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

by Helman, Scott

  The boat was Henneberry’s greatest pleasure. Now that he was retired from his job as a phone company installer, the sixty-six-year-old Watertown native had more time to enjoy it. In another month, he would have the vessel in the water, and he and his wife, Beth, would settle into their favorite routine. Beth would pack a lunch on Sunday mornings, he’d pick up the paper, and they’d head for the nearby Watertown Yacht Club. There they would hop aboard the Slipaway II and meander eastward on the Charles River, around the bend at the Eliot Bridge in Cambridge, past Boston University to the Esplanade. They would often drop anchor there, in the basin between MIT and Kendall Square on the Cambridge side of the river, and, across the water in Boston, Beacon Hill and the golden dome of the State House. They would take their time with the paper and their lunch, and then, when it felt right, make their way back. They loved how easy it was and how free it felt to get away from everything.

  It felt like the opposite of all that on this particular Friday in April. They were stuck inside, like all their neighbors on Franklin Street, where Henneberry had lived for forty years. And the situation was unnerving. Somewhere in the area, the authorities said, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev could be hiding. Henneberry had been up late the night before—he was a night owl, a habit ingrained from his many years playing drums in bands at Boston nightclubs—and he had heard the gunfight erupt on Laurel Street. It was little more than half a mile away as the crow flies, across the backyards and quiet, tree-lined streets. He stayed up until 2:30 A.M. watching the news coverage on TV. It almost seemed unreal that the violence that had erupted in Boston on Monday had come to his town, his neighborhood. Early Friday morning, one of Beth’s children called to make sure they knew of the lockdown. Beth peered sleepily through the blinds and saw a military vehicle stop on the corner outside. Police dressed in heavy tactical gear assembled on the streets.

  The boat in Henneberry’s backyard was thirty-two years old, but it was nearly impossible to tell. He had owned it for eleven years, and he had been working on it the whole time. He had restored the cabin, crafted custom covers for the storage bins, laid in a new teak floor. The wood got seven, eight, nine coats of varnish—whatever it took for the shine to meet his standards. It was so glossy you could see your reflection. When winter threatened and it was time to store the boat for the season, Henneberry took pains to protect it from the weather. That was where the fuzzy white paint rollers came in. When the boat was sealed in protective white plastic, Henneberry liked to tuck ten or so rollers up under the bottom edge of the wrap, so it wouldn’t chafe against the boat and leave scratches. It was an extra, almost obsessive bit of care. Now two of the rollers were just lying there on the grass. Maybe, Henneberry thought, the wind had blown them out. Or maybe the wooden frame under the shrink-wrap had loosened up. As soon as he was allowed to venture that far, he would go outside and check it out.

  He and Beth watched the 6:00 P.M. press conference on the TV in their living room. They watched Governor Deval Patrick announce that “the stay-indoors request is lifted” and then ask the public to remain vigilant. “Remember there is still a very, very dangerous individual at large,” he cautioned. Then, as if realizing the ominous tone of his warning, Patrick added a note of reassurance. “We feel confident . . . we can return to living our lives,” he said.

  It was all Henneberry needed to hear. Well, they didn’t get him, he thought. He got away somehow, and now he’s in Boston, Worcester, wherever. Beth was not convinced. I wonder what they’re not saying, she thought. I think they think he’s still here.

  “I’m going to check the boat,” said her husband, heading to the back door.

  Henneberry crossed the small backyard to his garage, a low-slung, tidy structure, white with green trim, built along with the house in 1890. He grabbed his stepladder, carried it outside, leaned it up against the side of the boat, and stepped up onto the second or third step. He rolled up a section of shrink-wrap that covered the side door to the boat, put a clamp on it to hold it up, and peered in through the sheet of clear plastic underneath. Sunset was an hour away—there was still plenty of light—and he could clearly see blood on the floor of his boat. There was no mistaking that deep crimson color. He looked forward, toward the cabin, and saw more blood there, under the seats. His eyes traveled back and forth between the two sets of bloodstains, his mind working to make sense of what he saw. His gaze shifted, to the deeper interior—that’s when he spotted the body on the other side of the engine box. The person on the floor had his back toward Henneberry, the hood of a sweatshirt pulled up over his head. The body remained perfectly still as Henneberry, stunned, backed away silently down the ladder. Later, he would not remember stepping off onto the ground.

