Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (26 page)

 • • • 

F
or two days after being yanked from the Watertown boat, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lay unconscious in a hospital bed at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. FBI agents trained to interrogate “high-value” detainees waited outside the room for him to wake up. When he finally did,
the agents began to pepper him with questions—and they did so before reading him his Miranda rights; a public safety exception to the procedure allows investigators to conduct limited interrogations of suspects before informing them of their right to stay silent. On April 21, Dzhokhar began to talk, providing investigators with their first details straight from the mouth of one of the men who had planned the assault on the marathon.

Dzhokhar, nursing a serious gunshot wound to the mouth and neck, provided some answers by nodding and by writing on a piece of paper. Talking was difficult. But he communicated quite a bit. He told investigators that
he and his brother had considered other schemes, including mounting suicide attacks and setting off bombs at another large public celebration beloved by the city—the traditional Fourth of July concert along the Charles River, where hundreds of thousands gather every year to watch a massive fireworks show set to the music of the Boston Pops. When the brothers, working in their Cambridge apartment, assembled their bombs faster than expected, they began looking for a place to strike sooner than the summer. They had cased police stations—several in Boston and one in Cambridge—seeking law enforcement officers to target, before settling instead on the Boston Marathon. They had drawn motivation, Dzhokhar said, from the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and they had acted on their own, without any direct assistance from Al-Qaeda or another terror network. Though the date in mid-April coincided with tax day, and fell close to Adolf Hitler’s birthday and the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, both April 20, those events did not appear to influence their timing.

In mining Dzhokhar’s laptop, investigators had found books and a magazine promoting radical interpretations of Islam. The books included
Defense of the Muslim Lands
,
The First Obligation After Iman
, and
Jihad and the Effects of Intention Upon It
, which promotes martyrdom. Dzhokhar had also downloaded one book, noteworthy less for its long title—
The Slicing Sword, Against the One Who Forms Allegiances With the Disbelievers and Takes Them As Supporters Instead of Allah, His Messenger and the Believers
—than for the author of its foreword, Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico–born Muslim cleric. Awlaki, whom counterterrorism officials had tracked for years, was
an apparent source of inspiration for Dzhokhar and Tamerlan, who likely watched Awlaki’s influential Internet videos.

Awlaki was once seen as a moderate Muslim voice but became infamous for his anti-Western screeds, which his followers posted on the Internet. YouTube removed clips of his sermons in 2010,
after a British student said that watching them inspired her to try to assassinate a member of Parliament—he survived the attack. By then,
US officials viewed Awlaki as a major source of inspiration for militants trying to strike against the United States. The 9/11 Commission found that three of the 9/11 hijackers had seen Awlaki preach and had met with him. Nidal Malik Hasan, a US Army major and psychiatrist, e-mailed extensively with Awlaki before shooting and killing thirteen people and injuring more than thirty at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in November 2009. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who confessed to trying to set off explosives hidden in his underwear while on an airliner headed to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, stayed at Awlaki’s house and got Awlaki’s approval for the bombing attempt, according to prosecutors. And Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen with an MBA, said his May 2010 attempt to detonate a car bomb in Times Square was inspired by Awlaki’s call for holy war against the West. Thus when a US drone strike killed Awlaki in Yemen in September 2011, President Obama called his death a “major blow to Al-Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate.”

Whether linked to Awlaki or not,
these smaller, self-contained terror plots—perhaps financed or inspired by Al-Qaeda but carried out by a quiet few—had increasingly worried US homeland security officials since 9/11. These attackers didn’t necessarily have to find a way into the United States; some were already here, concealed, in effect, within ordinary-looking families. Their weapons of choice, including crude bombs and automatic weapons, could be acquired with relative ease or created using Internet recipes and widely available materials. “
These extremists have no formal relationship with Al-Qaeda, but they have nonetheless adopted the Al-Qaeda ideology,” Matthew Olsen, director of the federal National Counterterrorism Center, told a high-level homeland security conference in June 2011. “And what makes them especially worrisome is that they’re really difficult for us to detect and, therefore, to disrupt.” The Tsarnaevs seemed to fit the profile—homegrown terrorists seemingly assimilated in America but harboring a latent hatred for it.

