May 1, 2013
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES
and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
They were perhaps Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s closest friends during
his two years at college, an American classmate from high school and two
Russian-speaking students from Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs seemingly had money and
drove expensive cars. They entertained Mr. Tsarnaev at their off-campus
apartment, and he partied with them in New York. One of them lent Mr. Tsarnaev a
black BMW after he smashed his Honda Civic in an accident.
And in the wake of the twin bombs that exploded last month at the finish line of
the Boston Marathon, federal prosecutors now say, the three showed just how
close their friendship was: two of them decided to put a backpack and fireworks
linking Mr. Tsarnaev to the blasts into a black trash bag, and toss it into a
Dumpster. Prosecutors say the third later lied to investigators when asked about
it.
The two Kazakhs, Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, were charged on
Wednesday with destroying evidence to obstruct the federal inquiry into the
marathon bombings. Their American friend, Robel K. Phillipos, was charged with
lying to impede the investigation.
The story behind their arrest, detailed in lengthy affidavits, paints a vivid
portrait of Mr. Tsarnaev in the days after the bombing, and portrays a dorm-room
scene of confusion as the three young men, stunned to realize that their friend
was being sought as a terrorist, debated whether and how to help him.
And it chillingly lays bare the skill with which Mr. Tsarnaev appears to have
concealed plans for the bombing from even his most intimate associates. Three
days after the blasts, as photographs of the then-unidentified suspects
blanketed television and the Internet, Mr. Kadyrbayev sent Mr. Tsarnaev a text
message: one photograph, he wrote, bore a marked resemblance to him.
“lol,” Mr. Tsarnaev coolly replied. “you better not text me.”
He added: “come to my room and take whatever you want.”
Later that evening, he told interrogators, he came to see that request as a
thinly veiled plea to cover up his crime.
Should the three men be found guilty, they would face potentially stiff
penalties: up to five years in prison for the two Kazakhs, eight years for Mr.
Phillipos and up to $250,000 fines for each of the three. Mr. Kadyrbayev, 19,
and Mr. Tazhayakov, 20, have been held in jail since last week, ostensibly on
suspicion of violating their student visas by not attending class at the
University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where they had studied with Mr.
Tsarnaev.
All four men entered classes there in the fall of 2011, but Mr. Phillipos
dropped out and returned to Cambridge, where he and Mr. Tsarnaev had attended
Cambridge Ringe and Latin High School together. A university spokesman said that
Mr. Kadyrbayev was not currently enrolled, and that Mr. Tazhayakov remained a
student but had been suspended until the charges against him were resolved.
In one respect, the two Kazakh students seem an odd match for Mr. Tsarnaev and
Mr. Phillipos. Sent from oil-rich Kazakhstan to study in the United States, Mr.
Tazhayakov and Mr. Kadyrbayev appear to have come from wealthy families. Mr.
Kadyrbayev’s Facebook page features photographs of him on beaches in Fort
Lauderdale, Fla., and Dubai. Mr. Tazhayakov’s page indicates he comes from
Atyrau, a petroleum center at the mouth of the Ural River. By contrast, the
Cambridge homes of Mr. Tsarnaev and Mr. Phillipos are hard-worn apartment houses
in working-class neighborhoods.
But the four quickly became close after starting classes, the affidavit and
interviews with friends suggest, in part because Mr. Tsarnaev and the two Kazakh
students all spoke fluent Russian. Mr. Tazhayakov struck up a friendship with
Mr. Tsarnaev first, and appeared the closest to him, said Jason Rowe, a
sophomore who was Mr. Tsarnaev’s freshman dorm roommate.
A Cambridge friend of Mr. Tsarnaev’s said their friendship began to ebb after
Mr. Tsarnaev met the two Kazakhs. Photographs posted online suggest a deepening
relationship with the foreign students; in one undated shot, Mr. Tsarnaev drapes
an arm over a broadly smiling Mr. Kadyrbayev as the two sit at a kitchen table,
plates of food laid out before them.
Despite dropping out of school and returning to Cambridge, Mr. Phillipos also
appears to have become fast friends with the Kazakh students, visiting them
frequently in the apartment they shared in New Bedford, about three miles from
the Dartmouth campus.
And Mr. Kadyrbayev and Mr. Tazhayakov apparently traveled often to Cambridge,
Mr. Kadyrbayev to meet “repeatedly” with the Tsarnaev family, the criminal
complaint against him states.
By last year, Mr. Tsarnaev and the two Kazakhs appear to have become constant
companions. A 2012 photograph, possibly from last November, shows the three
posing in Times Square, bundled against the cold, the Kazakh students grinning
broadly. “New York is so ratchet on black Friday it’s ridiculous,” Mr. Tsarnaev
wrote on Twitter that month. “I’m on to bed son.”
That world would rapidly begin to come apart a few months later.
An affidavit by Special Agent Scott P. Cieplik of the F. B.I. released Wednesday
did not detail the men’s reactions to the bombings — one of their lawyers said
they had been “shocked and horrified” — but it makes clear that for days
afterward, they had no inkling that Mr. Tsarnaev might have been involved.
On Wednesday, two days after the explosions, Mr. Kadyrbayev drove to Mr.
Tsarnaev’s dormitory and, standing outside, chatted while Mr. Tsarnaev smoked a
cigarette, the affidavit quotes Mr. Kadyrbayev as saying. Later, Mr. Tsarnaev
drove to the New Bedford apartment and stayed until about midnight.
Only one detail seemed amiss. Mr. Tsarnaev, whose long and unmanageable hair had
been an object of wry posts on his Twitter account, had suddenly cut his mop
short.
The next day, Mr. Tazhayakov told the F.B.I., Mr. Tsarnaev drove him home from a
university class, dropping him off about 4 p.m. An hour or more later, Mr.
Kadyrbayev called Mr. Phillipos as he was driving to the apartment from Boston
with an urgent message: turn on the television news when you get home.
Investigators had released grainy photographs of two bombing suspects, lifted
from video surveillance cameras. One of the suspects, Mr. Phillipos said, looked
familiar.
The sequence of events that followed, patched together from separate F.B.I.
interviews with Mr. Phillipos and the two Kazakhs, is not precisely clear.
Sometime before 7 p.m., the three men drove to Mr. Tsarnaev’s Pine Dale Hall
dormitory room. His roommate said Mr. Tsarnaev had left a couple of hours
earlier.
As the visitors watched a movie, the affidavit states, they noticed a backpack
stuffed with fireworks that had been emptied of their powder. Mr. Kadyrbayev
“knew when he saw the empty fireworks that Tsarnaev was involved in the
bombing,” the affidavit states.
He resolved to protect him.
At 8:43 p.m., Mr. Kadyrbayev sent the text message to Mr. Tsarnaev noting his
resemblance to the photographs, and read the nonchalant reply. Mr. Tazhayakov
told the F.B.I. that when Mr. Kadyrbayev showed him Mr. Tsarnaev’s request to
“take whatever you want,” he concluded that he would never see his friend again
alive.
Later that evening, Mr. Phillipos and Mr. Tazhayakov said, the three went back
to Mr. Tsarnaev’s dorm room. When they returned to their apartment, they were
carrying the backpack, fireworks, a jar of Vaseline and Mr. Tsarnaev’s laptop,
all of which are now in the custody of federal agents.
Mr. Phillipos initially told the F.B.I. he did not recall going to Mr.
Tsarnaev’s dorm room that night, then said later that they had gone there, but
left without entering, the authorities said. Only six days later would he
recant: actually, Mr. Kadyrbayev texted him at 9 p.m. to “go to Jahar’s room,”
where the three men took the laptop and evidence.
Back home, Mr. Phillipos said, the three “started to freak out, because it
became clear from a CNN report that we were watching that Jahar was one of the
Boston Marathon bombers.” Mr. Kadyrbayev asked him “if he should get rid of the
stuff.”
“Do what you have to do,” he said he told him.
Shortly thereafter, the bag and the fireworks were tossed into the apartment
complex Dumpster.
The next afternoon, as Mr. Tazhayakov watched, a garbage truck emptied it and
drove away.
Reporting was contributed by Ian Lovett and Jess Bidgood from
Boston;
Michael S. Schmidt from Washington; William K. Rashbaum
April 30, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
President Obama said a lot of important things on Tuesday
about the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It is a blight on the nation’s
reputation. It mocks American standards of justice by keeping people imprisoned
without charges. It has actually hindered the prosecution and imprisonment of
dangerous terrorists. Even if Guantánamo seemed justified to some people in the
immediate aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, those justifications are
wearing thin. It is unsustainable and should be closed.
We were pleased that Mr. Obama pledged to make good, finally, on his promise to
do just that. But that reaction was tempered by the fact that he has failed to
do so for five years and that he has not taken steps within his executive power
to transfer prisoners long ago cleared for release. Mr. Obama’s plans to try to
talk Congress into removing obstacles to closing the prison do not reflect the
urgency of the crisis facing him now.
As of Tuesday morning, Charlie Savage reported in The Times, 100 of the 166
inmates at Guantánamo are participating in a hunger strike against their
conditions and indefinite detention. Twenty-one have been “approved” for
force-feeding, which involves the insertion of a tube through their nostrils and
down their throats.
Mr. Obama defended the practice. “I don’t want these individuals to die,” he
said.
Most people don’t. But a recently published bipartisan report on detainee
treatment by the Constitution Project said “forced feeding of detainees is a
form of abuse and must end.” The World Medical Association has long considered
forced feeding a violation of a physicians’ ethics when it is done against a
competent person’s express wishes, a point that was reinforced on April 25 by
Dr. Jeremy Lazarus, president of the American Medical Association, in a letter
to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
There is no indication that the inmates being force-fed were unconscious or
incapable of making decisions. And virtually all inmates at Guantánamo have
never been charged with any crime and never will be. Nearly 90 have been cleared
for release, and another large group can never be tried because they were
tortured or there is no evidence they were involved in a particular attack. Only
six are facing active charges before a military tribunal.
Mr. Obama was asked about the hunger strike at a White House news conference. “I
think it is critical,” he said, “for us to understand that Guantánamo is not
necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us
in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies
on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists.”
Mr. Obama said permanent detention without trial is “is contrary to who we are.
It is contrary to our interests.”
Mr. Obama correctly said that Congress passed malicious laws that restrict the
use of federal money to transfer Guantánamo detainees to other countries and
prohibit sending them to be tried in federal courts, which, unlike the military
tribunals, are competent to do that.
But those laws were lent political momentum by the Obama administration’s
bungling of an attempt to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, in a
federal court. And, since then, Mr. Obama has approved a dangerous expansion of
military detention of terrorist suspects.
If he is serious about moving toward closure, there are two steps proposed by
the American Civil Liberties Union that could get the ball rolling. He could
appoint a senior official “so that the administration’s Guantánamo closure
policy is directed by the White House and not by Pentagon bureaucrats,” the
A.C.L.U. said, and he could order Mr. Hagel to start providing legally required
waivers to transfer detainees who have been cleared. Senator Dianne Feinstein,
the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has urged Mr. Obama to
urgently review the status of those prisoners — a primary issue for the hunger
strikers.
The hunger strike is an act of desperation over policies even Mr. Obama says
cannot be defended. It is his responsibility to deal with it — and close the
prison.
April 29, 2013
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and SERGE F. KOVALESKI
Federal authorities are closely scrutinizing the activities of
the wife of the dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect in the days before and
after the attacks.
The authorities are looking at a range of possibilities, two senior law
enforcement officials said, including that she could have — wittingly or
unwittingly — destroyed evidence, helped the bombers evade capture or even
played a role in planning the attacks. As part of the investigation, F.B.I.
agents are trying to determine whether female DNA found on a piece of a pressure
cooker used as an explosive device in the attacks was from Katherine Russell,
the wife of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the officials said.
One of the officials said that a fingerprint had also been found on a bomb
fragment and that investigators had tried to collect DNA and fingerprint samples
from several people whom the authorities are scrutinizing in addition to Ms.
