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

by Helman, Scott

  • • •

  Aided by the darkness, Dzhokhar had slipped away from the Mercedes and into the early-morning quiet of the Watertown neighborhood, past the pine trees, along the chain-link and wooden fences, among the well-kept single- and multifamily homes, their sleeping residents oblivious to his silent flight. Walnut Street, near where he’d left the car, was relatively busy, but not at this hour. Even with an army of officers on his trail, it wasn’t hard to evade detection, to creep quietly through backyards and behind parked cars, to slide by the flag poles, painted garages, and stone walls. Behind a home on Franklin Street, a short L-shaped road connecting Walnut and a major artery, Mount Auburn Street, Dzhokhar came upon a boat, wrapped and stored for the cold months. It lay fewer than twenty houses away from where he had fled from the car. This, he decided, would be his hiding place. He wriggled inside.

  With the whole world looking for him, Dzhokhar hunkered down inside the boat and used a pen to scrawl a note on its inside wall and beams. It was a confession of sorts. He seemed to take responsibility for the marathon bombing, praised Allah, and cast himself and his brother as martyrs, paradise as their reward. “The U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians,” he wrote. “I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished. We Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all.” In the message, there was a brief hint of regret for what he had done. “Now I don’t like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam,” he wrote. But it was justified in this case, he asserted. “Stop killing our innocent people,” he wrote, “and we will stop.”

  • • •

  Heather Abbott was not following the search. The shelter-in-place request, disruptive to so many hundreds of thousands of people in Boston, meant little to her and the dozens of others who had been badly hurt by the bombs at the marathon, who were stuck in their hospital beds, looking down on the city from above. They weren’t going anywhere, not for a while, and many of them, like Heather, had chosen to block out the hunt for the bombers. They had more important things to focus on. Heather had spent the last two days grappling with a decision only she could make, one that she could never in a million years have imagined facing. No matter how she turned her options over in her head, the one she wanted remained out of reach: the life she had enjoyed before, and taken for granted.

  Doctors had saved Heather’s left foot on Monday night. The surgeons had rapidly assessed and responded to the damage, opening up the inside of her undamaged right thigh, removing blood vessels, and grafting them into place where the veins inside her foot had been destroyed. They had said from the start that the transplant might not work, and that if it failed she might face a dire choice. Amputation was not off the table. After the transplant, when the doctors touched her foot to see if the nerves were functioning, she had feeling in some places and none at all in others. But blood was circulating again. Doctors who gathered at her bedside were heartened by the sounds they heard through their Doppler probe, a handheld device used to detect blood flow. Heather dared to hope that she would keep her foot.

  She had since returned to the OR for two more surgeries. In the last one, doctors had surveyed the damage and repairs, and they had assessed how well the foot might one day function. Then they had come to present her with their findings. Their tone was solemn; the news they brought was not good. The blood was flowing, but her foot was ravaged; if and when it fully healed it would be hell to live with. The decision was hers and hers alone, but it was clear: The doctors thought she should amputate. If she kept the foot she had been born with, she would never run again, they told her. She might be able to walk on it someday. Her left leg would be shorter than her right; she would suffer chronic pain and need more operations. And still her foot would always look deformed. The hospital arranged for her to talk to people who had faced the same decision. One man who came to see her had kept his leg after a motorcycle accident. He suffered chronic pain and addiction to painkillers, and ten years later, he chose amputation. “I wasted ten years of my life,” he told her. She wondered, as she listened, if she really had a choice. She was in tremendous pain; every time the nurses changed the dressing on her foot, it became excruciating. She tried to imagine steeling herself to the suffering, maybe for years. The thought—the dread she felt—gave her a moment of clarity.

  Meanwhile, the people close to her were struggling, too. Her mother, Rosemary, found the thought of Heather losing part of her leg almost unbearable. Then, after listening intently to the surgeons, she discovered the alternative scared her even more. She reached her own conclusion but said nothing to her daughter. The choice had to be Heather’s. Her mother did not want to sway her.

  To Heather’s close friend Jason, who had stayed by her bedside all week, the talk of amputation seemed to arise out of nowhere. On Wednesday, he had seen her foot for the first time since she’d left Boylston Street in an ambulance. He had braced himself for the worst as the nurse pulled off the sheet. But the foot had looked more normal than he expected—at least the top of it did; he couldn’t see the bottom—and the sensors placed on it to check for circulation had broadcast the much-desired thump of flowing blood. Listening, Jason felt a rush of joy. It was working; it was going to be okay. He stepped out into the hallway with two other friends who were there, who had also been at the marathon. They wrapped their arms around one another’s shoulders. All three were crying tears of happiness.