In August 2011, the White House warned in a policy paper of a growing number of American citizens and residents just like the brothers who were moved to act by the ideology of extremists abroad. “
The number of individuals remains limited, but the fact that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents are openly and specifically inciting Americans to support or commit acts of violence—through videos, magazines, and online forums—poses an ongoing and real threat,” the paper said. President Obama, in the paper’s introduction, called on Muslims to help root out these threats. “Communities—especially Muslim-American communities whose children, families, and neighbors are being targeted for recruitment by Al-Qaeda—are often best positioned to take the lead because they know their communities best,” he said. Another necessary step, according to Olsen and the White House, is that federal, state, and local authorities communicate and share what they know—exactly what Ed Davis and others said should have happened before the Tsarnaevs brought deadly explosives to Boylston Street. Tamerlan, after all, had set off alarms years before, and there were troubling intimations about his intentions. The lack of knowledge of any specific intentions, however, meant they failed to attract more than a piecemeal response from law enforcement.

 • • • 

W
hile back on the campus at UMass–Dartmouth the Wednesday after the bombing, Dzhokhar hung out, federal prosecutors said, with two friends he had entered college with in 2011: Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, nineteen-year-olds who were born in Kazakhstan to well-off families.
The three friends were among the few Russian speakers on campus. Classmates said they often spent time together, and with other international students. Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov
shared a black BMW, which Dzhokhar would sometimes borrow.
The car had a fake license plate on the front, a gift from Spanish friends, that read
TERRORISTA #1
.
Tazhayakov’s father would explain later that the plate was supposed to be a joke, a nod to a lyric from “Harlem Shake,” a popular dance track. “
Terrorista #1 doesn’t mean Osama bin Laden, doesn’t mean ‘terrorist,’” Tazhayakov’s father told a Kazakh television station. “In their slang, it means ‘happy-go-lucky,’ ‘a leader of the pack,’ that sort of thing.”

On that Wednesday,
two days after the bombing, Kadyrbayev drove over to Dzhokhar’s dorm. The two chatted outside as Kadyrbayev smoked a cigarette. Kadyrbayev noticed that Dzhokhar’s hair had been trimmed. Later on, Dzhokhar drove to the apartment Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov shared in New Bedford and stayed until around midnight. The next day, Thursday, April 18, Dzhokhar gave Tazhayakov a ride home after class. It was just another week at college. Until suddenly it wasn’t.

On Thursday evening, after the FBI images of the bombing suspects led every news report in the country, a third friend, former UMass–Dartmouth classmate Robel Phillipos, who had gone to Cambridge Rindge & Latin with Dzhokhar, allegedly called Kadyrbayev as Kadyrbayev drove back to the New Bedford apartment. Phillipos was nervous. He told his friend, “Turn on the TV when you get home.” The face of one of the suspects was a little too familiar. Here, in grainy pixels on the screen, was a man who looked an awful lot like Dzhokhar, a man now being described as one of the most wanted criminals alive.

The three men’s accounts of what happened next diverged somewhat, but not long after the FBI put out the pictures, Kadyrbayev, Tazhayakov, and Phillipos went to Dzhokhar’s dorm room. His roommate told them Dzhokhar had left an hour or two before. So the three friends put on a movie. As they watched, they noticed a backpack full of hollowed-out fireworks, the powder gone. At one point, Kadyrbayev texted Dzhokhar, saying he looked like one of the suspects, Kadyrbayev told investigators.

lol
, Dzhokhar replied—“laughing out loud” in text-speak.
You better not text me.

Kadyrbayev got another text from Dzhokhar that he showed to Tazhayakov. It included a bizarre invitation plus a traditional Muslim greeting:
If yu want yu can go to my room and take what’s there :) but ight bro Salam aleikum
.

