Boston Strong

by Casey Sherman

  ForeEdge

  An imprint of University Press of New England

  www.upne.com

  © 2015 Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge

  All rights reserved

  For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

  Paper ISBN: 978-1-61168-559-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61168-728-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014948151

  Frontispiece: A makeshift memorial for marathon bombing victims at Copley Square, Boston, Massachusetts, on April 30, 2013. © dinhhang / 123RF Stock Photo

  For Martin Richard, Lingzi Lu, Krystle Campbell, Sean Collier, and all of the survivors of the April 2013 terror attacks in Boston. Each of you inspires this city and this nation every day.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Mayor Martin J. Walsh

  [1]Patriots’ Day

  [2]Murder in Waltham

  [3]Easy Money

  [4]Safe Haven

  [5]Joy on Boylston Street

  [6]Dagestan

  [7]Calm Before the Storm

  [8]Terror Strikes

  [9]Fire at Forum

  [10]Under Siege

  [11]Saving Lives

  [12]Taking Command

  [13]Keeler’s Ghosts

  [14]A Family’s Anguish

  [15]Citizen Soldiers

  [16]The Flame Is Kindled

  [17]Traitors

  [18]War in Watertown

  [19]The Lockdown

  [20]Captured

  [21]Sharing the Blame

  [22]Field of Dreams

  [23]The Deserted Island

  [24]The New Normal

  [25]From Finish Line to Finish Line

  Authors’ Note

  Notes

  Illustrations

  FOREWORD

  Marathon Monday is always one of the most remarkable days in Boston and has been for more than 100 years.

  It’s a day when people from across the globe turn their eyes to our great city to watch the world’s elite runners compete in one of the most unique and challenging road races known to man. For Bostonians, it’s a rite of spring as millions emerge from winter hibernation, congregate along the race route to cheer on thousands of runners and celebrate the human spirit.

  Terrorists tried to destroy our beloved tradition on April 15, 2013. They failed.

  When I became mayor of Boston in January 2014, fulfilling a lifelong dream of mine, one of the first challenges of my administration was to organize and oversee the first anniversary events of the Boston Marathon bombings. It was a monumental task as I was thrust into the position of trying to calm fears of terrorism while leading the city through one of its most somber moments.

  The stories that unfold in the pages ahead may at times be difficult to read. The bombings undeniably left a trail of wreckage in our city marked by immeasurable sadness, tragedy, and heartbreak. The nation lost a little more of its innocence that day as well.

  But there are also incredible tales of inspiration, hope, kindness, and heroism. What happened in the days and months after those cowardly attacks was nothing short of miraculous and revealed the indomitable spirit of Boston and America.

  Authors Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge spent countless hours over several months interviewing first responders, witnesses, survivors, family members of those who lost their lives, and public officials. Their dedication, compassion, and commitment was fueled by a desire to honor the victims and survivors.

  Like Wedge and Sherman, I have met many of the survivors and victims’ families and shared in their grief. I came away inspired by their strength and bravery. After reading this book, you will too.

  So many of them have shared in something so sad. But they chose not to quit and instead turned their tragedy into ways to inspire and help others. They’ve formed charities. They’ve supported one another. They’ve worked hard to rebuild their lives. They’ve learned how to find a new normal.

  Through their loss, grief, and sadness, they’ve found ways to help others. They’ve been incredible models of love and kindness.

  The city will never forget what happened that dark day—among the darkest in Boston’s long history. We will always honor those innocent people hurt and killed at the hands of cowards.

  But the marathon will be stronger—as it certainly was on the first anniversary of the bombings. I watched in amazement for hours as runners crossed the finish line on April 20, 2014, and knew that Boston would never be the same. But I also knew we would be better.

  This city is resilient. This is our marathon, and no one is going to take it away from us.

  Boston is a proud city, a fiercely loyal city. When you hurt one of us, you hurt us all. When one of us gets knocked down, we help them up. We take care of our own.

  We will not be held down. We will not be afraid.