  It seemed like the next thing Jason knew, everyone was talking about amputation. He didn’t understand—how could the outlook be so dire when everything had seemed to be going so well? The problem, he gathered, was the underside of the foot; there was no good way to reconstruct it. He heard the doctors’ dark prognosis, the predictions of more pain and suffering. Still he resisted, clinging to a hope that had quickly faded. After one doctor talked to Heather in her room, Jason followed him out into the hall.

  “She’s my best friend in the whole world,” he implored. “Is there any chance?”

  “The decision is hers,” the doctor said. “But what I said in there is true.”

  That night Jason and Heather sat alone in her room. No one had rushed her to decide, but Heather knew the time was coming. “What do you think?” she asked.

  “I think you’ve got to try and save it,” Jason said.

  “I don’t want to lose it,” Heather agreed. But she could not ignore the warnings, either, from those who had already made the painful passage she was facing. She was, at her core, a practical-minded person. She had always made decisions based on information, not just emotion. There was no way to know for sure which path would bring more pain. She could only make her choice and commit herself completely.

  • • •

  David King was up early Friday morning. The surgeon had to be in Dover, New Hampshire, north of Portsmouth, before 8:00 A.M., to give a lecture at a hospital there. It was a commitment made long before the marathon. He got coffee and went to the gym, and then he started reading the news on his phone. When he realized what was unfolding in Watertown, he wanted to skip the trip and stay in Boston. What if more violence erupted and he was needed at the hospital? He called in to work and asked to stick around, but his boss told him to head north.

  The lecture, at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital, was supposed to be about the latest strategies for replacing fluids after blood loss in trauma patients. No one is going to want to hear about that, King thought as he drove up I-93 to I-95 and over the border. On a day like this, with the drama still unfolding, he was sure the doctors in New Hampshire would prefer he talk about the bombing and his hospital’s response. The week had been a whirlwind—he hadn’t had time yet to reflect on what had happened, let alone assemble any notes or photographs—but he usually did just fine speaking off the cuff. The lecture room was packed when he arrived, the crowd much bigger than its normal size. As he had expected, everyone wanted to know about the bombing. His talk, King told them as he began, “was advertised as somet
hing else, but that’s not what you want to hear about. I’ll tell you the story through my eyes, and if you’re bored, you can leave.” He started talking. Two hours later—long after the lecture had been scheduled to end—the room was still full of people.

  The drive to and from New Hampshire was the first time King had had to himself since Monday, the first real chance he’d had to think about the week. The high-octane surgeon—who always had music playing, often at top volume, whether he was exercising or writing e-mails—chose to drive in silence that Friday morning. He found himself reflecting on his time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thinking about the many soldiers he had treated who had lost their legs. If every one of those cases became big news, like the plight of the marathon victims, he wondered, would it change public attitudes about the wars? He understood why this event was different—these things weren’t supposed to happen here, in the US, and these victims hadn’t made a choice to head into harm’s way—but it still bothered him that wounded soldiers so rarely inspired a similar flood of public outrage and concern.

  In between his musings at the wheel, King got on his phone with a Time magazine reporter. The hospital had been flooded with interview requests from around the world, and King had volunteered to respond to some of them, squeezing calls into his few breaks between patients. He felt a responsibility to make sure the facts were reported correctly and calmly, and he saw an opportunity, too, to help the public understand the work he and his colleagues were doing. He talked to the Time reporter as he drove, the answers to the questions coming to him easily. He felt like he had the right words, like his brief sojourn north had helped him process the chaotic events. By 11:00 A.M., the doctor was back in the city. He drove his car home to Cambridge, then walked across the river to the hospital, ignoring the order to shelter, intent on getting to work. The streets were empty, the morning unnaturally silent. The bomber was still at large, and Boston was a ghost town.

  • • •

  They were starving when they arrived in Harvard Square around 2:00 P.M. Deval Patrick was with about a half-dozen state troopers in full-body gear. Nobody had eaten in hours. They pulled up to Charlie’s Kitchen, a longtime Cambridge fixture. They were happy to find the place open. Patrick had to laugh at the irony of it: We know we’ve asked everyone to remain indoors and businesses to close, but, hey, can you make us some cheeseburgers? Everyone in the restaurant applauded the troopers when they walked in. Patrick had just come from visiting Mount Auburn Hospital, where Dic Donohue was recovering from surgery. Patrick couldn’t see Donohue but spent time with his wife and his brother. The governor was gratified to see all the support Donohue seemed to have, including from colleagues at the transit authority and in law enforcement. After the meal at Charlie’s, Patrick returned to the State House. Exhausted, he lay down on a couch in his office, not bothering to even take off his shoes. He didn’t have the energy for that.

