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

by Helman, Scott

  • • •

  David King hadn’t written a speech, but he wasn’t worried. He would think of something. The trauma surgeon brought his wife, Anne, with him, and their two little girls, three and six, wearing matching polka-dot party dresses. The dinner at the Ipswich Country Club, north of Boston, was a fund-raiser for families of police officers killed in the line of duty. The organizers wanted King to talk about the marathon. Four months had passed, but people were still interested, still appreciative. They wanted to thank him for what he’d done. It was unfamiliar territory for King, who saved lives all the time but was almost never celebrated for it.

  The former Somerville police detective who had invited him to the dinner, Mario Oliveira, was one of the only patients with whom King had ever kept in touch. Oliveira had narrowly escaped death in a 2010 shoot-out. A bullet missed his heart by an inch; his heart stopped twice on the operating table, and both times King revived him. Afterward, the cop considered King a brother. When the surgeon was in Afghanistan, Oliveira checked on his family. When Oliveira’s second son was born, he gave him the middle name David. It had been King’s only brush with that kind of gratitude—until now. Since the marathon, the city of Boston had embraced him. It made him feel less an outsider, more a part of something. It anchored him here in a way he never expected. He was eager to run Boston in 2014, but he had also volunteered to help Dave McGillivray with medical response planning for next year. He wanted to be part of making everything go smoothly.

  King and Oliveira sat together at the dinner. As the meal wound down, the event organizers stepped to the podium to talk about Sean Collier. Then they honored Richard Donohue, the transit police officer wounded in the shoot-out. Donohue leaned on a cane at the front of the room, looking embarrassed by the standing ovation. “I miss Sean every day,” he said. Collier’s brother Andrew offered words of solace. “It’s easy to focus on the evil,” he said, “but the good in people outweighs the bad.” It felt like the right way to end. The room began buzzing, on the verge of breaking up. But there was one last speaker: Dr. King. He began to talk about that week in April. A hush fell over the dining room again. He talked about his patients, about Roseann Sdoia. He described Obama’s visit to Mass General, and his own assignment from the White House in advance, to write down every patient’s story for the president. He explained how it had changed him, taking time to talk with every person who was wounded. “I realized I’d worked on these patients for days and I hardly knew them,” he said. “I realized all those little details really mattered.” He paused to collect himself, briefly overcome, and the room was silent, willing him to recover. Then he spoke of Mario, the cop he’d saved, and their lasting bond. “All of you inspire me,” he said finally. He returned to his seat and took his six-year-old into his lap.

  In November, he ran the New York City Marathon. He decided to try for the same time he’d run in Boston in April—3:12—to link this race to the one that still loomed so large. He had taken two months off from running, though, to let his bad back heal, and he wasn’t sure how well he would do. He felt no anxiety, except for a single moment at the start, when a cannon boomed close by without warning, shaking the ground. Running felt great, and the race went well. He finished just two seconds off the mark, with a time of 3:11:58. One of his marathon patients, Kaitlynn Cates, who had suffered a serious leg injury but not an amputation, had come to New York to cheer him on; she was waiting at the finish line with a sign that said GO DR. KING—MY HERO—BOSTON STRONG. His wife was there, too, and his daughters. Before they had left Boston for New York, King’s parents had offered to take the kids so he and Anne could enjoy a weekend away by themselves. For a split second King had calculated the risk in his head: Would his children be safer staying home? Then he recognized what he was doing and shook away the thought. Nope, he told himself. I’m not thinking like that. The race would be a celebration, and his girls would be there with him.

  • • •

  “You have to smile, babe,” Billy Campbell had told his wife, Patty, in the weeks after their daughter’s death. “You can’t be in grievance twenty-four seven. You have to start thinking about the good things.” The prescription was wise and level-headed, but it would prove hard to follow—not only for Krystle’s parents, but for her extended family and the community she had built around her. The only thing they could do was to try to push through every day. “I was very lucky to have two great kids, and one of them was taken away,” Billy said. “I believe my daughter really could have made a difference in this world, for the good. She was out to really leave a mark. She already had in a lot of people’s lives. She was special, man. She was special.” It was hard to get past how unnatural this was. Daughters weren’t supposed to die first.