  We are strong. We are Boston Strong.

  Mayor Martin J. Walsh

  BOSTON, MASS.

  [1]

  PATRIOTS’ DAY

  The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone;

  it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.

  — Patrick Henry

  LEXINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS,

  APRIL 15, 2013, 5:45 A.M.

  The cold ground trembled as the drumbeat of war echoed across Lexington Green, where thousands of spectators huddled together against the early morning chill. With their hands tucked into the lined pockets of heavy coats and heads wrapped in the warmth of woolen hats, hoodies, and scally caps, these hearty onlookers had gathered to witness the annual bloodletting ritual that had grown to symbolize the violent birth of the American Revolution. The crowd stood ten rows deep on both sides of the green, some with arms raised in iPhone salutes to capture the spectacle on video to share later on social media channels like YouTube and Facebook. A group of distinguished guests occupied the best vantage point on a raised platform that had been draped in patriotic bunting and set up directly in front of the Jonathan Harrington House at 1 Harrington Road.

  Those who had been coming out to the event each Patriots’ Day since the tradition had begun in 1969 recognized seventy-nine-year-old Bill Poole, a retired history and science teacher, who was standing in the center of the green with his silver mane tucked under a dark tricorne hat. For thirteen years, Poole had been a member of a local reenactment group known as the Lexington Minute Men, and the battle he was about to recreate was truly in his blood. Poole was a direct descendant of Ebenezer Locke, a farmer from Woburn who, according to some historians, fired the first musket shot against the British Regulars on that tragic April morning in 1775. Poole had played the role of his ancestor in previous reenactments, but this day was different. This day, he had finally been given the opportunity to perform what was considered the event’s lead role — that of Captain John Parker.

  It was Parker, a forty-six-year-old father of seven and hardened veteran of the French and Indian War, who had assembled a small band of armed colonists on the green 238 years before. “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon,” he told the group of just under seventy militiamen. “But if they want to have a war, let it start here.”

  Poole recited his line as the British Regulars, draped in red coats and wearing white britches, formed in tight columns nearly a hundred yards away. The pounding of drums was suddenly replaced by an eerie silence as the crowd watched six actors in the roles of British Major John Pitcairn and others advance toward the colonists. “Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels,” one actor shouted. “Damn you, disperse!” The warning was met by a rousing “Huzzah!” from the assembled British Regulars — which in turn triggered a volley of giggles
from the event’s younger spectators, many of whom had climbed the branches of tall oak trees for a better look at the carnage they were about to witness. Whether the result of steely resolve or simple confusion, the colonists refused to move. With precision and with muskets raised, the Regulars advanced toward their foes. In the guise of Captain Parker, Bill Poole — seeing that his militiamen were grossly outnumbered — ordered them to make a hasty retreat. At this moment, the crack of a single musket shot reverberated across the Lexington Green. The battle had begun.

  A moment later, brilliant flashes of orange and white exploded from the muzzles of dozens of Red Coat muskets, and on cue the Lexington Minute Men began to fall to this sacred ground. The crowd gasped as the violence reached its climax when a British Regular plunged his bayonet into the chest of a single downed colonist. As the controlled chaos continued, the Lexington Green disappeared under a blanket of gray smoke that masked the faces of dying men, screaming where they lay. The drums of war thumped loudly once more while the British fell back into position. The smoke soon rose off the green, revealing the sacrifice beneath — the bodies of men lying motionless on the grass. Once again, blood had been figuratively spilled, the annual ritual completed.

  The crowd dispersed in silence as the reenactors pulled themselves up from the grass. Hours later, the day would offer a more joyous opportunity to honor the spirit of Patriots’ Day, a holiday honoring our colonial forefathers that is celebrated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Many of those gathered in Lexington had planned to regroup in the afternoon to root for their beloved Boston Red Sox playing at Fenway Park, and to cheer on friends and loved ones participating in the 117th running of the world-renowned Boston Marathon. The unsuspecting celebrants would be joined by two young men — Black Hat and White Hat — who were planning a blood ritual of their own.