In Dzhokhar’s dorm room that night, Kadyrbayev, Tazhayakov, and Phillipos allegedly picked up Dzhokhar’s laptop and his backpack, which contained, among other things, fireworks and a jar of Vaseline. They brought the items back to the New Bedford apartment. As they watched the continuing news coverage, Phillipos would tell investigators, the friends began to “freak out.” Kadyrbayev wondered aloud whether they should get rid of the stuff they’d taken from Dzhokhar’s room.

“Do what you have to do,” Phillipos said he replied.

Kadyrbayev then allegedly put the backpack with the fireworks into a black garbage bag and deposited it in a trash bin outside the apartment. The next day, Friday, April 19, after Dzhokhar had been identified by name as one of the bombing suspects, Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov watched as a garbage truck took the contents of the trash bin away.

Investigators soon interviewed and then arrested the three friends, accusing them of trying to help Dzhokhar cover up the bomb plot. Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov were each charged on two counts of obstruction of justice. Both pleaded not guilty.
Kadyrbayev’s lawyer contended that he had not, in fact, recognized Dzhokhar on the news and thus didn’t know his friend was a bombing suspect; Tazhayakov’s lawyer said his client was shocked Dzhokhar could have committed an act of terrorism. Phillipos faced two counts of making false statements in a terrorism case, following misleading accounts he allegedly provided to investigators. Phillipos’s lawyers said that he had nothing to do with removing the backpack or destroying potential evidence. Less than two weeks after the marathon attack, more than thirty federal agents combed through a New Bedford landfill looking for the discarded items.
After hours of searching, they finally came upon Dzhokhar’s backpack. Inside were fireworks, Vaseline, a thumb drive, and something that spoke to Dzhokhar’s more mundane concerns before April 15, 2013: a homework sheet from the university.

 • • • 

T
he more the media drilled into the Tsarnaevs’ background, the more their relatives came under the spotlight. On the Friday morning after Tamerlan was killed, with police still hunting for Dzhokhar, investigators and reporters found their uncle Ruslan Tsarni, a corporate lawyer living outside Washington, DC. Tsarni first spoke with FBI agents inside his home. When he emerged, he walked up to the television cameras and reporters gathered outside looking for the latest in what had become the biggest story in the world. In an impromptu press conference, aired live on network television, Tsarni offered condolences to the bombing victims, denounced his nephews, and ordered Dzhokhar to turn himself in. Asked to explain what provoked the brothers to attack, Tsarni said: “Being losers. Hatred to those who were able to settle themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine of. Anything else—anything else to do with religion, with Islam—that’s a fraud. It’s a fake.” He was asked how he felt about the United States. “I respect this country, I love this country,” said Tsarni, who moved to the United States in 1995 and became a US citizen. “This country, which gives [a] chance to everybody else to be treated as a human being and to just be a human being.”

An opinion writer for the
Washington Post
called his words “inspiring” and said his press conference was “a moment we all needed.”
The
New Yorker
said he “looked like he might hunt his nephew down himself.” Two aunts of the Tsarnaev brothers, Maret Tsarnaeva and Patimat Suleimanova, had a very different view of things. Both expressed disbelief that their nephews could have set off the bombs. “
I’m suspicious that this was staged,” Maret Tsarnaeva told reporters in Toronto. “I just do not believe our boys would do that.” Suleimanova, living in Dagestan, said that Tamerlan may have been religious, but
he wasn’t an extremist. “
A man who takes Islam cannot do this,” she said. “They are not terrorists. I have no doubt that they were set up.”

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s mother, Zubeidat, was the most insistent that her two sons had been framed, claiming, the week after the bombing, that
it was all “lies and hypocrisy.” Her defiance was hardly surprising—US officials had her on a terrorist watch list, too. “They already want me, him, and all of us to look [like] terrorists,” she said at an April news conference in Dagestan with Anzor, her ex-husband and Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s father. This was the family that had once come to the United States seeking a better life, settling in Cambridge, raising two boys whose lives became flecked with American influences. This was the family who had chosen this place, who had wanted it. Now, as they stood dismissing the overwhelming evidence of their sons’ horrendous crimes, they seemed as distant from American soil as they could possibly get.