  The Campbells were a private family. They hadn’t asked for any of this attention. They understood, though, that Krystle had become an emblem of Boston’s sorrow. And they understood the expectations that came with that. So they put on the strongest faces they could muster and began representing their daughter at public events. Patty threw out a ceremonial first pitch at a Red Sox game at Fenway Park—the first time, her husband said, that she had worn a broad smile since the bombing. They attended a benefit concert at an Irish pub not far from their house. They stood alongside other proud parents at the University of Massachusetts Boston graduation ceremony, watching as the chancellor presented Krystle’s posthumous bachelor of arts degree to her brother, Billy III. They went to a New England Patriots game, where the team honored victims of the April attack. Throughout, they tried to reclaim their lives. They got out of town a little with friends and family. They doted on their grandson. In September, Patty returned to her job in food services at Harvard Business School. Billy worried about her all day, until she walked back in the door. He kept his phone in his pocket all the time. Some days went okay, and some didn’t. Sometimes the days cut both ways, like when they went to a relative’s wedding in Philadelphia, or when they received Krystle’s friends at home to look through pictures. Every celebration of life was a reminder of loss.

  One of the better days came on a gorgeous, cloudless Tuesday in late September, five months after the bombing. With the morning sun shimmering on the sea, Krystle’s parents, brother, and nana boarded a private ferry at Boston’s Long Wharf alongside dozens of other relatives and friends. After a short ride, the ferry pulled up to a dock on Spectacle Island, the beautifully restored former landfill out in Boston Harbor that had held a special place in Krystle’s heart. The group walked off the pier and onto a path that led up a hill, through a meadow of wildflowers and chirping crickets. At the top sat a wooden gazebo, built on an overlook offering majestic views of the Atlantic off the back side of the island. Above the entrance, a new sign had just been hung, yellow letters on two varnished boards: KRYSTLE M. CAMPBELL GAZEBO. Krystle’s work family on the islands, led by state park officials, had thought this a fitting way to honor her memory and her love of this place.

  Billy came in a gray suit. Patty wore blue pants, a cream-colored jacket, and pink tennis shoes. They took their places in the front row of white chairs arranged in front of the gazebo. Friends and family filled in behind them. The flags of the United States and Massachusetts flapped in the salty breeze. Krystle was “the lady with the million-dollar smile,” Medford mayor Michael McGlynn said during a brief ceremony. She represented the confidence Americans had in their way of life, McGlynn said, invoking the words of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” Her friend Tim Getchell told of Krystle’s role in building the islands community. “This gathering is a small reminder of the huge presence she had out here and always will,” he said. Patty spoke last. She walked up to the lectern and tearfully thanked everyone for their heartfelt words. “God bless you,” she said. “Thank you.” In that moment, it was all she could manage. “I’m sorry,” she said. Then Patty, B
illy, and his mother, Lillian, walked together toward a big red ribbon stretched across the gazebo entrance. With a pair of giant green-handled scissors, they cut the ribbon together, officially opening the gazebo under its new name. They walked slowly inside, studying the plaque hung in Krystle’s honor. The red ribbon danced in the wind.

  On the boat back to Boston, the solemnity of it all seemed to recede. There would be hard days ahead—that was certain. But this day felt like a celebration of Krystle’s life, a warm gathering of many who knew and loved her, who came out to cheer her exuberance, her fondness for blue eye shadow, her indelible Boston-ness. “It feels really good,” Billy said as he walked among the guests on the ferry. “It really does.” Nearby, Krystle’s friends and relatives stood by the boat’s makeshift bar, talking, laughing, and swapping hugs and stories. A few of them cracked open blue aluminum bottles of Bud Light. Patty stood among them, a bottle in her hand, too, gazing out a window at the sparkling waves.