  He ran into the house. When Beth saw his face, she knew something bad was happening. Henneberry was shocked and confused, but he knew exactly who was in his backyard.

  “I . . . there . . . He’s in the boat,” he managed to stammer. Beth grabbed the phone, dialed 911, and thrust it at him.

  “This call is recorded,” the operator told him.

  Henneberry recited his name and address. “There’s a body in my boat in the backyard,” he recalled saying.

  “Sir, did you say there’s a body in your boat?”

  “Yes, there’s someone in my boat,” Henneberry repeated. “And a lot of blood.” He stood at the kitchen sink, watching the boat out the window.

  The operator told him that police were on the way. Then he asked if the man was still in the boat.

  “I think so,” Henneberry said. “But I can only see one side.”

  Then, without asking the dispatcher if he should, Henneberry decided to go back out and check. Cordless phone to his ear, he walked down the porch steps and back onto the grass. He moved closer to his six-foot wooden fence, peering down the side of it to check behind the boat.

  “He’s still in the boat,” he assured the operator.

  “How do you know that?” the operator asked.

  “I’m looking at the other side,” Henneberry said.

  As the operator ordered him to get back in the house, Henneberry turned away from the boat. He was facing his pebble-covered driveway when police came running up it, weapons drawn, yelling, “Get back! Get down! Where is he?” He felt a wave of overwhelming fear—what if they thought he was the terrorist? Frozen there, the phone still in his hand, he saw one officer emerge from the pack, and he realized she was calling his name: “David! David!” He recognized Watertown Police Detective Jennifer Connors, whom he knew from the Watertown Yacht Club. The familiar face jolted him from his paralysis. She grabbed his arm and pulled him down the sidewalk, away from the house. “Jen, Jen,” he told her, “get Beth! She’s all by herself!”

  • • •

  Around 6:45 P.M., right after Henneberry’s 911 call, William Evans jumped in his Boston police car with two lieutenants, racing toward Franklin Street behind a Watertown cop. State troopers and other police officers quickly descended on the property, too. Evans positioned himself in front of Henneberry’s house, looking straight up the driveway at the boat. He saw Dzhokhar poking at the tarp. Everyone at the scene began yelling. Police thought he might be trying to get a gun through. “We didn’t know what he had,” Evans said. “But given what he did at the scene of the marathon, given what he did during the shoot-out, and given what he did to the MIT officer, we knew we were dealing with a serious terrorist here who had weapons to the max.” Dzhokhar’s movements prompted someone to begin firing at the boat. Other officers immediately joined in, the shots ringing out through the quiet neighborhood. “Hold your fire!” Evans yelled. He believed they had the guy in their clutches, that things were under control. And he wanted to take Dzhokhar alive. The bullets stopped. Evans didn’t need guns. What he needed were SWAT officers who could get the suspect out.

  Rich Correale, Mike Powell, and Nick Cox had spent all day searching homes and properties in Watertown.
The SWAT team officers from the nearby city of Malden had just finished scouring an apartment complex. They were sitting out front of the building, talking to a supervisor from a Boston Police SWAT team working alongside them. Everyone was tired, ready to go home. Suddenly the supervisor got a call over the radio: A resident had seen some blood on his boat. “And we’re like, ‘Bullshit,’” Correale said. “‘This isn’t it.’” They had been chasing false alarms all day. This just seemed like another. Police on the radio called for SWAT units. The Boston squad was heading to the house and asked the Malden team to join. They agreed, reluctantly. “We were kind of dragging our feet,” Correale said. But as they walked to the van, the radio traffic intensified. Police had seen movement on the boat. The Malden guys heard “shots fired!” and raced to the scene.