Russell.
Federal authorities took a sample of Ms. Russell’s DNA on Monday in Rhode
Island, where she has been staying with her parents, the officials said.
Her lawyer, Amato A. DeLuca, has said that Ms. Russell was shocked when she
learned that her husband and brother-in-law were suspected of involvement in the
attack. “We want to state what we stated before: Katie continues to assist in
the investigation in any way that she can,” he said Monday in an e-mail.
The focus on Ms. Russell is part of the wider effort by the F.B.I. to determine
who else may have played a role aiding the bombers. While the authorities do not
believe the bombers were tied to a larger terrorist network or had accomplices,
they remain skeptical that others did not know of their plans or did not help
them destroy evidence. A law enforcement official said that authorities were
investigating individuals who may have helped the suspects in some way after the
bombings. The official would not elaborate.
Ms. Russell, 24, grew up in North Kingstown, R.I., and is the daughter of a
physician. She met Mr. Tsarnaev at Suffolk University, her lawyer said. She
converted to Islam and married him in 2010.
Mr. DeLuca has said that Ms. Russell does not speak Russian, so she could not
always understand what her husband was saying.
On Monday, another lawyer was added to the defense team of the surviving bombing
suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19. Judy Clarke, one of the nation’s foremost
experts in death penalty cases, took the case at the behest of Mr. Tsarnaev’s
three federal public defenders.
Ms. Clarke’s past clients include Susan Smith, who was convicted of drowning her
two children, Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Jared Loughner, who
killed six people at an event held by Representative Gabrielle Giffords in
Arizona. All avoided the death penalty and received life sentences instead.
“In light of the circumstances in this case, the defendant requires an attorney
with more background, knowledge and experience in federal death penalty cases
than that possessed by current counsel,” federal Magistrate Judge Marianne B.
Bowler wrote in her order appointing Ms. Clarke, who is based in San Diego.
Katharine Q. Seelye, Richard A. Oppel Jr.
and John Eligon contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: April 30, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled
the name of the Rhode Island town where Katherine Russell grew
up.
IF only it were as simple as the drones coming home to roost.
That would be comforting somehow. In giving us a tidy cause, it would give us a
clear remedy: rain less death in distant lands, and worry less about death in
our own.
If only it could all be chalked up to immigration leniency or an F.B.I. blunder.
We could get tougher on both fronts, turning a warier eye toward anyone aspiring
to come here, cracking the whip over at Quantico. And maybe then we could
vanquish the worry that blooms darkly inside many of us when we visit a thronged
landmark or attend the kind of richly symbolic event, like the Boston Marathon,
whose violent disruption carries all the extra horror its disrupters intend.
Last week was one of theories, of hobbyhorses, of political complaints and
agendas being hitched like so many train cars to what happened on that brutal
afternoon in Boston.
The assailants’ radicalization proved that we must scale back our military
campaigns and take a humbler posture in the world. The assailants’ firepower
(overstated, it turns out) made a case for gun control.
We had to be more expansive in our embrace of Muslims, who become agents of
destruction because they’re targets of suspicion. We had to slough off political
correctness and patrol mosques.
Oh, the pitfalls of the amnesty our country grants and the big heart it opens to
determined pilgrims from the third world! Oh, the peril of all our aimless,
alienated young men! (Are there many other kinds?)
But these broad-brush diagnoses, many of them conveniently tethered to a
proposed solution, weren’t entirely or even ultimately about policy, sociology
or anything so concrete. They were about something much more nebulous and much
less easily mastered.
They were about fear. And they were about the ardent, persistent, poignant
hunger to believe that in a society of free information and free movement and
clashing ideologies and gaudy dreams that don’t come true — in other words, in
this splendid but difficult experiment known as the United States of America —
we can somehow prevent disaster, somehow inoculate ourselves. With a
sufficiently probing analysis of a suspect’s Twitter feed, with the designation
of a broken 19-year-old as an enemy combatant, we could unravel the riddle, then
adjust to and obey the truths at its core.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” last weekend, Doris Kearns Goodwin described a
celebration that erupted in the bar where she happened to have been when it was
reported that the younger of the brothers Tsarnaev was captured: “Everybody was
just screaming, ‘Thank God we got him alive,’ because they want the answer to
the question, why?”
And over the days that followed they got — we got — many answers. We learned
that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was easily swayed by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, a sibling
dynamic of an utterly routine stripe.
We learned that the Internet and social media sped one or both of them to wicked
influences and let them steep in anger and twisted thoughts, the way the
Internet and social media let anyone concentrate on a specific obsession, a
single cluster of emotions.
We learned that they’d plucked bomb-making instructions from the Web, in much
the way someone else might retrieve a guacamole recipe.
All in all we learned at least as much to amplify our anxieties as to quiet
them, because the Tsarnaevs were seemingly inconspicuous, haphazard terrorists,
and because the picture that emerged didn’t really yield a set of instructions
for staving off the manner of mayhem they allegedly engineered from occurring
again. It suggested how easily this can happen in a land of liberty, governed by
a compact of trust.
THE brothers had ample reason to love America. More reason, it would seem, than
to hate it. When their family, of Chechen heritage, asked for refuge, America
said yes. It extended them opportunities, gave them hope. Dzhokhar went to the
same high school that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had attended, and when he
graduated, the city of Cambridge, Mass., awarded him a $2,500 scholarship for
his future studies.
But college didn’t go well for him, just as Tamerlan’s boxing career — he’d once
aspired to represent this country in the Olympics — didn’t pan out. And the big
promises of our country no doubt make its disappointments all the more crushing.
But the big promises also make us who we are.
The brothers apparently objected to our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But do we know that they wouldn’t have had some other plaint, some other prompt,
if those interventions had never occurred? They postdated 9/11, whose authors
had a brimming portfolio of alternate grievances.
Where there’s a capacity for fury, justifications aren’t hard to come by.
Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, cited the government’s raid on the
Branch Davidians in Waco, Tex., as one of his prods. He was neither Muslim nor
immigrant, just unhinged, a characterization that also fits Anders Behring
Breivik, who blamed Europe’s acquiescence to multiculturalism for his killing of
77 people in Norway in 2011. Terrorism isn’t a scourge we Americans alone
endure, and it’s seldom about any one thing, or any two things.
Our insistence on patterns and commonalities and some kind of understanding
assumes coherence to the massacres, rationality. But the difference between the
aimless, alienated young men who do not plant bombs or open fire on unsuspecting
crowds — which is the vast majority of them — and those who do is less likely to
be some discrete radicalization process that we can diagram and eradicate than a
dose, sometimes a heavy one, of pure madness. And there’s no easy antidote to
that. No amulet against it.
There’s also a danger built into the American experiment, the very nature of
which leaves us exposed. Our rightly cherished diversity can make the challenge
of belonging that much steeper. Our good fortune and leadership mean that we’ll
be not just envied in the world, but also reviled.
The F.B.I. averted its gaze from the older Tsarnaev brother after it couldn’t
find any conclusive alarms because that’s what the government is supposed to do,
absent better information. We don’t want it to go too far in spying on us. That
means it will fail to notice things.
While we can and will figure out small ways to be safer, we have to come to
terms with the reality that we’ll never be safe, not with unrestricted travel
through cyberspace. Not with the Second Amendment. Not with the privacy we
expect. Not with the liberty we demand.
That’s the bargain we’ve made. It’s imperfect, but it’s the right one.
April 27, 2013
The New York Times
By DEBORAH SONTAG, DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
and SERGE F. KOVALESKI
BOSTON — It was a blow the immigrant boxer could not
withstand: after capturing his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves
heavyweight champion of New England in 2010, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23,
was barred from the national Tournament of Champions because he was not a United
States citizen.
The cocksure fighter, a flamboyant dresser partial to white fur and snakeskin,
had been looking forward to redeeming the loss he suffered the previous year in
the first round, when the judges awarded his opponent the decision, drawing boos
from spectators who considered Mr. Tsarnaev dominant.
From one year to the next, though, the tournament rules had changed,
disqualifying legal permanent residents — not only Mr. Tsarnaev, who was
Soviet-born of Chechen and Dagestani heritage, but several other New England
contenders, too. His aspirations frustrated, he dropped out of boxing
competition entirely, and his life veered in a completely different direction.
Mr. Tsarnaev portrayed his quitting as a reflection of the sport’s
incompatibility with his growing devotion to Islam. But as dozens of interviews
with friends, acquaintances and relatives from Cambridge, Mass., to Dagestan
showed, that devotion, and the suspected radicalization that accompanied it, was
a path he followed most avidly only after his more secular dreams were dashed in
2010 and he was left adrift.
His trajectory eventually led the frustrated athlete and his loyal younger
brother, Dzhokhar, to bomb one of the most famous athletic events in this
country, killing three and wounding more than 200 at the Boston Marathon, the
authorities say. They say it led Mr. Tsarnaev, his application for citizenship
stalled, and his brother, a new citizen and a seemingly well-adjusted college
student, to attack their American hometown on Patriots’ Day, April 15.
Mr. Tsarnaev now lies in the state medical examiner’s office, his body riddled
with bullets after a confrontation with the police four days after the bombings.
He left behind an American-born wife who had converted to Islam, a 3-year-old
daughter with curly hair, a 19-year-old brother charged with using a weapon of
mass destruction, and a puzzle: Why did these two young men seemingly turn on
the country that had granted them asylum?
Examining their lives for clues, the authorities have focused on Mr. Tsarnaev’s
six-month trip to the Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan last year. But
in Cambridge, sitting on the front steps of the ramshackle, brown-shingled house
where the Tsarnaev family lived for a decade, their 79-year-old landlady urged a
longer lens.
“He certainly wasn’t radicalized in Dagestan,” the landlady, Joanna Herlihy,
said.
Ms. Herlihy, who speaks Russian and was friends with the Tsarnaevs, said she
told law enforcement officials that his trip clearly merited scrutiny. But she
said that Mr. Tsarnaev’s embrace of Islam had grown more intense before that.
As his religious identification grew fiercer, Mr. Tsarnaev seemed to abandon his
once avid pursuit of the American dream. He dropped out of community college and
lost interest not just in boxing but also in music; he used to play piano and
violin, classical music and rap, and his e-mail address was a clue to how he
once saw himself: The_Professor@real-hiphop.com. He worked only sporadically,
sometimes as a pizza deliverer, and he grew first a close-cropped beard and then
a flowing one.
He seemed isolated, too. Since his return from Dagestan, he, his wife and his
child were the only Tsarnaevs living full time in the three-bedroom apartment on
Ms. Herlihy’s third floor.
Mr. Tsarnaev’s two younger sisters had long since married and moved out; his
parents, now separated, had returned to Dagestan, his mother soon after a felony
arrest on shoplifting charges; and his brother had left for the University of
Massachusetts at Dartmouth, returning home only on the occasional weekend, as he
did recently after damaging his 1999 green Honda Civic by texting while driving.
“When Dzhokhar used to come home on Friday night from the dormitory, Tamerlan
used to hug him and kiss him — hold him, like, because he was a big, big boy,
Tamerlan,” their mother, Zubeidat, 45, said last week, adding that her older son
had been “handsome like Hercules.”
Not long after he gave up his boxing career, Mr. Tsarnaev married Katherine
Russell of Rhode Island in a brief Islamic ceremony at a Dorchester mosque in
June 2010. She has declined to speak publicly since the attacks.
His wife primarily supported the family through her job as a home health aide,
scraping together about $1,200 a month to pay the rent. While she worked, Mr.
Tsarnaev looked after their daughter, Zahira, who was learning to ride the
tricycle still parked beside the house, neighbors said. The family’s income was
supplemented by public assistance and food stamps from September 2011 to
November 2012, state officials said.
It was probably not the life that Anzor Tsarnaev had imagined for his oldest
child, who, even as a boy, before he developed the broad-shouldered physique
that his mother described as “a masterpiece,” dreamed of becoming a famous
boxer.
