Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (10 page)

Standing where the second bomb had just blown up in front of Forum, Boston fire lieutenant Fred Lorenz surveyed the carnage. He saw two people who looked like they didn’t have long to live. Those who weren’t making any noise were the ones who needed help the most. Looking up Boylston toward the scene of the first blast, he could see ambulances. On his radio, he called for help—
755 Boylston,
we need ambulances!
—but all the other crackling voices drowned him out. The police and firefighters at the site of the first explosion, just a block away, were consumed with their own tangle of casualties; their focus had narrowed so tightly they did not yet realize a second deadly scene lay a short distance down the street.

Firefighter Pat Foley was rushing toward the site of the first blast when the second bomb exploded just fifty feet away. Two or three more steps and he stood in the middle of the smoke and wreckage, surrounded by bodies and body parts on the ground. Foley was a thirty-four-year veteran of the fire department; as the assistant chief of the city’s dive team, he routinely rescued and recovered bodies from the water. As he began barking orders at the hysterical people around him, his authoritative tone silenced some of the screaming. “
Gimme the belt,” he told a woman standing at his side. Other people turned toward the sound of his voice—people who were unscathed; people with shredded clothes and holes in their legs—seeking the small comfort of direction. “I need more belts,” he ordered, and people obediently fumbled to comply. Foley knelt beside a critically wounded man and cinched a belt tight around his leg, cutting off the blood flow. “Go get every towel in the restaurant,” he told a young man nearby, who sprang into action. Then Foley looked closer at the injured man whose tourniquet he gripped, and realized that his legs were still on fire. Grabbing his knife, he sawed at the man’s burning pants. The man, whose name was Marc Fucarile, lay not far away from Roseann, the woman with the singed blonde hair whom Shana was trying to comfort.

Finally, an ambulance was coming toward them. “Here it comes; it’s almost here,” Foley assured the two victims. Roseann heard the sirens and thought,
This one
must be for me
. But as the vehicle approached it showed no sign of stopping. Frantic bystanders and police rushed forward, screaming and waving, trying to flag down the driver. All at once their nightmare felt like a prison: There was no way out and no way to end it. “We’re full, we’re full!” the driver yelled as he passed them. Another ambulance approached and it, too, kept on rolling. Shana could not believe what was happening. What did the driver mean “full”? Was there any space at all, on the floor, in the front seat? Were these people going to bleed to death here on the street?
We’ve got to get them out of here right now
, she thought with mounting desperation.
There are a million hospitals, but we’ve got to get them there.

A van pulled up beside them in the middle of the street. It was a Boston Police Department prisoner transport vehicle—otherwise known as the “paddy wagon”—a white truck with a blue stripe down the side and a big metal box to carry passengers on the back. It was typically stationed near big events like the marathon, mostly to send a sobering message to any rowdies in the crowd. The driver, Jim Davis, was a large, imposing man with the tattoos of a biker and decades on the force. He could see and hear the desperation in Roseann’s eyes and in Marc’s voice, pleading with the first responders not to let him die. “I’ll get you to the hospital,” Davis said. People were already struggling to wrench open the truck’s rear doors, yelling about which victims needed to go first. To Fred Lorenz, in charge of the day’s EMS operation, it was perfectly clear who would go. But with the clamor in the street, no one seemed to hear him. Looking at Roseann and Marc, he spoke again, this time with a clarity that ended the debate: “These two people need to go now or they’re going to die.”

Shana Cottone, Pat Foley, and another firefighter, Mike Materia, helped load Roseann and Marc into the back of the van. Each of the victims lay across a backboard; the firefighters propped the boards on the bare metal benches along the sides of the cab. Foley and Materia knelt on the van’s metal floor back to back, each cradling a victim in his arms as they tried to hold the man and woman steady on the benches. Up front, Shana leapt into the passenger seat of the wagon. The metal doors slammed shut, plunging the four passengers in the back into blackness.