The marathon man finishes the race

H
e had to run. No question. Dave McGillivray had made the commitment forty years ago in honor of his late grandfather: He would complete the Boston Marathon every spring, until his body wouldn’t let him. He’d kept the promise, one way or another, all these years. Nowadays that meant heading out to the starting line later on Marathon Day, once he had satisfied his race-director duties. This year,
the bombing had complicated things. The phone call had come as he was about to start down the course. His personal mission was suddenly the last thing on his mind.

He couldn’t just walk away from his promise, though. Especially not now. It was a question of timing—when would it be appropriate to get back out to Hopkinton, to keep his streak alive? In the days immediately following the attack, there was far too much to do—helping the Boston Athletic Association contend with the fallout, ensuring that runners were accounted for, supporting crestfallen volunteers. He was conscious, too, of appearing respectful, of not wanting to seem self-absorbed. So he waited for the funerals to pass, for the crush of care at the hospitals to ease, and for the city to reopen Boylston Street; he felt like he shouldn’t be the only person with access to the finish line. And yet he was anxious to get going. The demands of overseeing the marathon made it difficult to train adequately. Year to year he was never sure he could go the distance. “Emotionally and physically, I wanted to get it done,” he said. “It was on my nerves.”

He settled on a Friday, eleven days after Marathon Monday. He contacted his running partner Josh Nemzer, who was the course director for the race, and asked if he was available. Nemzer was. They made plans to go to Hopkinton early that morning, but they kept their intentions quiet. They didn’t tell the media, didn’t alert the cops, didn’t inform any race executives except Tom Grilk, the head of the BAA, who understood their desire for discretion. Nemzer’s son Aaron drove them out to the starting line. McGillivray’s son Ryan met them out on the course. There was something special about the small group—just McGillivray and Nemzer running the course and their sons trailing in cars. It would be a moment for them alone.

Around 8:30
A.M.
,
they prepared to set off. They tied on their running shoes. Nemzer’s son took a picture. They had done this so many times together that their prerace routine was automatic. “It’s almost like two people who don’t have to speak,” Nemzer said. Then they were gone, heading east down the sidewalks and the sides of roads—unlike on Marathon Monday, the streets this day were not closed to traffic. Aaron, driving his dad’s Honda CR-V, and Ryan, driving his pickup truck, shadowed them, stopping every once in a while to offer the dads water, Gatorade, bagels, and pretzels. “It felt good to take these first steps back toward Boston,” Nemzer said.

About halfway down the route, McGillivray’s cell phone rang. It was Ed Jacobs, the technical producer for the marathon, whose company, Interstate Rental Service, held the contract to build the bleachers and other finish-line infrastructure. McGillivray was breathing heavily—breathing like he was running.
Jacobs picked up on it.

“Where are you?” Jacobs asked.

“I’m in Wellesley,” McGillivray responded.

“You’re not doing your run, are you?” Jacobs asked.

“Well . . . well,” McGillivray stammered, not wanting to divulge the secret. He didn’t want to lie, either.

“You are, aren’t you?” Jacobs said. He told McGillivray he would meet him at the finish line.

What McGillivray didn’t know was that Jacobs would alert a Boston police officer that McGillivray was out on the route and would soon enter the city. The officer got on his radio and made the announcement. McGillivray’s annual running of the course was part of marathon legend. It wasn’t something police would let go unnoticed. When McGillivray reached Hereford Street, the final road before the route curves around to Boylston, he saw a Boston police cruiser. An officer got out. “Are you McGillivray?” the officer asked. And with that, McGillivray’s plan to quietly run the marathon came apart.

A police officer on Boylston flipped on his sirens and began moving cars to the side of the road. Other officers began cheering him on—“Go Dave, Go!” The commotion drew people out of the stores. The news had also broken on Twitter. The media, which had often covered McGillivray’s postmarathon runs and were now hungry for fresh stories, converged. A news helicopter appeared overhead.
I’m in deep trouble
, McGillivray thought to himself. The attention, the fanfare, the spectacle—this was exactly what he had hoped to avoid. The last thing he wanted was to be the guy who brought sirens to Boylston Street so soon after the bombing.
Who is this clown?
he imagined people in their cars thinking. At the same time, he didn’t want to appear ungrateful. He knew that everyone’s intentions were good. So he went with it.