But then the father’s life had not gone as planned, either. Once an official in
the prosecutor’s office in Kyrgyzstan, he had been reduced to working as an
unlicensed mechanic in the back lot of a rug store in Cambridge.
“He was out there in the snow and cold, freezing his hands to do this work on
people’s cars,” said Chris Walter, owner of the store, Yayla Tribal Rug. “I did
not charge him for the space because he was a poor, struggling guy with a good
heart.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was born on Oct. 21, 1986, five years before the dissolution
of the Soviet Union, in Kalmykia, a barren stretch of Russian territory by the
Caspian Sea. A photograph of him as a baby shows a cherubic child wearing a knit
cap with a pompom, perched on the lap of his unsmiling mother, who has spiky
black bangs and an artful pile of hair. Strikingly, she did not cover her head
then, as she does now; she began wearing a hijab only a few years ago, in the
United States, prodded by her son just as she was prodding him, too, to deepen
his faith.
When he was still little, his parents moved from Kalmykia to Kyrgyzstan, a
former Soviet republic, where their other three children were born. They left
there during the economic crisis of the late 1990s and spent a few brief months
in Chechnya, then fled before the full-scale Russian military invasion in 1999.
They sought shelter next in his mother’s native Dagestan.
In an interview there, Patimat Suleimanova, her sister-in-law, said the family
had repeatedly been on the run from war and hardship in those days. “In search
of peace, they kept moving,” she said.
Finally, Anzor Tsarnaev sought political asylum in the United States. He arrived
first, with his younger son, in the spring of 2002. His older son, a young man
of 16, followed with the rest of the family in July 2003.
Their neighborhood in Cambridge was run-down, with car repair lots where
condominiums have since arisen. But the city has long been especially welcoming
to immigrants and refugees; its high school has students from 75 countries.
The schools superintendent, Jeffrey Young, described Cambridge as “beyond
tolerant.”
“How is it that someone could grow up in a place like this and end up in a place
like that?” he said of the Tsarnaevs.
Unlike his little brother, who was well integrated into the community by the
time he started high school, Mr. Tsarnaev was a genuine newcomer when he entered
the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, from which he graduated in 2006. Enrolled
in the large English as a Second Language program, he made friends mostly with
other international students, and his demeanor was reserved, one former
classmate, Luis Vasquez, said.
“The view on him was that he was a boxer and you would not want to mess with
him,” Mr. Vasquez, now 25 and a candidate for the Cambridge City Council, said.
“He told me that he wanted to represent the U.S. in boxing. He wanted to do the
Olympics and then turn pro.”
Jumping right into boxing after his arrival in the United States, he called
attention to himself immediately in more ways than one. During registration for
a tournament in Lowell, he sat down at a piano and lost himself for 20 minutes
in a piece of classical music. The impromptu performance, so out of place in
that world, finished to a burst of applause from surprised onlookers.
“He just walked over from the line and started playing like he was in the Boston
Pops,” his trainer at the time, Gene McCarthy, 77, recalled.
Having trained in Dagestan, where sport fighting has an impassioned following,
Mr. Tsarnaev boxed straight-legged like a European and not crouched,
American-style. He also incorporated showy gymnastics into his training and
fighting, walking on his hands, falling into splits, tumbling into corners. So
as he started working out in Boston-area clubs — and winning novice tournament
fights — he made an impression, although not an entirely positive one.
“For a big man, he was very agile,” said Tom Lee, president of the South Boston
Boxing Club. “He moved like a gazelle and was strong like a horse. He was a big
puncher. But he was an underachiever because he did not dedicate himself to the
proper training regimen.”
In 2009, Mr. Tsarnaev won the New England Golden Gloves championship in the
201-pound division, which qualified him for the national tournament in Salt Lake
City in May. Introducing what would become his signature style, he showed up
overdressed, wearing a white silk scarf, black leather pants and mirrored
sunglasses.
Stepping into the ring, as The Lowell Sun described it, Mr. Tsarnaev floored
Lamar Fenner of Chicago with an explosive punch that required an eight-count
from the referee, and then he seemed to control the rest of the fight.
Bob Russo, then the coach of the New England team, said: “We thought he won. The
crowd thought he won. But he didn’t.”
Mr. Fenner’s mother, Marsha, said her son had called her the night of his “bout
with the bomber,” thrilled to have defeated an opponent he described as
unnervingly strong. Her son, who died of heart problems last year at 29, ended
up coming in second in the tournament and turning professional, she said.
If Mr. Tsarnaev was chastened by the defeat, it did not temper his behavior.
During a preliminary round of the New England Golden Gloves in 2010, in a breach
of boxing etiquette, he entered the locker room to taunt not only the fighter he
was about to face but also the fighter’s trainer. Wearing a cowboy hat and
alligator-skin cowboy boots, he gave the two men a disdainful once-over and
said: “You’re nothing. I’m taking you down.”
The trainer, Hector Torres, was furious and subsequently lodged a complaint,
arguing that Mr. Tsarnaev should not be allowed to participate in the
competition because he was not a citizen.
As it happened, Golden Gloves of America was just then changing its policy. It
used to permit legal immigrants to compete in its national tournament three out
of every four years, barring them only during Olympic qualifying years, James
Beasley, the executive director, said. But it decided in 2010 that the policy
was confusing and moved to end all participation by noncitizens in the
Tournament of Champions.
So Mr. Tsarnaev, New England heavyweight champion for the second year in a row,
was stymied. The immigrant champions in three other weight classes in New
England were blocked from advancing, too, Mr. Russo said.
Mr. Tsarnaev was devastated. He was not getting any younger. And he was more
than a year away from being even eligible to apply for American citizenship, and
there appeared to be a potential obstacle in his path.
The previous summer, Mr. Tsarnaev had been arrested after a report of domestic
violence.
His girlfriend at the time had called 911, “hysterically crying,” to say he had
beaten her up, according to the Cambridge police report. Mr. Tsarnaev told the
officers that he had slapped her face because she had been yelling at him about
“another girl.”
Eventually, charges against him would be dismissed, the records show, so the
episode would not have endangered his eventual citizenship application.
But his life was changing. He married. He had a child. And he largely withdrew
from Cambridge social life, and from many of the friendships he had enjoyed. “He
had liked to party,” said Elmirza Khozhugov, 26, his former brother-in-law, who
lost touch with him in 2010. “But there was always the sense that he felt a
little guilty that he was having too much fun, maybe.”
In 2011, the Russian security service cautioned the F.B.I., and later the
C.I.A., that “since 2010” Mr. Tsarnaev had “changed drastically,” becoming “a
follower of radical Islam.” The Russians said he was planning a trip to his
homeland to connect with underground militant groups. An F.B.I. investigation
turned up no ties to extremists, the bureau has said.
In early 2012, Mr. Tsarnaev left his wife and child for a six-month visit to
Russia. His parents, speaking in Dagestan, portrayed it as an innocuous visit to
reconnect with family and to replace his nearly expired passport from the
Republic of Kyrgyzstan with a Russian one. His father said he had kept his son
close by his side as they visited relatives, including in Chechnya, and
renovated a storefront into a perfume shop.
But American officials say Mr. Tsarnaev arrived in Russia months before his
father returned to Dagestan and so did not have the continuous tight supervision
described by his father.
Also, Mr. Tsarnaev, with no apparent sense of urgency about his travel
documents, waited months to apply for a Russian passport, and returned to the
United States before the passport was ready for him.
After his return, Mr. Tsarnaev applied for American citizenship, a year after he
was eligible to do so. But the F.B.I. investigation, though closed, had caused
his application to be stalled. Underscoring how detached he had become, he no
longer had any valid passport, or international travel document, and Cambridge,
to which he had a hard time readapting, was now his de facto home more than
ever.
He grew a five-inch beard, which he shaved off before the bombings, and
interrupted prayers at his mosque on two occasions with outbursts denouncing the
idea that Muslims should observe American secular holidays. He engaged neighbors
in affable conversations about skiing one week and heated ones about American
imperialism the next.
At a neighborhood pizzeria, wearing a head covering that matched his jacket, he
explained to Albrecht Ammon, 18, that “the Koran is great and flawless, and the
Bible is ripped off from the Koran, and the U.S. used the Bible as an excuse to
invade different countries.”
“I asked him about radical Muslims that blow themselves up and say, ‘It’s for
Allah,’ ” Mr. Ammon said. “And he said he wasn’t one of those Muslims.”
Deborah Sontag and Serge F. Kovaleski reported from Boston,
and David M. Herszenhorn from Makhachkala, Russia.
Reporting was contributed by Michael Schwirtz, John Eligon,
Ian Lovett and Dina Kraft from Boston; Andrew Roth from
Makhachkala;
Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Julia Preston from New York;
April 25, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
All five living presidents gathered in Texas Thursday for a
feel-good moment at the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and
Museum, which is supposed to symbolize the legacy that Mr. Bush has been trying
to polish. President Obama called it a “special day for our democracy.” Mr. Bush
spoke about having made “the tough decisions” to protect America. They all had a
nice chuckle when President Bill Clinton joked about former presidents using
their libraries to rewrite history.
But there is another building, far from Dallas on land leased from Cuba, that
symbolizes Mr. Bush’s legacy in a darker, truer way: the military penal complex
at Guantánamo Bay where Mr. Bush imprisoned hundreds of men after the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks, a vast majority guilty of no crime.
It became the embodiment of his dangerous expansion of executive power and the
lawless detentions, secret prisons and torture that went along with them. It is
now also a reminder of Mr. Obama’s failure to close the prison as he promised
when he took office, and of the malicious interference by Congress in any effort
to justly try and punish the Guantánamo inmates.
There are still 166 men there — virtually all of them held without charges, some
for more than a decade. More than half have been cleared for release but are
still imprisoned because of a law that requires individual Pentagon waivers. The
administration eliminated the State Department post charged with working with
other countries to transfer the prisoners so those waivers might be issued.
Of the rest, some are said to have committed serious crimes, including
terrorism, but the military tribunals created by Mr. Bush are dysfunctional and
not credible, despite Mr. Obama’s improvements. Congress long ago banned the
transfer of prisoners to the federal criminal justice system where they belong
and are far more likely to receive fair trials and long sentences if convicted.
Only six are facing active charges. Nearly 50 more are deemed too dangerous for
release but not suitable for trial because they are not linked to any specific
attack or because the evidence against them is tainted by torture.
The result of this purgatory of isolation was inevitable. Charlie Savage wrote
in The Times on Thursday about a protest that ended in a raid on Camp Six, where
the most cooperative prisoners are held. A hunger strike in its third month
includes an estimated 93 prisoners, twice as many as were participating before
the raid. American soldiers have been reduced to force-feeding prisoners who are
strapped to chairs with a tube down their throats.
That prison should never have been opened. It was nothing more than Mr. Bush’s
attempt to evade accountability by placing prisoners in another country. The
courts rejected that ploy, but Mr. Bush never bothered to fix the problem. Now,
shockingly, the Pentagon is actually considering spending $200 million for
improvements and expansions clearly aimed at a permanent operation.
Polls show that Americans are increasingly indifferent to the prison. We
received a fair amount of criticism recently for publishing on our Op-Ed page a
first-person account from one of the Guantánamo hunger strikers.
But whatever Mr. Bush says about how comfortable he is with his “tough” choices,
the country must recognize the steep price being paid for what is essentially a
political prison. Just as hunger strikes at the infamous Maze Prison in Northern
Ireland indelibly stained Britain’s human rights record, so Guantánamo stains
America’s.
April 24, 2013
The New York Times
By SUHAIB WEBB and SCOTT KORB
JUST hours after the two suspects in the Boston Marathon
bombing were identified as Muslims, Representative Peter T. King of New York,
the Republican chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and
Intelligence, called for an “increased surveillance” of Islamic communities in
the United States. “I think we need more police and more surveillance in the
communities where the threat is coming from,” he told National Review. “The new
threat is definitely from within.”