  With the shelter request now lifted, the streets leading to Franklin were lined with people—“like a parade,” Nick Cox said. The Malden team dumped their van and ran the last quarter mile or so, in full SWAT gear, toward Henneberry’s house. Uniformed officers directed them to it. Correale, Powell, and Cox didn’t know what to expect. Was this it? Was this really him? They reached the bottom of Henneberry’s driveway. The boat sat just on the other side of two cars. As more officers arrived, snipers took positions in armored vehicles and in the windows of surrounding houses, their weapons trained on the boat. Correale, seeing guns pointed in several directions, got on the radio at one point and warned about the potential for deadly crossfire. Commanders removed some police from behind the boat.

  Everyone’s attention turned to getting Dzhokhar out of the Slipaway II. Police were on edge, not knowing what his intentions were, what weapons he had, or how hurt he was. They kept their distance at first. They tried tear gas, to flush him out, but he didn’t budge. Instead the gas drifted down the driveway, where the Malden team was set up. “We got smoked,” Correale said. “The whole place cleared out.” Around this time, an FBI tactical unit arrived and took command of the scene, behind a leader from the bureau’s Virginia-based Hostage Rescue Team; the FBI would later request that he not be identified by name. The FBI unit was composed of fourteen operatives, including three specialists in crisis negotiation. There were also two “breachers,” who had responsibility for preparing the scene for the operation; a K9 specialist, who coordinated all the responding K9 teams; three “assaulters,” who helped run the show on the ground; two communications specialists, one right near the boat and another in a vehicle a few blocks away; and two snipers, who got up on a building and provided cover for everyone else. The team leader quickly won the trust and respect of local police, taking their guidance into account, keeping them informed on next steps, and leading with firmness and unexpected humility.

  A number of warnings had trickled in over the radio, and it was impossible, in the moment, to weigh their legitimacy. Hovering above in a helicopter, state police outfitted with thermal imaging equipment reported that Dzhokhar looked like he may be trying to start a fire in the boat; dozens of gallons of fuel might be on board. The FBI team leader calmly told everyone to back away. If the boat exploded, he said, the flash would come right down the driveway. “I know this is your party,” the leader told Correale. “But we’re going to want you to back up.” They knew that snipers would likely take Dzhokhar out if he tried anything, but the Malden SWAT officers were prepared for the worst. They’d been told that Dzhokhar had a weapon and had exchanged gunfire with police. Indeed, throughout the two-hour standoff, all kinds of reports were coming over the transom about Dzhokhar’s purported arsenal—that he had a rifle, that he was armed with an AK-47, that he wore a suicide vest. “I was under the impression these people had no regard for human life,” Powell said. “So I’m thinking this guy’s going to go out with the last hurrah, and he’s probably going to try to take as many out with him [as he can].”

  At one point, around nightfall, Correale’s cell phone rang. It was his wife.

  “Hey,” she said, “you know they have him in a boat?”

  “Yep, I know,” he said.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in the driveway.”

  “You gotta be shittin’ me! You said you were just watching sidewalks!”

  The FBI breachers launched at least four or five diversionary devices into the boat, which produced loud, bright explosions meant to stun and disorient Dzhokhar. The idea was to buy police and federal agents time to safely move in. State troopers had also positioned a BearCat—an armored, military-style vehicle with chunky tires—in Henneberry’s backyard. They tried to tip the boat over using the BearCat, but the trailer made that difficult. They punctured the tarp instead. Authorities at one point discussed sending a dog into the boat but concluded it wouldn’t do much good; a dog wasn’t going to cuff the suspect and bring him out. As the standstill continued, the FBI team leader came over to where Correale’s team had assembled, alongside a group of SWAT officers from the transit police and officers from a regional unit called North Metro SWAT. If Dzhokhar wouldn’t leave the boat on his own accord, that left one option for taking him alive: They’d have to go get him. The team leader put his hand on Correale’s shoulder. “We need to move fast,” he said. “Get your team. Get a plan together.”