Crossing the finish line was emotional, there in the sunshine in the middle of a bustling Friday, at the very spot where evil had visited his beloved race. Because of all the hoopla, though, it wasn’t quite the cathartic experience he had envisioned, or needed. “That special moment never came,” McGillivray said. He was too busy trying to shrink from the spotlight, fending off requests for interviews from the TV cameras. He slipped into the front seat of Nemzer’s car, the cameras trained on the passenger window as if he were a criminal or misbehaving starlet. The memory was one he would not soon forget. He was usually accessible to the press, but not today, not like this. And yet the act of running, of completing the marathon course once again, just like he had done for more than four decades, had still been important. With this run, this personal feat in defiance of the bombing, Dave McGillivray wanted to make a statement. “I felt, I can’t let this act of violence deter me from doing what I usually do,” he said. Much of Greater Boston felt the same.

 • • • 

E
ven with panic and fear still fresh, runners vowed, soon after the attack, to return for the next Boston Marathon, on April 21, 2014. Indeed, it was hard to find any who planned to stay away. NPR host Peter Sagal articulated the prevailing conviction this way: “
Goddamn it, I’m not going to let these guys ruin the marathon.”
More than one political leader promised that the next year’s race would be “bigger and better” than ever. It was easy for them to say, though. They weren’t the ones who had to pull it off.

To McGillivray, Grilk, and other race organizers,
it was clear immediately that staging the 2014 marathon would be a massive undertaking. The number of prospective entrants would spike. The crowds would swell. Security would have to be tighter than ever. Amid all these demands, organizers would need to strike a delicate balance. How would they both pay tribute to everyone affected by the bombing and preserve the essential character of the Boston Marathon—the competition and athletic excellence, the remarkable spirit of inclusion? In other words, how would the 2014 race at once look back and ahead? “We want to do the best job we can to give appropriate recognition to everyone who was affected,” Grilk said. “And then move on.” In practice, the task was monumental, and much of it lay at McGillivray’s feet.

One of the first things he and other race organizers did, a month after the stunted marathon, was to grant automatic entry to any 2013 runner who hadn’t finished but had made it to the halfway point or farther before the race was stopped, around 5,600 people in all. More than 80 percent of them chose to re-up. “That’s a strong statement to me,” McGillivray said. “They’re saying, ‘We’re coming back, we got invited, we will not be denied.’” That sentiment drove Amy Formica, a runner from near Pittsburgh, to reserve her hotel room for 2014 within weeks of the attack. Not having made it across the finish line nagged at her. The kindness she experienced from strangers amid the panic and confusion only strengthened her desire to come back. “You’re not going to scare me or my family away,” she said. Formica, her husband, and their two sons planned to stay in Boston even longer this time.
The BAA ultimately announced that it would allow an additional nine thousand runners in 2014, raising the cap from twenty-seven thousand to thirty-six thousand entrants. At the starting line, instead of three waves of nine thousand runners each, there would be four. The only other time the Boston Marathon field had been this big was in 1996, for the one hundredth anniversary race. Race organizers also announced in November 2013 that they would open the 2014 marathon to a
limited number of nonelite runners who could show that they had been “personally and profoundly” affected by the bombing.

Not that it was ever easy to put on the Boston Marathon, but when the field size, course, and security blueprint stayed more or less the same year to year, it was a little bit like “add water, you got soup,” McGillivray said. After 2013, race organizers and public safety agencies had to almost start over. Everything had to be reevaluated, from spectator access along the 26.2-mile course to how the finish line layout would look. One of the biggest changes they began planning for was a prohibition on bags. If the early plans held, runners would no longer be able to bring bags out to Hopkinton. Spectators would no longer be able to get near the course with bags, at least not in areas where big crowds gathered. Adding nine thousand runners presented a host of new considerations, too, including how to handle more trash, where to put additional portable restrooms, and keeping roads closed longer to accommodate the fourth wave of competitors.