  Less than an hour later, his cell phone rang. It was the White House. The president was on the line. Obama, with whom Patrick had been close for years, asked him how he was doing, whether he had everything he needed. The president had been following the investigation closely. “He was very current,” Patrick said. They talked about the possible threats that were still out there, what they knew of the intelligence. They discussed the latest development, which involved promising police searches in New Bedford, a former whaling city on the state’s south coast; authorities had picked up a ping down there from one of Dzhokhar’s electronic devices. Then Patrick and Obama discussed the shelter-in-place request. Obama told Patrick what Patrick already knew: that they’d have to lift the request soon, regardless of whether they had found the suspect. They couldn’t ask people to stay in lockdown forever. Patrick told the president they planned to wrap up the house-to-house searches by the evening, and then they’d tell the public to resume their lives, carefully.

  By 5:00 P.M., with Dzhokhar still at large, William Evans, his police officers, and the rest of the tactical teams back in Watertown were feeling the weight of their work. They were living off bottled water and granola bars. Bathrooms were hard to come by. They were beat from lugging their heavy gear around all day under the sun. The exhaustion, coupled with the frustration of not having found their man, left police spent. “Some of my officers were calling for release,” Evans said. “I said, ‘Let’s hang in there. Let’s hang in there.’” As evening approached, Ed Deveau, the Watertown chief, began to worry what all this meant for his community. Where was this guy? Had there been a carjacking police never heard about, giving Dzhokhar a vehicle to escape in? “My other concern was that it was going to be dark in an hour and a half or two, and it was going to give him a chance to move again if he was still here,” Deveau said.

  Patrick knew, by day’s end, that it was time to go back before the cameras. What he had wanted to say—what everyone hoped he would say—was that after hours of searching police finally had their suspect in custody. But that was not in the script. Instead he had to deliver the truth: that authorities did not know where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was. That after a long, difficult day of methodical searches, there was little to show for it. The Boston Red Sox and Boston Bruins had called off their games. The Big Apple Circus was in town, but there were no clowns or elephants or trapeze acrobats. The city had more or less ground to a halt. And yet the dragnet had come up empty. On the way out to Watertown, where he planned to announce the end of the shelter request, Patrick picked up Menino at the Parkman House, the city-owned mansion where the ailing mayor had been recuperating.

  Around 6:00 P.M., the governor stepped up to a bouquet of microphones at the Watertown command post, a blend of determination and disappointment evident on his and other leaders’ faces. Menino was by his side in a wheelchair, frustrated by how little they had to report but convinced Dzhokhar was contained in Watertown, and that the shelter order should not drag on any longer. “We can return to living our lives,” Patrick said, urging residents to use extra vigilance. Mass transit would reopen immediately. It made for an odd and unsatisfying juxtaposition—residents were being told to resume their lives, but that a terrorist who had helped kill and maim scores of people could still be right there in their midst. “There were the inevitable questions: Are you saying we’re safe? Did he get away?” Patrick recalled. “We answered what we could.” Patrick himself was still on edge, too, but he understood that they couldn’t keep the shelter request in place indefinitely. “Any one of the decisions around the response you knew had consequences, good or bad,” he said. “The worst thing would have been not to make decisions. You have to keep moving.” Patrick said he had come to understand that you could trust the public with information—that you could be up-front about what you did and did not know, and that people would respect that. “I’m not saying there was unanimity in support for what we had to do,” he said. “I think people basically got that we were trying to do what was in their best interest.”

  In the car on the way home, Patrick felt drained. And he felt uneasy. Is this going to be a long, painful period of uncertainty? he thought. Where could this guy be? Is he up under some house, dead? The governor called home, where his wife, Diane, and his daughter Katherine had been looking after each other. They decided that, on his way back, he would pick up Thai food from a place in Quincy that they liked, called Pad Thai. They had found it on Yelp a while back. Diane and Katherine placed the order; Patrick didn’t have enough brainpower left to do it himself. Comfort food for an uncomfortable night.

  CHAPTER 14

  TRAPPED IN A BOAT

  “He’s in custody! He’s in custody!”

  All day long, David Henneberry had been looking out his window at the two fuzzy paint rollers lying on his lawn. They weren’t supposed to be there—they had fallen out from under the shrink-wrap cover on his boat. He was itching to go put them back where they belonged, but he didn’t want to disobey police. Already, officers driving up and down his street had spotted
him on his back steps smoking a cigarette. They had waved, with a look that said, Okay, but that’s far enough. There were helicopters hovering overhead. Henneberry figured if he got up on a ladder and started messing around with the boat, they would see him and angrily order him back inside. He understood that the situation in Watertown was serious; he was trying to respect authority, he really was. But as he stood there smoking just outside his back door, gazing down at the rollers on the grass not twenty feet away, he felt a nagging irritation. For a guy as meticulous as Henneberry—especially when it came to his twenty-four-foot Seabird powerboat—even that trace of disarray was hard to take.