Mr. King’s hypothesis, and the widespread surveillance policies already in
effect since 9/11, assume that the threat of radicalization has become a matter
of local geography, that American Muslims are creating extremists in our mosques
and community centers.
But what we’re learning of the suspects, the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, suggests a different story, and one that has itself become familiar:
radicalization does not happen to young people with a strong grounding in the
American Muslim mainstream; increasingly, it happens online, and sometimes
abroad, among the isolated and disaffected.
The YouTube page of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, for example, does not contain a single
lecture from a scholar, imam or institution in America. One report suggests that
he found the theology taught in a local Cambridge mosque, the Islamic Society of
Boston, unpalatable: while attending a Friday service in which an imam praised
the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Tsarnaev shouted
that the imam was a “nonbeliever.” The younger Tsarnaev brother seems to have
rarely attended a mosque at all.
Representative King’s theories also fail to explain why, if young people are
being radicalized within mainstream Islamic communities, there aren’t more
attacks like the one in Boston. By some measures Islam is the fastest-growing
religion in the United States, and the last decade has seen a rapid expansion of
Muslim institutions across the country.
Yet what’s most obvious to anyone who has spent time in these communities is
that whether they are devotional or educational, focused on the arts or on
interfaith cooperation and activism, this mediating set of American Muslim
institutions is keeping impressionable young Muslims from becoming radicalized.
Take the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center and its range of devotional,
arts and educational programs, from preschool to a seminary. Or Chicago’s
Inner-City Muslim Action Network, complete with a medical clinic, civic
leadership education and a summer music festival that draws on the biggest names
of Muslim hip-hop to promote peace through community organizing. Or Zaytuna
College in Berkeley, Calif., the nation’s first four-year Islamic liberal arts
school.
These institutions and others have different aims, but they abide by a common
idea: if the center of Judaism is the law, and the heart of Christianity is
love, what Islam requires, above all else, is mercy. And whether on display in
health care provided for the poor at South Los Angeles’s UMMA Community Clinic,
or in a patiently handled Arabic lesson that will one day lead a new convert
into the fullness of the tradition, Islamic mercy, preached and practiced within
the community, allows no room for radicalization.
Representative King and others have it exactly, completely wrong — the American
Muslim community has actively and repeatedly, day in and day out, rejected such
radicals on religious grounds: they do not know mercy.
More than a decade since 9/11, this should no longer be any secret. Across the
nation, the doors are open, and more are opening every day. And despite whatever
misplaced fears the Boston bombings evoke about radical Islam and homegrown
terror, we’ll all find ourselves increasingly secure as more Muslims heed the
call — coming to Islam as it is in the United States, as a real, living
community.
Suhaib Webb is the imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural
Center.
Scott Korb, who teaches writing at New York University
and the New School, is the author of
“Light Without Fire: The Making of America’s First Muslim
College.”
April 24, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON — Despite being told in 2011 that an F.B.I. review
had found that a man who went on to become one of the suspects in the Boston
Marathon bombings had no ties to extremists, the Russian government asked the
Central Intelligence Agency six months later for whatever information it had on
him, American officials said Wednesday.
After its review, the C.I.A. also told the Russian intelligence service that it
had no suspicious information on the man, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a
shootout with the police early last Friday. It is not clear what prompted the
Russians to make the request of the C.I.A.
The upshot of the American inquiries into Mr. Tsarnaev’s background was that
even though he was found to have no connections to extremist groups, his name
was entered into two different United States government watch lists in late 2011
that were designed to alert the authorities if he traveled overseas.
The picture emerging Wednesday was of a counterterrorism bureaucracy that had at
least four contacts with Russian spy services about Mr. Tsarnaev in the year
before he took a six-month trip to Russia in 2012, but never found reason to
investigate him further after he returned, or at any time before last week’s
attacks in Boston that killed 3 people and injured more than 260.
Lawmakers this week criticized federal officials for failing to share
investigative leads in the months leading up to the attack, and the new
disclosures are likely to increase Congressional scrutiny of why the authorities
did not pay more attention to an overseas visit that may have helped radicalize
Mr. Tsarnaev.
After the C.I.A. cleared him of any ties to violent extremism in October 2011,
it asked the National Counterterrorism Center, the nation’s main
counterterrorism agency, to add his name to a watch list as a precaution, an
American intelligence official said Wednesday. Other agencies, including the
State Department, the Homeland Security Department and the F.B.I., were alerted.
That database, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, contains
about 700,000 names. It is the main repository from which other government watch
lists are drawn, including the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Database and the
Transportation Security Administration’s “no fly” list.
The information conveyed to the watch list included a transliteration from
Cyrillic of Mr. Tsarnaev’s name — “Tamerlan Tsarnayev” — two dates of birth
(both incorrect, officials said), and one possible variant spelling of his name.
The first Russian request came in March 2011 through the F.B.I.’s office in the
United States Embassy in Moscow. The one-page request said Mr. Tsarnaev “had
changed drastically since 2010” and was preparing to travel to a part of Russia
“to join unspecified underground groups.”
In response, counterterrorism agents in the F.B.I.’s field office in Boston,
near where Mr. Tsarnaev was living, began a review to determine whether he had
extremist tendencies or ties to terrorist groups. The review included examining
criminal databases and conducting interviews with Mr. Tsarnaev and his family.
The agents concluded by June 2011 that they could not find any connections to
extremists, and in August the results of the assessment were provided to the
Russians, according to the United States official. At the time, F.B.I. agents
requested additional information on Mr. Tsarnaev and asked to be informed of any
further developments.
In closing out its report, the F.B.I.’s field office in Boston added Mr.
Tsarnaev’s name to a second watch list, the Treasury Enforcement Communications
System, or TECS, which was set up to send an electronic message to customs
officials whenever Mr. Tsarnaev left the country.
Shortly thereafter, the F.B.I. repeated its request to the Russians for more
information. The Russians, however, did not respond with anything new.
But a month later, the Russians sent the C.I.A. the same request for information
on Mr. Tsarnaev that they had sent the F.B.I. .
That request prompted the C.I.A. to review its databases for information on Mr.
Tsarnaev, but the agency came to a similar conclusion as the F.B.I. Around that
time, the F.B.I. learned of the request to the C.I.A. and for the second time
since providing its findings to the Russians in June, it went back and asked
them for additional information on Mr. Tsarnaev, according to the official.
The official said the Russians never provided any additional information on Mr.
Tsarnaev until after he was killed as he and his brother, Dzhokhar, tried to
evade police officers who were chasing them in Watertown, Mass.
When Tamerlan Tsarnaev left the country on Jan. 12, 2012, for a six-month trip
to Dagestan and Chechnya, predominantly Muslim republics in the North Caucasus
region of Russia, his flight reservation set off a security alert to customs
authorities, the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, told a Senate
committee on Tuesday.
But Mr. Tsarnaev’s departure apparently did not set off a similar alert on the
TIDE watch list because the spelling variants of his name and the birth dates
entered into the system — exactly how the Russian government had provided the
data months earlier — were different enough from the correct information to
prevent an alert, a United States official said.
When Mr. Tsarnaev returned in July, the travel alert “was more than a year old
and had expired,” Ms. Napolitano said.
The new details about the investigation and the coordination between American
intelligence emerged as the deputy F.B.I. director, Sean Joyce, and other top
counterterrorism officials briefed lawmakers for a second day Wednesday. But
members of the House Intelligence Committee left closed briefings on Capitol
Hill with many unanswered questions about what or who radicalized the suspects.
Officer’s Killing Spurred Pursuit in Boston Attack
April 24, 2013
The New York Times
By WENDY RUDERMAN, SERGE F. KOVALESKI
and MICHAEL COOPER
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Officer Sean A. Collier was 27, not much
older than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology students he watched over as
a campus police officer, and he sometimes joined them in a game of darts or
Xbox. So when an ambulance staffed by students rolled past his parked patrol car
last Thursday night, he flashed his blue lights to say hello. The students
answered with their red lights.
It was just a little after that routine interaction, the police said, that a
pair of men approached Officer Collier’s squad car from behind and shot him to
death, in what some law enforcement officials said appeared to have been a
failed attempt to steal his gun. In the anguished scene that followed, the
student emergency medical technicians were called back to the patrol car they
had just passed, where they tried in vain to save Officer Collier’s life.
The killing of Officer Collier, who was mourned Wednesday at a campus memorial
at which Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke, was the first bloody
altercation in a nearly 24-hour chain of violent events that left one of the
brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings dead and ended with the
capture of the other. Interviews with law enforcement officials and witnesses
painted a clearer picture of what happened during that chaotic period, and
correct some of the information that officials gave out as they hunted the most
wanted men in America.
Police officials initially announced that officers had “exchanged gunfire”
Friday evening with the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, as he hid in a
boat in the backyard of a house in Watertown, Mass. Now several law enforcement
officials say no gun was found in the boat, and officials say they are exploring
what prompted officers to fire at Mr. Tsarnaev, who some feared was armed with
explosives.
Law enforcement officials now say they have recovered only one gun elsewhere,
which they believe was used by Mr. Tsarnaev’s older brother, Tamerlan — not the
three previously reported. And initial reports that the brothers first came to
the attention of the police after robbing a 7-Eleven were wrong. The police were
called to a gas station convenience store early Friday after a man who said he
had been carjacked by the marathon bombers escaped and sought help.
The catalyst that set the violent night in motion was the shooting death of
Officer Collier, officials said. It came about five hours after the F.B.I.
released pictures of the two suspects in the bombings and asked the public’s
help in identifying them.
“I consider him a hero,” Boston’s police commissioner, Edward Davis, said in an
interview this week. “It was his death that ultimately led to the apprehension.
The report of the shot officer led to all those resources being poured in.”
Officer Collier was killed around 10:30 p.m., police officials said — just half
an hour before his 3-to-11 shift was to end.
While there is video of two men approaching Officer Collier’s car, three law
enforcement officials said, it does not clearly show their faces. But
investigators now believe the brothers killed the officer to get another gun.
“He had a triple-lock holster, and they could not figure it out,” a law
enforcement official said. “There is evidence at the scene to suggest that they
were going for his gun.”
The killing brought a huge influx of police officers into Cambridge, so plenty
of officers were in the area later that night when a 911 call reported a
carjacking by two men claiming to be the marathon bombers.
The two men apparently split up after the killing, and when the carjacking
occurred, before midnight, a lone man approached a parked Mercedes-Benz sport
utility vehicle and tapped on the passenger-side window, officials said. Why the
men separated was among the many details of the night that were still unclear
even a week later.
After the driver lowered the window, the man reached in, opened the door,
climbed in and pointed a gun, saying, “Did you hear about the Boston explosion?”
and “I did that,” according to an affidavit filed Monday with the criminal
complaint charging Dzhokhar Tsarnaev with the bombings.
The gunman, who law enforcement officials believe was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26,
removed the magazine from his gun and showed the driver that a bullet was in it,
according to the affidavit. “I am serious,” he was quoted as saying.
The gunman then forced the driver to head for another location, where they
picked up a second man, who officials believe was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The
brothers loaded something in the trunk of the S.U.V., the affidavit said. They
then took $45 and a bank card from the carjacking victim, it said.
They pulled into the Memorial Drive Shell gas station and Mary’s Deli food mart
at Memorial Drive and River Street in Cambridge after midnight. Video
surveillance shows the victim of the carjacking fleeing to a Mobil gas station
across the street, according to Alan Mednick, the Shell station’s general
manager. The brothers did not buy anything, Mr. Mednick said.
“Maybe they were going to try and buy something, but the guy took off running,”
he said.
At the Mobil station, Tarek Ahmed, 45, was working the overnight shift when, he
said, a panicked man “came in running.”