  • • •

  The October weekend had been busy, progress mixed, as always, with reminders of her limits. In one quiet step forward—one she had not planned to take just yet—Heather Abbott had gone on a date Friday night. It was one of her biggest quandaries: how to reenter the dating scene; how to explain her story to new people. Standing at a bar in her high heels, Heather looked just like everyone else—that was the point. So when was she supposed to tell a potential suitor about her missing leg? And how would she handle it if he rejected her then? For months she had pushed the thought away. She wasn’t ready. Then a friend offered to set her up with a guy who was also an amputee, having lost his leg years before in an accident. It seemed like a good way to start, so she accepted. They sat on bar stools side by side and talked. The conversation went well. At the end of the night, when they started to get up, they found themselves momentarily stuck. Their prosthetic legs had somehow become hooked together, and neither one had realized it until that moment. They couldn’t help but laugh as they pulled the prosthetics apart.

  The next night, someone pulled a fire alarm in her Boston hotel, and Heather was forced to walk downstairs from the twenty-first floor. Going down stairs was still not easy, and she was slow. There was a moment in the stairwell, people running past her, when she felt panic flare. By morning, it had become a rueful lesson: From now on, she would ask for a room on the ground floor. But Sunday morning brought a welcome revelation, too. She left her hotel room wearing her striking new blade prosthetic, the kind used by amputee athletes for running. Unlike her other prosthetic legs, which looked so real they were rarely noticed, this one, a high-tech, custom-made carbon-fiber blade given to her by the Challenged Athletes Foundation, couldn’t be missed. She had been afraid that people would stare as she walked across the busy hotel lobby, but no one did. Blending in was liberating. She checked out and headed for the athletic fields at Harvard University.

  Outside, a cold October rain was falling. On a soaked playing field at Harvard, Heather joined a circle of other amputees doing warm-up stretches. She wore the hood of her gray sweatshirt pulled up over her head to fend off the chill. “You’re running your own race,” Joan Benoit Samuelson, a two-time Boston Marathon winner and Olympic gold medalist, told the group on the field, participants in a clinic for disabled athletes run by the foundation. “You’re showing us it can be done. . . . Go get ’em.” Heather would have loved to make it look easy, the way Benoit Samuelson made it sound, but she knew better by now. Like just about everything else, this was going to hurt.

  Heather and the others lined up on the edge of the field, standing on artificial turf stained dark green by the rain. When the trainer gave the command, they ran to the other side, passing rows of orange cones along the way. On the first trip across, Heather was the slowest, her movements tentative and awkward. She was having a hard time figuring out how high to lift her prosthetic leg; she didn’t want to scrape it on the ground and trip herself. On the trip back across the field, the trainer said, they would go faster. “Pull back, reach out; pull back, reach out,” he called as they started off. Heather tried to concentrate on his instructions, reaching with her new leg, planting it and pulling past it. She tried to set aside the fear of falling. They reached the starting line again, stopped and turned around. “We’re going to work on speed from here out,” the trainer told them. She was still moving slowly, feeling her way in the cold.

  On the wet field, morning became afternoon. The rain faded into mist, but the damp persisted. Heather kept running back and forth across the turf. Down the field and back, a short rest, then again. The ache in her leg became a constant throbbing, the new prosthetic pounding on her flesh with every step. Still she kept at it. It was possible that running would get easier in time—there was no way for her to know for sure. She kept going anyway, ignoring pain and doubt. It was the only way forward that she knew.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not exist without critical contributions from so many, starting with our colleagues at the Boston Globe, whose tenacious reporting, elegant writing, and thoughtful editing during a very difficult week in April—and in the long days afterward—built a strong foundation for Long Mile Home. We are deeply grateful to work alongside them each and every day. Never have their breathtaking skill and dedication been more apparent than in 2013.

  Our editor at the Globe, Mark S. Morrow, was a constant source of wisdom and counsel, as he has been to each book under his direction. His insights and judgment were essential, as was his steadying presence. Brian McGrory pushed this project from the beginning, rightly seeing the story as the Globe’s to tell. We are thankful for his support and leadership throughout. Christopher M. Mayer again proved his unwavering commitment to in-depth, long-form journalism and his expansive vision of what that can be. Other senior Globe editors were partners as well, including Christine S. Chinlund, Jennifer Peter, and Doug Most.