 • • • 

I
n the alley between Boylston and Newbury Streets, Jason Geremia had discovered that his friend Heather was missing. Seven of them had come to the marathon together; now six were gathered behind Forum restaurant, in the frightened, confused sea of people who had fled through the back doors of businesses on Boylston. “Where is she?” Jason urgently asked their friend Michelle. She had been standing next to Heather at the front door when the bomb exploded, when everyone started running, but now she had no idea where Heather was.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Jason demanded. He moved back toward the metal staircase they had just come down, intending to fight his way back up the stairs and into the bar, but people were still coming down in droves, blocking his path. Then, as he looked up the stairs, he saw Heather, in the arms of a big bald man coming through the door. Jason pushed closer. “Give her to me, bro,” he said.

“Wait,” said the man. “Look at her leg.”

Jason looked and saw that Heather was in serious trouble, her left foot partially destroyed. “Oh my God, oh my God,” she was saying. “What happened? Jason, what’s going on?”

The big man—Jason thought he was a bouncer from the bar but learned later he was Matt Chatham, a former linebacker for the New England Patriots—laid Heather gently on the ground. “Please call an ambulance,” she told her friends. Her friend Jess got on the ground beside her, resting her head on Heather’s shoulder and holding her hand, while Jason punched in 911 on a cell phone. “We’re behind the Pelham,” he told the operator, mistakenly giving the name of a bar back in Newport. One of his friends quickly corrected him. “Sorry, behind Forum,” he said into the phone. No one else nearby in the alley had been hurt, and strangers gathered around them, trying to help.

“Do you think we should move her?” a man asked Jason.

“Don’t move her!” a woman ordered sharply.

Another woman hunted around in the alley until she found a sheet of wood five or six feet long, big enough to carry Heather out on if they had to. Heather tried to stay focused on one task: somehow getting herself to a hospital. She knew it had to happen fast, but the wait in the alley seemed to take forever. A nurse and a doctor appeared and asked for a belt. Her friend Tommy pulled his off and gave it to them. Someone fastened it as a tourniquet on her leg. Still no ambulance appeared in the alley.

Her friend Jess was crying now, her face close to Heather’s. “Don’t leave me,” Heather told her softly.

 • • • 

S
hana Cottone leaned all the way out the window on the passenger side of the police van as it inched up a side road, away from Boylston, screaming at the people in the street to get out of the way. Her sense of urgency had not abated, but she felt a little safer, now that they were heading away from the scene of the bombing. They turned left onto Huntington Avenue. She took out her phone and dialed her father in New York. “Dad,” she said when he answered, “we’re being attacked. I’m okay. I’m trying to get people out. I love you.” She hung up. The van was passing quickly through the Back Bay now. They turned onto Stuart Street and then onto Charles, between Boston Common and the Public Garden, two of the city’s swaths of downtown green, the Common much older than the country.

The back of the police van was another world, hard and windowless and completely dark. The two firefighters knelt on the metal floor as the vehicle careened across the city, each holding one of the severely injured victims. They struggled to protect the wounded from the rough ride, to keep them from sliding off the bare metal benches while still gripping the tourniquets on their legs. Foley was afraid that Marc, the man he cradled, might think that he had died, because of the pitch-blackness in the van. He reached into his bunker coat, found a tiny light and switched it on. Marc was asking for his fiancée and child; he was fading in and out of consciousness. They were so close now, a minute or two away, but it wasn’t clear if he had that long.

They turned right on Beacon Street, then cut left to zigzag down historic Beacon Hill, on narrow streets lined with well-kept brownstones, to Massachusetts General Hospital. The van’s driver sped toward the emergency room entrance, slamming the vehicle into reverse to back into the ambulance bay. As they rolled in reverse toward their destination, the cell phone Marc was clutching started ringing. Somehow, he managed to answer the call from his fiancée, thrusting the phone at Foley and begging him, “Please, talk to her.” Normally, at accident scenes or in ambulances, Foley avoided speaking to family members. At this moment, though, he could not refuse. He took the phone. “This is a Boston firefighter,” he said. “We have your husband, we’re at Mass General, you need to come here.”