“He opens the door,” Mr. Ahmed recalled in an interview. “I stood up. He was
screaming, saying: ‘Call the police. They have bombs. They have a gun. They want
to kill me.’ I thought he was drunk.”
Then Mr. Ahmed realized he was serious.
“He ran behind the counter and ran into the back room, a storage room, and
locked the door,” Mr. Ahmed recalled. “At this moment, I believe him. He was
honest, that somebody wanted to shoot him. So I took the phone, and I called
911.
“I tried not to look outside at anything. I wanted to make it appear as if
nothing was wrong. I was hoping the suspects didn’t see where he went. At the
same time, I told the police what happened. As I’m talking to the police, I back
up slowly and knock on the storage room door. The guy opened the door, and I
handed him the phone.”
The carjacking victim left his cellphone in the Mercedes, a law enforcement
official said, allowing officials to track it.
They caught up with S.U.V. in Watertown, where the men “threw at least two small
improvised explosive devices” out of the car, the affidavit said.
A furious gunfight ensued on Laurel Street in Watertown, where more than 200
rounds were fired, officials said. A transit police officer, Richard H. Donohue,
was shot in his right leg and critically wounded during the gunfight.
Chief Edward P. Deveau of the Watertown police said the suspects were shooting
at seven of his officers on a side street and throwing explosives at them.
“One of the officers coming in had at least one bullet go through his
windshield, and had the wherewithal to put the car in gear and let it roll down
the street while he is able to get out and take up a position,” the chief said.
“And eventually it hit a parked car. They were shooting at it because they think
there is somebody in it.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was wounded in the gunfight and then, law enforcement
officials and witnesses said, was hit by the carjacked Mercedes, which his
brother used to escape.
Mike Doucette, 27, a chimney sweep who lives on the street, described seeing one
brother shot and fall to the ground. He was still moving when the other brother
went “screaming up the street” in the S.U.V.
“I yelled to the cops, ‘Watch out!’ ” Mr. Doucette said in an interview. But the
car hit the wounded brother, he said, and “his body was tumbling underneath.”
As Friday dawned, state officials urged people in the Boston area to stay behind
locked doors, and all transit service was shut down — paralyzing the
metropolitan area as officials searched for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. That evening they
lifted the order, fearing he had escaped.
Then, close to 7 p.m., they got a call from a Watertown man. The man, Dave
Henneberry, had stepped out of his house after the authorities gave residents
the all-clear, then noticed something askew with his boat and went to fix it,
said John Duffy, 66, a close friend. The boat was called the Slip Away II.
A little later, Mr. Henneberry decided to return to the boat. “So he brought a
ladder out of the garage and laid it against the boat,” Mr. Duffy, who has
talked to Mr. Henneberry several times about the episode, said in an interview.
“He took about three steps up the ladder and looked inside the boat and sees
blood on one side of the deck. And he is questioning himself, ‘Did I cut myself
the last time I was out here?’
“Then he sees blood on the other side of the deck,” Mr. Duffy said. “Then he
looks over the engine compartment and sees a body. His words were, ‘I levitated
off the ladder.’ He does not remember going back into the house. He told his
wife, ‘Lock the doors,’ and he called 911.”
A call went out over the police radio. “They have a boat with blood on it, and
they believe someone’s on the boat,” it said. Police officials initially said
the boat was in the backyard of a house just outside the perimeter of the area
where investigators had conducted door-to-door searches all day. But
Commissioner Davis, of the Boston police, said this week that the boat had been
inside the perimeter.
“It was an area that should have been checked,” he said. “We are not sure how
long he was in the boat. There was a pool of blood near where the car was dumped
about four or five blocks away from the boat.”
It is still not clear what prompted officers to fire into the boat. “Shots
fired, multiple shots!” someone was heard saying on the radio, before another
call went out: “All units hold your fire! Hold your fire.”
Commissioner Davis said that “we will have to see what prompted the volley of
shots before the cease-fire was ordered by a superintendent of the Boston
police.”
A state police helicopter used thermal imaging technology to show where the
suspect was hiding in the boat, and a robotic arm attached to a police vehicle
was used to pull the tarp back.
Then, around 8:45 p.m., Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken alive.
Wendy Ruderman reported from Cambridge,
Serge F. Kovaleski from Boston,
and Michael Cooper from New York.
Reporting was contributed by Katharine Q. Seelye from Boston,
William K. Rashbaum and Erica Goode from New York,
April 22, 2013
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
WASHINGTON — For victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, the
terrible physical cost may come with a daunting financial cost as well.
Many of the wounded could face staggering bills not just for the trauma care
they received in the days after the bombings, but for prosthetic limbs, lengthy
rehabilitation and the equipment they will need to negotiate daily life with
crippling injuries. Even those with health insurance may find that their plan
places limits on specific services, like physical therapy or psychological
counseling.
Kenneth R. Feinberg, the lawyer who has overseen compensation funds for victims
of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the shootings at Virginia Tech and other
disasters, arrived in Boston on Monday to start the difficult work of deciding
who will be eligible for payouts from a new compensation fund and how much each
person wounded in the bombings and family of the dead deserves.
The One Fund Boston, which Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston and Gov. Deval
Patrick of Massachusetts created a day after the bombings, has already raised
more than $10 million for victims and their families. At the same time, friends
and relatives have set up dozens of smaller funds for individual victims.
For at least 13 victims who lost limbs, including William White of Bolton,
Mass., expenses may also include renovations to their homes that make it easier
for them to get around.
“What if his stairs are at the wrong incline, or he needs a ramp, or the
cobblestones in his backyard are uneven?” said Benjamin Coutu, a friend of the
White family who helped create a donation page on a fund-raising Web site for
Mr. White and his wife and son, who were also wounded in the blasts. “People who
are insured in these situations think, ‘Wow, I’m O.K., I’m covered.’ It’s not
until a month or two later that they realize, ‘I’m covered for the bare bones.’
”
The overall medical costs are difficult to estimate, especially since it is not
yet clear how much rehabilitation or future surgery the victims with the worst
injuries will need. But as a basis for comparison, medical costs for shooting
victims average about $50,000, said Ted Miller, a senior research scientist at
the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation who studies the costs of
injuries.
For Mr. Feinberg, whom city and state officials asked to administer the One Fund
Boston, the first task is to determine how much money is going to be available
through it. Most donations typically arrive in the first month after a disaster,
he said, adding that the fund-raising window should ideally be brief. “I’m a big
believer, in most of these programs, that the fund should be a very small
duration,” Mr. Feinberg said in a phone interview. “Because you’ve got to begin
to get the money out the door to the people who really need it, and you’ve got
to know how much you’re going to distribute.”
The thornier job, though, will be figuring out who qualifies for the funds and
how much each victim who survived — as well as the families of the three who
died — should receive. More than 170 people were wounded in the blasts, and more
than 50 remain in the hospital.
Mr. Feinberg said that he would seek input from victims and their families
before deciding on a formula. For victims of the Virginia Tech shooting, he
said, compensation amounts were based on how long they were in the hospital.
After the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., victims who were paralyzed or
suffered traumatic brain injuries received just as much as the families of those
who died.
“You can’t pay everyone the same if someone has a broken ankle versus a brain
injury,” he said. “There’s got to be some sliding scale.”
After the shootings in Aurora, some of the hospitals who treated victims agreed
to limit what they charged and to waive charges entirely. Tim Gens, executive
vice president of the Massachusetts Hospital Association, said that the
hospitals treating the Boston victims had not yet discussed how to handle
billing, but that it would be decided case by case.
For the uninsured, Mr. Gens said, Massachusetts has a charity care fund that
covers all or part of their costs, depending on their income. Each hospital also
has its own policies for waiving costs in certain situations, he said.
Meanwhile, Mr. Gens said, “For those who have insurance, there really shouldn’t
be an issue.” Massachusetts requires most of its residents to have health
insurance, although a small number refuse to comply or get waivers. It is not
yet clear how many of the wounded were visiting from other states, or how many
were uninsured.
“Massachusetts has been the leader of ‘let’s create health insurance for
everyone,’ ” said Dr. Miller of the Pacific Institute.“So it will be very
interesting to see how that plays out in terms of how the costs get borne.”
Charlie Baker, a former chief executive of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, one of
the state’s largest insurers, predicted that given the circumstances, most
insurance companies and employers would cover as much care as victims needed,
regardless of what their policy allowed.
“If, say, they have a physical therapy benefit with an annual limit of 30
visits, I just don’t see a lot of employers saying, ‘Stick to the benefit,’ ”
Mr. Baker said. “They’re going to say ‘go for it’ as long as the treatment is
medically helpful.”
Rich Audsley, special adviser to a committee that helped distribute $5.4 million
raised for victims in Aurora, said he wished there had been enough money to
cover the needs of people who were not physically injured but suffered emotional
trauma from witnessing the shootings or having victims die in their arms. Mr.
Audsley said that he hoped some of the One Fund Boston money would go to
community agencies that can provide counseling.
“We’re talking about emotional scars for many people that will be with them for
the rest of their lives,” Mr. Audsley said.
Mr. Coutu, the family friend of some victims, said that while Mr. Feinberg
figures out a formula for distributing money from the larger compensation fund,
smaller fund-raising efforts could provide crucial interim help. The one for the
White family has raised more than $55,000 so far.
“The great thing about these sorts of micro-fundraisers is they can access the
funds immediately,” Mr. Coutu said. “This is theirs.”
After the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Feinberg compensated victims’ families by
calculating the likely lifetime earnings of the dead. He won praise for his
handling of the fund, which was created by Congress and paid more than $7
billion in taxpayer funds to more than 5,000 survivors and families of the dead.
But it was an emotionally charged process.
“When people come to see me,” he said of disaster victims and their families,
“I’d be better off with a divinity degree or a degree in psychiatry.”
April 22, 2013
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
BOSTON — Lying grievously wounded in a hospital bed, the
surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings admitted on Sunday to playing
a role in the attacks, said law enforcement officials, and on Monday he was
charged with using a weapon of mass destruction that resulted in three deaths
and more than 170 injuries.
Uttering the word “no” once, but mostly nodding his responses, the suspect,
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was charged in a brief but dramatic bedside scene in the
intensive care ward of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he is
recovering from multiple gunshot wounds sustained during his capture last week.
Mr. Tsarnaev made his admission on Sunday morning to specially trained F.B.I.
agents who had been waiting outside his hospital room for him to regain
consciousness. After he woke up, they questioned him, invoking a special Justice
Department public safety exception that allowed them to interrogate him without
telling him he had the right to remain silent.
In the course of questioning him about whether he knew of any other active plots
or threats to public safety, he admitted that he had been involved in laying the
bombs that killed three people at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
He said that he knew of no other plots and that he and his brother had acted
alone, and he said he knew of no more bombs that had not been detonated.
At the legal hearing Monday, he shook his head in response to most questions.
The brief bedside session began when Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler asked a
doctor whether Mr. Tsarnaev was alert, according to a transcript of the
proceeding.
“You can rouse him,” the judge told the doctor.
“How are you feeling?” asked the doctor, identified in the transcript as Dr.
Odom. “Are you able to answer some questions?” He nodded.
Judge Bowler then read Mr. Tsarnaev his rights. Also present were two United
States attorneys and three federal public defenders, who will be representing
him. Judge Bowler asked if he understood his right to remain silent, to which he
nodded affirmatively, according to the transcript.
The only word Mr. Tsarnaev uttered, apparently, was “No,” after he was asked if
he could afford a lawyer.
Judge Bowler said, “Let the record reflect that I believe the defendant has
said, ‘No.’ ”
At the end of the session, Judge Bowler said: “At this time, at the conclusion
of the initial appearance, I find that the defendant is alert, mentally
competent, and lucid. He is aware of the nature of the proceedings.” If
convicted, he faces the death penalty or life behind bars.