The most delicate planning involved the tributes, the emotional cornerstones of what was sure to be the most poignant Boston Marathon ever. McGillivray, Grilk, and their team envisioned a series of special events leading up to Marathon Day, beginning with a large gathering on April 15, 2014, six days before the race, perhaps at the same time that the bombing had happened. The event, likely at the nearby Hynes Convention Center, would draw in victims, family members, police, firefighters, and other first responders, and probably a host of political leaders. Afterward, according to the early plans, guests would join together in a procession down Boylston Street to the finish line. Then, on the Saturday before the marathon, the BAA would host its typical premarathon 5K race, but with a bigger field, maybe ten thousand runners in all, to accommodate those taking part as an act of healing or remembrance. Following that race, an invitation-only run or walk—perhaps a modest loop around Back Bay—would bring bombing victims, their families, first responders, and hospital staff to Copley Square.

After that, the focus would shift to putting on a stellar marathon, to restoring its glory. There might be a moment of silence at the start or another acknowledgment of the tragedy, but race organizers hoped to leave much of the sentiment for the tribute events. What they couldn’t control—and, to a degree, what they feared—were well-meaning but misguided attempts along the sidelines to honor the bombing victims. Would spectators try to write messages on the course using paint that became dangerously slick in the rain? Would they hang balloon arches over the road but not anticipate high winds bringing them down? Would novices set up new water stations in dangerous locations? The list of unknowns was endless.

For many other marathons, including Chicago and New York, making big changes is easier because the course lies within a single city. The Boston Marathon snakes through eight communities; only the final leg is actually in Boston. That means race organizers must coordinate with eight different municipal police departments, eight different public works departments, and so on. Emerging from the early planning meetings for the 2014 marathon, McGillivray was struck by how much work it would take to bounce back from 2013. “The magnitude of it just hits you in the face,” he said. He became so caught up in the next year, in fact, that he lacked the time and space to reflect on the bombing and everything it meant. That would have to come later.

In the running community, it’s widely believed that McGillivray is the man you want in charge of the marathon; Grilk said he doesn’t know if anyone else even has the capability. McGillivray likes to joke that he’s never had to worry about someone taking his job, because no one else would want it. But more than ever, as they looked ahead toward 2014, McGillivray and Grilk were feeling the weight of expectations. They would never please everyone. Not everything would be perfect. They were buoyed, though, by all the expressions of support from around the world. “When that many people are pulling for you, it matters,” Grilk said. “The challenges have been severe, but it really helps you get past all that stuff, and it leaves you with a very strong sense of stewardship, of privilege, for being at the center of something that has so many people’s attention. And you want to get it right.”

Before they turned to 2014, race officials had to carry out one of their most important postrace rituals. Every year after the marathon is over, they pull up the 3M adhesive strip that’s laid across Boylston Street for the finish line; it’s not the kind of thing that can just be left there year-round. The finish line is such a Boston landmark, though, that they paint it on the road for show, typically the day after the race. With Boylston closed for days after the attack, that wasn’t possible. But on the night of April 29, two weeks later, they were finally able to bring out the stencils and the blue and yellow paint, giving the iconic band a fresh coat that it needed more than ever.

 • • • 

M
cGillivray is often asked: Why are so many people running these days? His answer is that the sense of intimidation has fallen away. They see that running is not just for the smug kale-buyers at Whole Foods, that being a runner requires little more than decent shoes and the discipline to get out the door. They see the value in leading a healthy life. They want to feel good about themselves. They see their neighbors doing it. More a lifestyle than a sport, running satisfies a craving for physical, mental, and emotional lift. McGillivray figured that out as a kid—his first race came at age five or six—and he’s been a running evangelist ever since. “It gives you so many things that you can go out and do other things as a result—be a better parent, be a better teacher, be a better worker, be a better tuba player,” McGillivray said. “It’s just like, ‘I can run a marathon? I can do
this
.’”