  Detective Sergeant Danny Keeler rose before dawn and made his way to the bathroom quietly so as not to wake his longtime girlfriend, Carol, who was still sleeping soundly in their bed. Today was a holiday for most, but not for him or his fellow officers of the Boston Police Department. They had orders to report for duty on this Patriots’ Day, better known as Marathon Monday. Keeler had run the marathon once back in 1978 and would never think of running it again. He looked in the bathroom mirror at his aging face, the sprouts of gray growing out of his mustache and along his temple. He was still fit, muscular even, but his body was built for sprinting, not running long distances. It suited him well on the job, where the finish line meant chasing down a suspect before he made his way over a chain-link fence to freedom.

  He sighed, rubbed his hand across his square jaw, and thought back to his younger days of chasing thugs and running the marathon. Those days were long behind him, he thought, massaging his knee, which was recently replaced with a titanium joint. His other knee, also needing replacing, throbbed.

  When he did run Boston back during the Jimmy Carter administration, Keeler nearly gave up when he reached the halfway point at Wellesley where his legs turned to rubber and his lungs burned. That day, the only thing that kept him pressing on toward the finish line at Boylston Street was the gruff voice of his former Marine Corps drill sergeant resounding in his ear, demanding that he not quit.

  Once a leatherneck, always a leatherneck, Keeler thought to himself as he examined his face once more before hitting the shower. He felt that everything he had earned, he owed to the Corps. He’d been an aimless kid when he first walked into the recruiting office back in 1969. Having left home at age sixteen, he had begun living and working as an orderly at the state psychiatric hospital in Mattapan. Still, it was better than staying in the projects where he’d spent his childhood. “It’s a development,” his mother always said. “Don’t call it a project.” Although his mother did everything possible to turn their concrete box into a home, it was what it was — a cramped tenement that felt more like a prison. The state psychiatric hospital wasn’t much better, but at least it was much bigger. Understanding there was no future in his current path, Keeler joined the Marines as soon as he was old enough. He survived boot camp and underwent jungle combat training at Camp Pendleton in preparation for deployment to Vietnam, but he never made it out of the United States. When his unit reached El Toro, the Marine Corps base in Irvine, California, that was the launch point for operations in Southeast Asia, it received orders to stand down. It was crazy to think this after all these years, but Keeler viewed the fact that he hadn’t fought in Vietnam as the greatest of his many regrets in life. And now his own son was serving in Afghanistan.

  But today, as on so many other days, Keeler set aside his regrets and planned to plow ahead as he had always done. And this day would be easier than most. Today was Boston’s version of an old Chevy commercial — Marathon Monday was quintessential Americana. Working the marathon was unlike working other big sporting events in the city, where drunken college students would use a big win or loss by the Red Sox, Patriots, Bruins, or Celtics as an excuse to turn over cars and light fires in Kenmore Square. The Boston Marathon was different. The marathon brought thousands of families into the city to cheer on moms, dads, sons, daughters, and even total strangers, most of whom were competing only against themselves, and also to cheer on the countless other participants who, over the past two decades, have helped raise more than $127 million for local charities. Danny Keeler and his men would keep an eye out for trouble as the bars and restaurants along the race route would be packed with people, especially after the matinee Red Sox game let out.

  After showering, Keeler pulled on a clean shirt, a pair of jeans, and his New Balance running shoes. He grabbed the keys to his unmarked silver Ford Fusion and walked out the door of his home in Quincy and into the morning chill.

  Mery Daniel felt the growing itch of spring fever. She’d been cooped up inside her in-laws’ apartment in Mattapan for what seemed like a lifetime. First it was the endless winter that piled up foot after foot of thick, wet snow on her stoop, making it impossible to go outside. Even though she now considered herself to be a hearty New Englander, the Haitian native had never gotten quite accustomed to the unpredictably harsh Boston weather. Now it was the studying — hours upon hours of studying that made her brown eyes strain and her temples throb. Mery had been cramming for her medical board exams, and her focus today was understanding and treating cardiomyopathy, a condition in which a damaged heart could not effectively pump blood.