Mr. Tsarnaev is being treated for what court papers described as possible
gunshot wounds to the “head, neck, legs and hand.” One law enforcement officer
said the wound to the neck appeared to be the result of a self-inflicted
gunshot. The charges were lodged in a criminal complaint unsealed Monday in
United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the first step
in a lengthy process.
The White House said that Mr. Tsarnaev would not be placed in military
detention. “We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of
justice,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.
He noted that it was illegal to try an American citizen in a military
commission, and that a number of high-profile terrorism cases had been handled
in the civilian court system, including that of the would-be bomber who tried to
bring down a passenger jet around Christmas 2009 with explosives in his
underwear.
The charges against Mr. Tsarnaev were made public about the same time that
Boston, like many cities across the country, held a moment of silence at 2:50
p.m., the time of the explosions a week before. Hundreds of people gathered in
Copley Square, near the scene of the attacks, after which church bells tolled
mournfully in a cold, wintry wind.
Already, hundreds of mourners had attended a funeral at St. Joseph Church in
Medford, Mass., for Krystle Campbell, the 29-year-old restaurant manager killed
near the finish line of the marathon. In the evening, hundreds more attended a
memorial service at Boston University for Lu Lingzi, 23, a Chinese graduate
student who was killed in the bombings.
A service is planned Wednesday for Sean Collier, 26, the M.I.T. campus police
officer who was killed in his car Thursday night.
Mr. Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, 26, are accused of going on a violent
spree that ended in Tamerlan’s death and Dzhokhar’s capture in a boat parked in
a driveway in Watertown, Mass., about seven miles west of Boston. New details
were included in the affidavit accompanying the criminal complaint, which also
outlined the evidence that law enforcement agencies have collected linking the
two suspects to the bombings. However, there was no mention in the affidavit of
the killing of the campus police officer, nor any explanation why it was not
mentioned.
The affidavit, sworn by Daniel R. Genck, an F.B.I. special agent assigned to the
Joint Terrorist Task Force in Boston, cited surveillance video as it detailed
the movements the brothers made around the time of the bombings.
In chilling detail, the affidavit described how a man it referred to as “Bomber
Two,” whom it identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, could be seen “apparently
slipping his knapsack onto the ground.”
Video from a nearby restaurant, Forum, showed the bomber remaining in place,
checking his cellphone and even appearing to take a picture with it, the
affidavit said. Then he seemed to speak into his phone.
“A few seconds after he finishes the call, the large crowd of people around him
can be seen reacting to the first explosion,” the court papers said. “Virtually
every head turns to the east (towards the finish line) and stares in that
direction in apparent bewilderment and alarm. Bomber Two, virtually alone among
the individuals in front of the restaurant, appears calm. He glances to the east
and then calmly but rapidly begins moving to the west, away from the direction
of the finish line.”
“He walks away without his knapsack, having left it on the ground where he had
been standing,” the court papers said. “Approximately 10 seconds later, an
explosion occurs in the location where Bomber Two had placed his knapsack.”
Just seven hours after the F.B.I. released pictures of the two suspects on
Thursday afternoon to the public, one of the suspects emerged in Cambridge,
pointing a gun at a man sitting in his car.
The affidavit said that the driver eventually escaped and his stolen vehicle was
located soon thereafter in Watertown. As the two suspects drove around, they
tossed at least two small improvised explosive devices from the car window, the
affidavit said. When the police caught up with the men on Laurel Street, they
engaged in a gunfight.
At the scene of the shootout, the F.B.I. found more clues: two unexploded
improvised explosive devices and the remnants of “numerous” exploded devices,
which were similar to those found at the scene of the marathon bombings — and at
least one was in a pressure cooker, the affidavit said. “The pressure cooker was
of the same brand as the ones used in the Marathon explosions,” it said.
As the legal process was playing out, investigators were still working
feverishly to determine the motives for the attacks. A lawyer for Katherine
Russell, who married Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2010, said that Ms. Russell found out
that her husband was a suspect in the bombings only after the authorities
released the photos on Thursday.
“She was shocked,” said the lawyer, Amato A. DeLuca. “She had no idea.”
Mr. DeLuca said that he had been speaking with law enforcement authorities but
declined to say whether Ms. Russell had. He also declined to elaborate on
whether his client had seen changes in her husband recently. He did say that his
client did not speak Russian, so she could not always understand what her
husband was saying.
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Boston,
Michael S. Schmidt from Washington
and William K. Rashbaum from New York.
Reporting was contributed by Michael Cooper
and John Eligon from New York;
Richard A. Oppel Jr., Serge F. Kovaleski and Jess Bidgood from
Boston;
April 22, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON — Amid questions about whether the F.B.I. missed an
opportunity to discover that one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings
may have become an extremist, law enforcement officials defended their actions
on Monday, saying they had no legal basis to monitor him in the months leading
up to the attack.
The agency first looked into the suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in 2011 in response
to a request from Russia, which told the F.B.I. that he “was a follower of
radical Islam.” But once investigators closed the background check on Mr.
Tsarnaev after concluding that he posed no terrorist threat, a senior law
enforcement official said, it would have been a violation of federal guidelines
to keep investigating him without additional information.
“We had an authorized purpose to look into someone based on the query we
received,” the official said. “You can do a limited investigation based on that
request.”
Senior F.B.I. and intelligence officials will be forced to explain to the Senate
Intelligence Committee in a classified briefing on Tuesday the steps they took —
and did not take — before and after Mr. Tsarnaev returned last July from a
six-month trip to Chechnya and Dagestan, predominantly Muslim republics in the
North Caucasus region of Russia.
In a statement Monday, Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat on the panel,
said: “There are many questions I want answered, such as how and when the
suspects became radicalized, details of the F.B.I.’s initial investigation into
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s activities, the nature of the terrorist threat in southern
Russia, and more information on our counterterrorism cooperation with Moscow.”
The exchange between the F.B.I. and Russian authorities on Mr. Tsarnaev’s
potential links to extremist groups has cast a spotlight on a counterterrorism
relationship that has endured even as diplomatic relations between the countries
have gone through ups and downs.
However, it also reflects what Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s former
top counterterrorism official, said on Monday was “a culture of wariness”
between the two former cold war rivals. Even as the United States responds to
Russian requests for details on potential extremists, Mr. Benjamin said, the
authorities must be careful not to provide information that could “expose
sources and methods or get us involved in an abuse of human rights that we
couldn’t condone.”
Soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Moscow and Washington created a special
counterterrorism working group to help improve cooperation.
James W. McJunkin, a former top F.B.I. counterterrorism official, recalled a
long-running investigation a few years ago into possible money laundering and
other material support to terrorist groups by American citizens of Chechen or
Russian origin in several Northeastern states.
Russian authorities provided the F.B.I. with cellphone numbers and e-mail
addresses of several possible suspects, and even though the inquiry in the end
did not yield any arrests, Mr. McJunkin said, “we now have a better
understanding of how these kinds of cases work and how we can better recognize
trends and patterns.”
In Mr. Tsarnaev’s case, the Russian government expressed fear that he could be a
risk “based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong
believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave
the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified
underground groups,” the F.B.I. said in a statement.
The F.B.I. responded by checking government databases for any criminal records
or immigration violations as well as activity on Web sites that promote
extremist views and activities. The investigators found no derogatory
information, officials said.
When they asked the Russians for more information to justify a search of Mr.
Tsarnaev’s phone records, travel history and other more restricted information,
they received no reply, a senior United States official said.
As a last resort, the F.B.I. sent two counterterrorism agents to interview Mr.
Tsarnaev and members of his family. According to an F.B.I. statement, “The
F.B.I. did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign.”
After Mr. Tsarnaev’s visit to Dagestan and Chechnya, signs of alienation
emerged. One month after he returned to the United States, a YouTube page that
appeared to belong to him was created and featured jihadist videos.
Posting such videos alone, without overt threats of violence, should not
necessarily sound alarms, some counterterrorism specialists said Monday.
“I tend to view this stuff as certainly interesting, and evincing some degree of
extreme beliefs, but probably not exactly a flashing warning sign,” said Evan F.
Kohlmann, a terrorism analyst with the consulting company Flashpoint Global
Partners.
Anecdotes suggest that Mr. Tsarnaev became more religious in the last several
years and may have embraced more conservative Islamic ideas.
On Monday, a spokesman for the Islamic Society of Boston, a Cambridge mosque,
said Mr. Tsarnaev disrupted a talk there in January, insulting the speaker and
accusing him of deviating from Islam by comparing the Prophet Muhammad to the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was the second time he had disrupted an event
at the mosque because he felt that its religious message was too liberal, said
the spokesman, Yusufi Vali, according to a report in The Boston Globe.
April 22, 2013
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
A senior United States official said Monday that federal
authorities invoked a public safety exemption to standard criminal procedures
and questioned Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Sunday without telling him that he had the
right to remain silent, in order to learn whether he knew of remaining active
threats.
Once the authorities felt satisfied that no such threat existed, a magistrate
judge was brought to Mr. Tsarnaev’s bedside at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center on Monday. He was informed of his rights and the charges against him in
the presence of a lawyer.
Mr. Tsarnaev, 19, nodded his understanding and during the proceedings spoke only
one word — “no” — when asked if he could afford a lawyer. One was appointed for
him.
The charges — use of a weapon of mass destruction that caused death — were
recited to him by William Weinreb, a federal prosecutor, who also told Mr.
Tsarnaev that they carried a maximum penalty of death. Under federal law, the
term “weapon of mass destruction” refers to virtually any explosive charge aimed
at harming people.
The magistrate, Marianne B. Bowler, said toward the end of the short
proceedings, “I find that the defendant is alert, mentally competent and lucid.
He is aware of the nature of the proceedings.”
The extraordinary developments — a public safety exemption followed by a bedside
initial court appearance — were the opening moves in what promises to be a
contested and complex legal case that could end in a federal death penalty in a
state that does not have one.
There was already much debate about whether a public safety exemption could be
invoked and what kinds of questions Mr. Tsarnaev could be asked during the
exemption.
A federal official said that Mr. Tsarnaev admitted to a role in the bombings
during the exempted questioning. Whether that statement could be admitted in
court later remained murky. The exemption would have to be upheld by a judge who
determined that it was properly invoked. The judge would also have to rule
whether the questioning hewed closely to public safety issues.
On the other hand, it remained unclear whether such an admission would be
needed, given video and other evidence against Mr. Tsarnaev and his brother,
Tamerlan, 26, who was killed.
Whether the case will come to trial also remains unclear. Daniel C. Richman, a
law professor at Columbia University, said Mr. Tsarnaev’s lawyer would do all he
could to persuade his client to cooperate fully with the authorities in order to
mitigate his punishment to life imprisonment.
“The first conversation between him and his lawyer will be the lawyer saying it
will serve you to speak up now,” Mr. Richman said.
But Christopher Slobogin, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, said he
doubted the government would be interested in much of a deal.
“He could plead guilty and hope to get something less than the death penalty,
but there would be a public uproar if he got life in prison,” Mr. Slobogin said.
He added, however, that Mr. Tsarnaev’s lawyer could try to assert that his
client was insufficiently sentient during the federal investigation on Sunday
night and that his statements were coerced in an unconstitutional manner even if
there was a legitimate concern for public safety and even if the next day the
magistrate asserted that he was able to follow the proceedings.
Donald A. Dripps, a law professor at the University of San Diego, said the
description of the bombs used in Boston last week as weapons of mass destruction
was completely appropriate.
“If the device had gone off at a slightly higher altitude, there would have been
a lot more deaths,” Mr. Dripps said. “These bombs were clearly built for that
purpose.”
Federal authorities said they had made proper use of the public safety exemption
to the Miranda rule.
“When you uncover a plot like this, you need to quickly be able to find out if
there are other threats,” a senior official said.
April 21, 2013
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
MEDFORD, Mass. — Boston began to say goodbye on Sunday to
those it lost last week. Its leaders — religious as well as political — fanned
out, in front of naves and cameras, to do what they could to reassure grieving
parishioners and constituents that the danger had passed. Or that for those who
are gone, “life,” as Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley put it, “is not ended, merely
changed.”