Outside the van, in the concrete chamber where ambulances delivered patients, security guards were banging angrily on the sides of the vehicle, bellowing at the driver to move it out of the way. They knew about the explosions at the marathon; they were out there waiting for the victims to show up. “We’ve got ambulances coming!” they yelled at Jim Davis in the driver’s seat. Shana jumped out and ran around to the back of the van, yanking open the doors. Light flooded into the cab, revealing the horrific tableau. Shana helped Pat Foley carry out the injured man as the security guards looked on in shock. “They’re bringing them in paddy wagons!” one of them exclaimed. Marc looked gray and lifeless as they laid him on a gurney. Never had Foley so longed to hand over responsibility. But as he prepared to step away, a nurse spoke sharply. “Don’t let go of that tourniquet,” she warned him. Together, then, they were moving through the door and down the hallway, the firefighter running alongside the gurney, his hand still on the belt, his viselike grip still holding back the flow of blood.

 • • • 

J
ason Geremia looked up at the metal staircase behind Forum and saw paramedics with blue gloves coming down it, carrying a backboard used for moving victims.
They were coming for Heather; they were going to get her out of this alley and into a hospital. Jason and his friends followed as the paramedics carried her back up the stairs and through the wreckage in the restaurant. They approached the front door; the scene up ahead, the smell like gunpowder, was shocking.
This is what soldiers see all the time
, thought Jason.
But I’ve never been to war, and I’m not prepared
. Police let two of Heather’s friends follow her outside, but they turned away Jason and the others at the door, sending them back through the restaurant to the alley. Out in the street the ambulance was waiting; the EMT put Heather inside it. Her friend Jess tried to climb in the back with her, trying to keep the promise she had made back in the alley. “No, no,” the paramedics told her. “You can’t come with us.” “It’s okay,” said Heather. “It’s okay. Let’s go.”

A paramedic put a needle in her arm and started an IV. Someone cut off her clothes with a pair of scissors. She could hear the driver screaming at the people in the street: “Make a hole! Make a hole!” The thought of being stuck there filled her with fear.
Please
, she thought, willing the crowd,
please move out of the way
. As they lurched through the streets toward Kenmore Square and Fenway Park, where she had started her day, heading for Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Heather asked the EMT to call her parents. She had lost her cell phone, but she knew their home number by heart.

Her mother picked up the phone at home in Rhode Island. The paramedic told her that Heather had been hurt, that they were heading for the hospital, and that she should come to the Brigham. He paused, listening to her questions. “I can’t talk anymore,” he said before hanging up. “Just come as fast you can.” Then the ambulance was jerking to a stop. The doors swung open and Heather was moving fast, into the teeming nerve center of the ER.
I made it
, she thought with relief.
I finally made
it
. It was the last thought she would remember having before everything went black.

 • • • 

T
he two firefighters had run beside the gurneys into Mass General, gripping the two victims’ tourniquets as they sped through the maze of corridors. Finally, deep within the emergency department, the nurse in charge cleared them to let go. The two patients, Marc and Roseann, disappeared, headed straight for surgery. Pat Foley and Mike Materia stood in the middle of the hallway looking at each other. Neither one of them knew how to get back out. Then they looked down at the floor and saw the trail of blood, clearly marking the way they had come in. They followed it out, back to the waiting police van. Foley realized that his hand was aching from holding the tourniquet so tight for so long.

Outside, Shana was waiting with Jim Davis, ready to take them back to Boylston Street. The back of the van was slick with blood, but the firefighters climbed in. They were already covered with it anyway. It felt almost impossible, what they had to do next—going back to the street to face it all again. But it was their job, their duty. They steeled themselves to it as best they could. They had no choice.

Only forty minutes had elapsed since the bombs exploded, maybe less. Yet the scene had been transformed when they climbed back out of the van. Everyone was gone; everything was silent. There were no more bleeding people in the street, no more screaming bystanders. There was only a sea of debris, scattered metal barricades and gently drifting paper and bags dropped by spectators in agony or in flight. It was still late afternoon, but the unreal quiet belonged to the darkest hour of night.