  She lifted her eyes from the textbook and peered at her five-year-old daughter, Ciarra Surri, whose blood had been pumping quite well all morning. The young girl was a little tornado of boundless energy as she danced around the apartment with a wide smile that lit up every room she entered. Every time she looked at Ciarra Surri, Mery couldn’t help reflecting on her own journey. Her daughter would grow up with opportunities and conveniences that she could only dream about as a little girl living in the central Haitian city of Hinche, about an hour’s drive from Port-au-Prince. Mery had been raised by her mother, Gabrielle Fanfan, who juggled the rigors of running a tiny convenience store with the challenges of caring for four children: Mery, her sister, and two brothers. All five lived in a modest, cramped apartment. Their mother had sacrificed comfort for her kids’ education. Just about every gourde earned at Gabrielle Fanfan’s small shop went toward tuition for the private Catholic schools that Mery and her siblings attended. Still, Mery’s childhood was a happy one as her family would entertain themselves with Haitian folktales and by taking long walks to a nearby river to bathe. Her native language was Creole, but she learned how to speak English by reading Harlequin romances — much to her mother’s chagrin. Salacious reading aside, Gabrielle recognized her daughter’s intellectual gifts early on and knew that Mery could go only so far in life with a Haitian education. So, when her daughter turned sixteen, Fanfan sent her to the United States to live with her father, from whom she had separated when Mery was an infant.

  Mery’s father, Hary, had left Haiti in the 1980s and had settled in Brock
ton, Massachusetts, with his new wife, Rose. Brockton, a working class city of 100,000 a half-hour south of Boston, had a large Haitian population, so it was an easy transition for Hary, who found work as a bus driver. The change did not come so easily for his daughter, however, when she arrived a decade later. In Haiti, Mery had been accustomed to a small school, but Brockton High School had four thousand students and was the size of a small college. At sixteen years old, she could very easily have gotten lost, both physically and mentally. At first, Mery was first placed into a bilingual program at Brockton High, but she decided that it was not for her. “I wanted full immersion,” she recalls. “I wanted to be an American teenager and to do that, I had to be around other American teenagers.”

  Mery Daniel was a young woman with big plans. Her father was strict, and curfews were put in place to keep Mery focused on her studies. And focused she was. After graduating, she attended the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where she studied biochemistry and molecular biology. Mery’s only visit back to her native Haiti came in 2010, after a catastrophic earthquake killed more than one hundred thousand people and had left the country’s major cities in rubble. Mery returned to her homeland as a member of a group of students who distributed food on behalf of the United Nations. “It was the End of Days,” Mery recalls with horror. “So many lives were destroyed. People were devastated and desperate.” More than five thousand Haitians who had survived the initial earthquake and the violent aftershocks were later pulled from the rubble with bodies so broken that arms and legs had to be amputated just so the victims could live. The images of those survivors with their crudely wrapped stumps at their elbows and knees would never fade from Mery’s memory. She believed that God had put her on earth to help her people — to help all people.

  Mery Daniel graduated college in 2005 and went on to receive her degree from the Medical University of Lodz, one of the most prestigious medical schools in Poland. Now back in Boston, she was an aspiring doctor, a mother, and a wife to her husband, Richardson, a fellow medical school graduate who works with autistic children. By Marathon Monday, Mery had completed two of her medical board exams, and she was now studying for a third. She had been concentrating too hard for too long, and now her eyes were glazed over. Mery knew that she had to take a break; she had to get out of her apartment for the day. She had attended the Boston Marathon just once before and had relished the experience. It allowed her to be a part of something that was much bigger than herself. The marathon helped her connect with the city she now called her own. Yes, today was a day to put away the textbooks and to celebrate the fact that she was now a true Bostonian. She would attend the marathon and applaud all those runners who epitomized the courage and determination of the human spirit.