  • • •

  The call came while Deval Patrick was waiting to pay for his takeout order at the Thai restaurant. On the line was Tim Alben, the state police colonel. Alben told the governor the news: “We think we have the suspect.” Patrick now had a bundle of Thai food for himself, his wife, and his daughter, but he had to get back out to Watertown, and fast. He called his wife, Diane, and told her he couldn’t come home. They arranged a quick transfer of the food on his way back up north. Diane pulled up outside St. Agatha Parish, in their hometown of Milton, and the governor’s car did, too. Patrick hopped out, handed over the takeout, and gave his wife a kiss. “Be careful,” she said, and he was gone. They raced back downtown, picked up Patrick’s chief of staff, Brendan Ryan, and booked it to Watertown, blue lights flashing.

  The principals gathered in a trailer at the Watertown command post—Patrick, Alben, Rick DesLauriers of the FBI, and other top law enforcement officials, including an FBI tactical supervisor who, with chewing tobacco in his mouth and a Gatorade bottle as a spit cup, kept in constant communication with the leader of the Hostage Rescue Team at the boat; the FBI would later decline to name the supervisor. The HRT team leader called the supervisor about every five minutes on the phone; the radio frequencies were too jammed with voices. The supervisor in turn provided regular updates to state and local leaders. At times he just put the team leader on speakerphone so those in the trailer could hear directly what was going on. Inside the trailer, a flat-screen on the wall showed the live video feed from a thermal imaging camera on the Eurocopter TwinStar helicopter that Mark Spencer, a state trooper, was piloting above Henneberry’s property. For a time, Dzhokhar appeared to be totally still. They didn’t know if he was alive or dead. The color of the image on the screen seemed to be fading. Then he moved, and everyone stirred. He’s moving! He’s moving! Menino couldn’t get into the trailer because of his injuries, so he sat in the front seat of his SUV listening to the drama on the police radio, fervently hoping that this was really it. The operation seemed to be taking an eternity. Let’s get this over with, he thought.

  As the drama unfolded, the second-guessing began: How had the house-by-house teams not found Dzhokhar’s hiding place? Was Henneberry’s house within the perimeter that police had spent the entire day searching? A clear answer would prove elusive in the days ahead, as different police officials provided different accounts. What was clear was that no one had come to search Henneberry’s house that day—nor his garage, his boat, or his backyard—even though he lived just two-tenths of a mile from where Dzhokhar had ditched the Mercedes. Other residents of Franklin Street who lived farther from where Dzhokhar had escaped on foot did have their properties searched, but the work at times se
emed haphazard or incomplete. One neighbor had his barn searched, but not his house. Another had her barn searched, but had to ask the officers to check the structure’s cellar. Yet another neighbor, Robert Vercollone, saw a tactical officer conduct only a cursory check under his porch, whose latticework had a gaping hole because of ongoing plumbing work. “It’s the perfect size for somebody to crawl through,” Vercollone said. “But he didn’t poke around any further.”

  Answers to such questions would have to come later. By this point, with Dzhokhar surrounded by police and federal agents all armed to the teeth, there was no remaining doubt—they had him. The searches may have covered hundreds of homes and saturated whole blocks with SWAT officers, but the manhunt had hardly proved to be airtight. They had not, despite the promises, knocked on every door. And so it had been left to David Henneberry to discover Dzhokhar on his own. The chance encounter in a Watertown backyard could easily have ended with another victim.

  • • •

  Grabbing a Kevlar ballistic shield from a federal agent, Rich Correale began to assemble a team to approach the boat. He, Powell, and Cox would lead, followed by the transit police officers and members of North Metro SWAT. Two FBI assaulters would provide cover. The SWAT unit lined up in a stack in Henneberry’s driveway, Correale in front with the shield, the others in a column behind him. The FBI leader returned and briefed them on what he knew. Negotiators were having some luck getting Dzhokhar to cooperate, to follow their instructions, in part by citing a public plea by his high school wrestling coach, Peter Payack, to give himself up. Dzhokhar had lifted up his shirt at one point to show that he wasn’t wearing a vest. Correale ran through their plan, how they would go at the boat, try to get Dzhokhar to surrender, and grab him if he didn’t. The FBI leader went down the line to each member of the SWAT team. Flashing a thumbs-up, he asked them all: “You good with that?” The leader told them that if they didn’t like what they saw, they should pull back.