  A number of journalists within the Globe family deserve special mention, starting with Sally Jacobs, Patricia Wen, and David Filipov, whose deep reporting and captivating writing on the lives of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev played a key role in the book; their careful review of the manuscript was also indispensable. Eric Moskowitz’s story on Danny, the carjacking victim, was one of the unforgettable Globe pieces published after the bombing, and his assistance in getting that story right here was invaluable. Mike Bello and Liz Kowalczyk were especially generous with their time and guidance. We are grateful to David Abel for his firsthand account of the bombing, and to Bryan Marquard for sharing his own memories of the days that followed. Steve Silva’s brave video of the scene on Boylston Street was an important resource, as were the searing images of John Tlumacki and David L. Ryan.

  Many Globe reporters conducted vital interviews with key sources, including Andrea Estes, Shelley Murphy, Thomas Farragher, Jonathan Saltzman, Jenn Abelson, Sean P. Murphy, and Kevin Cullen. Thanks to Scott Allen for his considerable editing and reporting talents. Stephen Smith and the rest of the Metro editing and reporting staff worked tirelessly to cover every angle of the story, as did the Globe’s graphics, photography, video, and online teams. Special thanks to Mark Arsenault, Matt Carroll, Michael Rezendes, Brian R. Ballou, Todd Wallack, Kay Lazar, Maria Cramer, Maria Sacchetti, Andrew Ryan, Andrew Caffrey, Bill Greene, Michael Levenson, Stephanie Ebbert, Akilah Johnson, Jenifer B. McKim, Wesley Lowery, Milton J. Valencia, Evan Allen, Derek J. Anderson, Alli Knothe, Vernice Liles, Dina Rudick, Chiqui Esteban, Ryan Huddle, Lane Turner, Bryan Bender, Noah Bierman, Matt Viser, Christopher Rowland, Michael Kranish, and Tracy Jan.

  Janice Page was integral in developing a vision for Long Mile Home and helping us fulfill it. Ellen Clegg has continued to be a strong advocate for the book and the paper. Our thanks go as well to the Globe’s literary agents, Lane Zachary and Todd Shuster, who championed this project from the start and stood by us the rest of the way. At Dutton, our editor, Jill Schwartzman, was a trusted voice and dedicated partner. She de
ftly helped shape the book with a strong hand but a gentle touch. Thanks also to Ben Sevier, Brian Tart, Christine Ball, Amanda Walker, Stephanie Hitchcock, and Linda Cowen for sharing our vision and for all their work to make Long Mile Home a success. Thanks to Janet Robbins for her sharp editing. Our fact-checking team of Matt Mahoney and Stephanie Vallejo was crucial to our endeavor. Their careful scrutiny makes everything they touch better. Researcher and writer Walter Alarkon filled a big role in chronicling the national response to the bombing and the intelligence shortcomings that preceded it. Thanks also to Lisa Tuite, Jeremiah Manion, Maria Amasani, and Jim Wilson for their photo and research assistance, to Peter S. Canellos for his sharp editorial input, and to Jonathan Albano for his close review of the manuscript. Thanks to Mary Zanor, for her enthusiastic collaboration, and to Susanne Althoff, Anne Nelson, Francis Storrs, and Veronica Chao for their support.

  We are forever indebted to the many, many people who took the time to help us understand and accurately capture the events of April 15, 2013, and all that came after. A few deserve special recognition, beginning with those whose stories form the core of the narrative: Heather Abbott, Shana Cottone, David King, Dave McGillivray, and Krystle Campbell’s parents, Billy and Patty. By letting us into their lives, they have given the world complex, personal, and otherwise unattainable perspectives on the marathon attack and its aftereffects. We always believed in telling this important story through the eyes of the people who lived it; they made that possible, and we are extremely grateful.