Memories were not the only thing etched for some mourners.
As Melanie Fitzemeyer, who baby-sat for Krystle Campbell two decades ago, walked
to Ms. Campbell’s wake along with hundreds of others at a brick-and-frame
funeral home on Main Street here, she took off her jacket and rolled up her
sleeve. Incised on her arm was a two-line tattoo she had gotten the night
before, at a parlor owned by one of Ms. Campbell’s cousins.
“Boston Strong,” the top line read in black letters scored into the length of
her forearm, the surrounding skin still pink and tender.
“1983 Krystle 2013,” read the bottom.
Ms. Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager, died after last Monday’s bombing
at the Boston Marathon from wounds sustained near the finish line of a race she
tried to see every year. Ms. Fitzemeyer, 39, knew her longer than most, and
remembered her as an exuberant child. “She liked to paint and color and make
things,” she said.
Ms. Campbell will be buried on Monday, and the wake here on Sunday was the first
time anyone was able to say goodbye so intimately to any of the victims. Dozens
came from Harvard — where her mother and brother work, as she once did — while
50 leather-and-denim clad members of motorcycle clubs stood across the street.
Some told photographers to move down the street.
“We’re just trying to keep the nonsense away,” one biker explained after he and
two friends blocked a cameraman.
Other bikers waited quietly, they said, in case a rumored picket by the Westboro
Baptist Church materialized. “We’re just here to create a respectful barrier for
the family,” said Tony Rossetti, a Middlesex County sheriff’s deputy who is the
president of the Boston chapter of the Enforcers Motorcycle Club, where he is
known as Preacher.
Reassurance seemed to be the message from top city and state officials on the
Sunday news shows.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino said that what he knew suggested that the two brothers
suspected of carrying out the attack had operated by themselves. “All of the
information that I have, they acted alone,” he said on “This Week” on ABC.
The danger has passed, Gov. Deval Patrick said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “The
immediate threat, I think all of law enforcement feels, is over, based on the
information we have,” he said. “And that is a good thing, and you can feel the
relief at home here.”
Yet the investigation continued, with officials struggling to learn whether the
brothers had help or were operating in league with anyone. Tamerlan Tsarnaev,
26, died after a shootout with the police in Watertown, Mass., early Friday
morning, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was captured that night in Watertown and now
lies grievously wounded in a Boston hospital bed.
At the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Cardinal O’Malley said some of the
more than 170 wounded in the bombings had prayed there one week ago. He named
the four who lost their lives — three who died at the finish line and a police
officer who was killed three nights later in a fatal encounter with the Tsarnaev
brothers, officials say — and said they would live in eternity.
“We must be a people of reconciliation, not revenge,” the cardinal said. “The
crimes of the two young men must not be the justification for prejudice against
Muslims and against immigrants. The Gospel is the antidote to the ‘eye for an
eye and tooth for a tooth’ mentality.”
Cardinal O’Malley, who has criticized the Democratic Party for its support for
abortion rights, said that more than one million abortions annually “is one
indication of how human life has been devalued.” But he also criticized
lawmakers in Congress — by implication, most of them Republicans — by saying
that a failure to “enact laws that control access to automatic weapons is
emblematic of the pathology of our violent culture.”
“I hope that the events of this past week have taught us how high the stakes
are,” the cardinal said at the end of his homily. “We must build a civilization
of love, or there will be no civilization at all.”
His words resonated with Maureen Quaranto, a nurse practitioner. She was working
as a volunteer in a medical tent at the marathon when the bombs went off. On
Sunday, she drove from her home in Plymouth, Mass., and then lingered after the
service, tears in her eyes.
“It just gives you time to reflect,” she said. “Jesus said to forgive him.”
Mayor Menino and Governor Patrick called on everyone in the state to come
together for a moment of silence at 2:50 p.m. Monday — precisely one week after
the bombings. That will be followed by the ringing of bells across Boston and
the commonwealth.
On Monday night at Boston University, students and faculty and staff members
will gather on campus in honor of Lu Lingzi, 23, the Chinese graduate student
who was killed in the bombing.
“We will remember her and everything good that a bright, ambitious, and engaging
student represents in our community, and, hopefully, speak about the values that
make our community strong, even under such terrible circumstances,” Robert A.
Brown, the president of the university, wrote in an e-mail announcing the
gathering.
Another memorial is expected this week at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology to honor Sean A. Collier, 26, the campus police officer who was
killed.
“I am profoundly grateful for the service and supreme sacrifice of Officer
Collier, who was an extraordinary young man, an excellent police officer, and a
truly beloved member of our community,” Eric Grimson, the chancellor of M.I.T.,
wrote in an e-mail on Sunday.
The fourth victim, Martin Richard, 8, was mourned on Sunday in Dorchester at the
church attended by his family.
There were signs that the Boston area was returning to normal.
Late Sunday afternoon, Mayor Menino briefed reporters about a five-phase plan to
reopen the area where the attack occurred. It will involve decontamination,
structural building assessments and debris removal.
Newbury Street, the busy retail thoroughfare that runs parallel to Boylston
Street, where the blasts took place, was bustling on Sunday, with visitors
clutching shopping bags and relaxing in restaurants. But they were also drawn by
the hundreds to gaze over the metal barriers cordoning off the six blocks around
the marathon’s finish line.
“It’s been really eerie,” said Calla Gillies, a 24-year-old real estate agent
who lives inside the area, which she can gain access to with proof of residence.
“We’re just still as scared because it’s empty. It feels like the marathon was
yesterday.”
Jess Bidgood and Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting from
Boston.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: April 21, 2013
Because of editing errors, an earlier version of this article
misstated the name of one of the Boston Marathon victims
and the university she attended. Her name was Lu Lingzi, not
Lingzi Lu,
and she attended Boston University, not Brown.
The article also incorrectly described the reason the university
closed on Friday.
It shut down during the search for the bombing suspects,
WASHINGTON — Some Republican lawmakers want President Obama to
declare the surviving Boston bombing suspect an enemy combatant in order to
question him without a lawyer and other protections of the criminal justice
system, intensifying a recurring debate over how to handle terrorism cases
arising inside the United States.
But while the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a naturalized American citizen, is a
Muslim, there is no known evidence suggesting that he is part of Al Qaeda. The
United States is engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, not all Muslim
extremists. As a result, the dispute is pushing beyond familiar arguments and
into new territory.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, is among the earliest and
most vocal proponents of declaring Mr. Tsarnaev an enemy combatant. Others
include Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and
John McCain of Arizona, as well as Representative Peter T. King of New York, all
also Republicans.
The Obama administration has said it thinks terrorism suspects arrested inside
the United States should be handled exclusively in the criminal justice system.
It has indicated no intention to do otherwise in Mr. Tsarnaev’s case, but the
issue is taking on political currency, underscoring a major divide on national
security legal policy.
Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, said in a statement that the laws of war did not apply to
Mr. Tsarnaev and that there was so far no evidence that he was “part of any
organized group, let alone Al Qaeda, the Taliban or one of their affiliates —
the only organizations whose members are subject” to detention as a part of war.
“In the absence of such evidence, I know of no legal basis for his detention as
an enemy combatant,” Mr. Levin said. “To hold the suspect as an enemy combatant
under these circumstances would be contrary to our laws and may even jeopardize
our efforts to prosecute him for his crimes.”
In an interview, Mr. Graham acknowledged that if no evidence were to emerge
linking Mr. Tsarnaev to Al Qaeda, then he should not continue to be held as an
enemy combatant. But he argued that given the need to swiftly find out if Mr.
Tsarnaev knew of other planned attacks or terrorist operatives, the government
could and should hold him as a combatant while it searched for any such links.
“You can’t hold every person who commits a terrorist attack as an enemy
combatant, I agree with that,” Mr. Graham said. “But you have a right, with his
radical Islamist ties and the fact that Chechens are all over the world fighting
with Al Qaeda — I think you have a reasonable belief to go down that road, and
it would be a big mistake not to go down that road. If we didn’t hold him for
intelligence-gathering purposes, that would be unconscionable.”
Mr. Graham said 30 days of confinement and interrogation as an enemy combatant
would be an appropriate amount of time to allow the government to look for
evidence that would justify his continued detention under the law of war. He
also said he believed that federal judges would grant the government that amount
of leeway.
Beyond the absence of known links between Mr. Tsarnaev and Al Qaeda, it is also
unclear whether the Constitution permits the government to hold citizens
arrested on domestic soil as enemy combatants. Though Mr. Graham believes that
it would be lawful, other lawmakers disagree. Neither Congress nor the Supreme
Court has resolved the question.
During the Bush administration, the Supreme Court upheld the indefinite military
detention of Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen who was captured carrying a
weapon on the Afghanistan battlefield.
But the court never resolved the case of another American, Jose Padilla, whom
the Bush administration held as an enemy combatant for several years after his
arrest in Chicago. Two different federal appeals courts disagreed about whether
it was lawful to hold someone like Mr. Padilla in indefinite detention without
trial, and the Bush administration transferred him back to the civilian court
system before the Supreme Court took up the case.
In the Hamdi ruling, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote “there is no bar to this
nation’s holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant.” But she also
wrote the decision was limited to Mr. Hamdi’s “narrow circumstances.” She also
said the purpose of wartime detention was to keep captured enemies from
returning to fight, adding, “Certainly, we agree that indefinite detention for
the purpose of interrogation is not authorized.”
Mr. Graham said the purpose of holding Mr. Tsarnaev as a military detainee would
be to question him at length without any lawyer. Though the Obama administration
has said it would use a public-safety exception to the Miranda rule to question
him for a period without warning him of his rights to remain silent and have a
lawyer, Mr. Graham said that would at best gain only a few days before a lawyer
intervened.
Mr. Graham also acknowledged that ultimately Mr. Tsarnaev must be transferred
back to the civilian criminal justice system for prosecution, because the
statute authorizing military commissions — which he helped write — does not
apply to United States citizens. Mr. Graham, one of the leading Republican
voices opposing the torture of terrorism suspects, emphasized that interrogation
as an enemy combatant would not mean inflicting suffering on Mr. Tsarnaev in
order to make him talk, and that anything he said in military detention should
not be used as courtroom evidence.
But Mr. Graham rejected the view that the Federal Bureau of Investigation might
be equally or more effective than intelligence officials at persuading Mr.
Tsarnaev to provide information, even with a defense lawyer at his side, since
the law enforcement officials would have the leverage of being able to float
more favorable treatment in exchange for cooperation as part of a potential plea
bargain. He said interrogators needed to build a rapport with a prisoner,
suggesting that any presence of a lawyer would disrupt that dynamic.
“That is, to me, the dumbest way to induce someone to talk,” he said of such
tools and tactics of law enforcement officials. “I want intelligence officials
trained in the intelligence process to have a chance to talk to him, without a
lawyer.”
April 21, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina apparently has a
thermal-imaging device for detecting the motivation of the man arrested on
suspicion of bombing the Boston Marathon. He and three other Republican
lawmakers declared — without the benefit of evidence — that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
should be considered an enemy combatant, not a criminal, and should be held by
the military without access to a lawyer or the fundamental rights that
distinguish this country from authoritarian regimes.
Mr. Graham’s reckless statement makes a mockery of the superb civilian police
work that led to the suspect’s capture, starting with a skillful analysis of
video recordings of the marathon. The law enforcement system solved the case
swiftly and efficiently, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local
police, and as shocking as the attack was, there is no reason civilian
prosecutors, defense lawyers and courts cannot continue to do their work —
especially since they have proved themselves far better at it than the military.
