey the upstairs, because they thought they had heard footsteps. “They were kind of begging us—‘check the attic, check the basement, check the car,’” said Mike Powell, a police officer and SWAT team member from the nearby city of Malden. It was a balancing act—police didn’t want to brush aside anyone’s nervous request, but they knew they had a job to finish. “We were trying to answer every call we possibly could while clearing the area and fulfilling the mission to search our quadrant,” said Boston Police superintendent William Evans.

  For police, the assignment was already stressful enough, but no one wanted to let anything slip by. They all understood what was at stake. “He could be anywhere, and you would hate to be the team that goes in there and misses something that could eventually be disastrous,” Powell said. “That was the most intense part—making sure we look everywhere and do it right.” Police knew the risks and urgency of their work, but they also knew they had to approach each house with calm and sensitivity, a task complicated by their conspicuous weaponry and armored vehicles. “One poor house we had to ask occupants to leave, and they had little kids,” Evans said. “I said, ‘Those poor kids, walking out and seeing a lot of police officers out there.’ My heart sort of broke we had to do this.” Residents praised the officers for their politeness, and for helping to bring a sense of security to a panicked neighborhood. Homeowners and renters offered them water and oranges. They offered their bathrooms. Throughout, residents tried to carry on as normally as possible, planning bar mitzvahs, taking naps, keeping young children away from televisions and the wall-to-wall coverage of the manhunt. The TVs proved useful to the search teams, though. They would catch glimpses of the news in every house, allowing them to remain up-to-date on what was happening elsewhere.

  Throughout the day Friday, police raced around Watertown chasing suspicious reports that filtered in. There was the 911 call about a woman reportedly being held hostage inside her home by a man with a gun. The person seen running into a home on Oak Street. The man speaking Russian who had crossed a secure line. The kid in a sweatshirt walking through a backyard. The young man sitting on a porch with a laptop, which seemed possibly connected to another report that Dzhokhar was online threatening retaliation for his brother’s death. Then there was the guy with circuit boards in his car who ran away when a Boston Police team confronted him. Making matters worse, the man’s family shut themselves inside a house. “Now everyone’s in a panic,” said Rich Correale, the Malden SWAT team leader. They didn’t know if the man had some connection to Dzhokhar. They feared he may have a bomb in the car. After forty-five minutes of negotiation, police finally got the family out of the house and did a thorough search, even calling in a bomb squad. It turned out to be one of many false alarms. “At least a dozen [times] just inside the perimeter, and then at the same time in the command post, we’re hearing different stuff that didn’t turn out to be accurate,” said Watertown Police chief Ed Deveau. “But you have to run it down.” Watertown would receive 566 calls to 911 on Friday. The day before, there had been twenty-eight.

  Authorities ran the manhunt operation out of a makeshift command post set up near Watertown’s Arsenal Mall. There was a certain historical resonance in that. It is a shopping mecca these days, but in the early nineteenth century the US military established one of its first arsenals there. Metalworkers built cannons for the Civil War and guns for both world wars. On this Friday, it r
esembled an army outpost once again, with thousands of uniformed officers using it as a staging area for this strange new twenty-first-century battle. The assemblage of police assets was like something out of childhood dreams: every manner of squad car, emergency response truck, and special operations vehicle imaginable gassed up and ready to go. It was here, too, where political leaders had their own brush with anxiety. Around midday, as Patrick and Menino were preparing to brief the media again, there was a man in the street, not far from where the media had assembled, who said he had an explosive device and was going to blow himself up. Police had to move Patrick and Menino to the other side of some buildings while they checked it out; just another false alarm, in the end. “That,” Patrick said, “was the nature of the day.”

  As the hours ticked by, nervous faces peered warily out the windows of Watertown’s homes and apartments, wrestling with whether to watch or retreat behind the curtains. They were frightened, but they were interested, too. Nothing like this ever happened here, and it probably never would again. It was unnerving, yes, but also a spectacle, a Friday they’d never forget, all of it captured by national TV, which they kept on all day; there was little else to do, after all. They may have been bit players in the drama, but it was their town and their drama. Perah Kessman, a twenty-nine-year-old mental health clinician and university lecturer, had been up all night, unable to sleep after seeing dozens of police cruisers race by her Arsenal Street apartment toward the firefight. She kept watch out her window, reassuring her nervous mother on the phone. “It’s pretty jarring,” she allowed. As the day wore on, Kessman and many others in Watertown couldn’t resist wandering gingerly out of their homes, curious, dazed, and increasingly stir-crazy, just to take stock of it all. They watched in disbelief as convoys of armored trucks, state police cruisers, ambulances, and fire engines from across New England roared up and down their streets, trying to read news in their speed and direction. They stiffened at the growl of low-flying helicopters overhead. They leaned on one another for news and comfort. They gripped their smartphones like lifelines. Some turned to alcohol to calm their nerves. It didn’t take much to get edgy: Why is there an unmarked white box truck rolling toward the police cordon? Why does that police dog look like he’s found something? The whole day was like one big pregnant moment, and no one knew how it would end.