Mr. Tsarnaev is a naturalized American citizen, an inconvenient fact for the
pressure-him-at-Gitmo crowd. He cannot be tried in a military commission, a
legal system reserved for aliens. Even to be held by the military without trial
would require a showing that he is associated with a declared enemy of the
United States, such as Al Qaeda or the Taliban. So far there isn’t any visible
connection between the Tsarnaev brothers and anyone more malevolent. Their
Islamic or Chechen heritage alone is hardly proof of jihadist intent.
Fortunately the Obama administration has ignored the posturing and declared that
Mr. Tsarnaev, like all citizens and even alien terrorists captured on American
soil, will be tried in the federal courts. He will soon be charged with
terrorism under federal statutes, and will be represented by the federal public
defender’s office.
Federal and local officials intend to take their time, however, in giving a
Miranda warning to the suspect, advising him of his right to remain silent.
(Even if Mr. Tsarnaev remains too wounded to speak, he still deserves his
rights.) There is a public safety exception to the Miranda requirement, allowing
investigators to question suspects about imminent threats, like bombs or
specific terror conspiracies, before the warning is given and then use that
information in court. In 2010, unfortunately, the administration improperly told
agents that they could expand that exception for terror suspects even when
threats were not imminent.
It is not clear whether that expansion, which has yet to be tested in court, is
being employed in this case. But the Obama administration, no less than
Republicans, should not allow the raw emotions associated with a terrorism case
to trample on the American system of justice.
April 21, 2013
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
NEEDHAM, Mass. — Four days after the Boston Marathon bombings,
Ali Tepsurkaev was at work on a construction site on Nantucket when his boss
approached him to deliver the news: the two prime suspects had been identified
as ethnic Chechens.
For Mr. Tepsurkaev, 33, who fled the wars in Chechnya more than a decade ago,
immediate disbelief turned quickly to fear and despair. The violence that had
once consumed his homeland had found him again, this time shattering the quiet
refuge he had found here in New England.
“I was so upset, I couldn’t work,” said Mr. Tepsurkaev, who soon left his
Nantucket home to be with his extended family here in Needham, a Boston suburb.
“I left my guys. I couldn’t finish. It felt so horrible.”
Until a few days ago, most Chechens in the United States lived largely anonymous
lives. Few Americans even knew what and where Chechnya was.
Now, two Chechen brothers are at the center of one of the most serious terrorist
attacks on the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. While the motivations behind
the bombings are still unknown, the attack has made Chechnya, a mostly Muslim
region in Russia, a focus of American scrutiny, and it has thrust Chechens
living here into an unwanted spotlight.
Several Chechens in the Boston area and elsewhere said the attack had left them
feeling exposed — and embarrassed. Some worry about being branded terrorists in
a country that they credit with offering them sanctuary.
For most of them, the attacks raised fears that their past was somehow catching
up with them. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in two vicious wars
between Russian troops and Chechen separatists in the 1990s and early 2000s. The
wars led to widespread destruction in Chechnya and spawned a violent Islamist
insurgency that created even more misery.
Many Chechens fled, taking their traumas and battle scars with them. Most stayed
in Europe. But a handful, perhaps no more than a thousand, came to the United
States, where few expected to see the kind of the indiscriminate slaughter that
had engulfed their homeland, particularly an attack committed by fellow
Chechens.
Mr. Tepsurkaev, who has a wife and 3-year-old daughter, said seeing two Chechens
held responsible for the Boston attack had left him feeling irrational guilt.
“Most of us would be dead right now if it wasn’t for the United States giving us
a home and saving us from all the violence,” he said. “It feels embarrassing for
us. After all this hospitality we’re getting from Americans, to hear that some
Chechen....” he said, breaking off. “It’s hard. It’s difficult to explain.”
He spoke with a reporter over tea at his uncle’s house across from a playground
here in Needham, about 10 miles from the bombing suspects’ home in Cambridge.
He was surrounded by cousins close to the age of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the
younger of the two suspects, who was taken into custody on Friday. Two of the
cousins, Islam and Maryam Baiev, are planning to go to college in the fall to
pursue careers in medicine. They speak English with no accent, but can still
banter easily in both Chechen and Russian.
“I remember them in the dungeon just hiding from the bombs,” Mr. Tepsurkaev said
of his cousins. “They’ve seen the screaming, they’ve seen the blood, but as you
see they’re getting educated here, trying to get into college and living their
lives. No hate, no violence. They’ve seen it, that’s why they appreciate it even
more.”
“But these guys who haven’t seen anything,” he said about the bombing suspects.
“I have no idea what kind of crazy ideas they have going on in their head.”
The two suspects, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan, 26, lived in
Dagestan, a region in Russia that borders Chechnya, and in Kyrgyzstan, a former
Soviet republic that is now independent, before coming to the United States as
children. But they had never lived in Chechnya itself.
“Any attempt to make a connection between Chechnya and the Tsarnaevs, if they
were guilty, is futile,” Ramzan A. Kadyrov, Chechnya’s leader, said in a post on
Instagram. “They were raised in the United States and their views and
convictions formed there. The roots of evil must be sought in America.”
None of the Chechens interviewed said they had more than a passing knowledge of
the Tsarnaev brothers, who are accused of killing three people and wounding more
than 170 in the bombing at the marathon and then going on a rampage that left
one police officer dead and another struggling to survive.
A 28-year-old Chechen immigrant, who refused to be named because he feared
reprisals against his family in Chechnya, said that there were, at most, five or
six Chechen families living in the Boston area, but they had little contact with
one another. He said he visited the Tsarnaevs’ home two years ago, after Anzor
Tsarnaev, the suspects’ father, returned from a hospital stay.
He said Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with the police on
Friday, was “a nice guy, physically strong and very funny.” Beyond that, he
said, he knew little about the family.
Some Chechens say they have felt uneasy since the suspects’ background was
revealed. And at least one senator has already evoked the Boston attack in a
call for stricter immigration laws.
“It’s something they are very nervous about because there is a history of ethnic
discrimination and suspicion against them in Russia,” said Almut Rochowanski, of
the Chechnya Advocacy Network, which works with Chechen refugees in the United
States. “I have actually had to calm down my Chechen-American contacts and
assuage their fears, telling them things like Americans have dealt with this
issue long enough now to know not to discriminate against entire groups.”
Albina Digaeva, 34, who fled in 1998 and now studies at a Los Angeles college,
said she was afraid to take the subway after learning the suspects were Chechen.
“Maybe it was an overreaction, but it was my initial reaction,” said Ms.
Digaeva, who is an observant Muslim and wears a head scarf. “It’s just that
after living through the war and experiencing that in Russia, it just brought
back all these memories.”
Amrina Sugaipova, a linguist who moved to Portland, Ore., from Chechnya in 2001
said she was distressed by some portrayals of Chechens in the news media since
the bombing suspects’ identities and backgrounds were released.
“I’ve read all kinds of stories with people saying very negative things about
the nation,” she said, referring to Chechnya. “I really hope Chechens won’t be
profiled here, but I suspect they are going to be following every step we do.”
Mr. Tepsurkaev was just as pessimistic.
“Now when I meet someone, and they ask where I’m from, it will be difficult to
say that I am Chechen,” he said. “I fear that it will affect my relationships
with Americans.”
April 21, 2013
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and ANDREW ROTH
MAKHACHKALA, Russia — Tamerlan Tsarnaev had already found
religion by the time he landed in Dagestan, a combustible region in the North
Caucasus that has become the epicenter of a violent Islamic insurgency in Russia
and a hub of jihadist recruitment. What he seemed to be yearning for was a home.
“When he came, he talked about religion,” said his aunt, Patimat Suleimanova,
who saw him a few days after he arrived in January 2012.
It was 15 months before Mr. Tsarnaev would be killed during a wild, bloody
standoff with the police, who believe he planted deadly bombs near the finish
line of the Boston Marathon.
He flew in to the airport here in Makhachkala, where the plate-glass windows of
the arrival hall frame a mosque with twin minarets stretching skyward. He had
already given up drinking alcohol, grown a close beard and become more devout,
praying five times a day.
The reunion with his aunt and uncle in their third-floor apartment on
Timiryazeva Street was a happy one, marked by contrasts with his life in
America. “He said, ‘The people here are completely different. They pray
different,’ ” Ms. Suleimanova recalled in an interview Sunday.
“Listen to the call to prayer — the azan — that they play from the mosque,” Mr.
Tsarnaev said, according to his aunt. “It makes me so happy, to hear it from all
sides, that you can always hear it — it makes me want to go to the mosque.”
“What, you can’t hear the mosques there in America?” she recalled asking, and he
replied, “Something like that.”
Mr. Tsarnaev stayed for six months in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan,
where he had spent most of his teenage years and where his parents had returned
to live after several years in the United States. Those six months have become a
focus for investigators who are trying to understand why he and his brother
might have carried out the attack in Boston, and especially, whether they were
connected to any organized terrorist network.
But the emerging portrait of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s time here seems inside out.
Dagestan, which has been known to grow and export terrorists like those who
carried out the deadly 2010 bombings in the Moscow subways, seems in this case
to have been a way station for a young man whose path began and ended somewhere
else.
On Sunday, the most feared terrorist group in the Caucasus, the Mujahideen of
the Caucasus Emirate, issued a statement dismissing speculation that Mr.
Tsarnaev had joined them and denying any responsibility for the Boston Marathon
attack. “The Mujahideen of the Caucasus are not fighting against the United
States of America,” the statement said. “We are at war with Russia, which is not
only responsible for the occupation of the Caucasus but also for heinous crimes
against Muslims.”
This continuing strife between Islamic militants and the Russian authorities
receives little attention outside Russia, but it has yielded a long string of
terror attacks, many of them in Dagestan, that have caused many more deaths than
the three in Boston. It is a cycle of bloodshed that Mr. Tsarnaev would have
experienced close at hand when he was living here.
Yet, during his six months in Makhachkala, according to relatives, neighbors and
friends, he did not seem like a man on a mission, or training for one. Rather,
they said, he was more like a recent graduate who could not quite decide what to
do with himself. He slept late, hung around at home, visited family and helped
his father renovate a storefront.
“The son helped his father,” Vyacheslav Kazakevich, a family friend, said in an
interview. “They started at 8 in the morning. When I passed by, they were
working on the inside of the store, laying tiles. He didn’t go anywhere; no
friends came to see him. His father wanted to open a perfume shop.”
Even so, his life’s narrative had been one of constant motion — so much so that
the authorities and relatives in recent days have given differing accounts.
According to his aunt, he was born in Kalmykia, a barren patch of Russian
territory along the Caspian Sea. His family moved to Kyrgyzstan, an independent
former Soviet republic in Central Asia, then to Chechnya, the turbulent republic
in the Russian Federation that is his father’s ancestral home. Then to Dagestan.
And then to America, where Tamerlan finished high school, married and had a
daughter, now a toddler.
Wherever he went, though, he did not quite seem to fit in. He was a Chechen who
had never really lived in Chechnya, a Russian citizen whose ancestors were
viciously oppressed by the Russian government, a green-card holder in the United
States whose path to citizenship there seemed at least temporarily blocked.
By January 2011, he somehow had attracted official attention in Russia, which
thought he might be a follower of radical Islam and asked the United States for
information about him. The F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Tsarnaev and his family in
Boston but found no sign of terrorism activity at that time, the agency said.
Dagestan may have made him feel more at home than the United States, but it was
a strange place to find comfort, given the nearly nonstop violence and the
persistent unease it engenders among those who live here.
In the days just before Mr. Tsarnaev visited, a 13-year-old was wounded after
picking up a package booby-trapped with a hand grenade, and a traffic police
post was fired upon by someone with a grenade launcher.
Two weeks after his arrival, another grenade was tossed in a residential area.
It was apparently meant to draw the police into an ambush, because several
minutes later, in a pattern eerily similar to the marathon bombing, a larger
bomb hidden in a garbage pail went off, killing a small child and injuring
another.
And so it went all the time he was in Dagestan: two or three deadly bombings a
month on average, constant “special operations” in which the federal police
killed dozens of people they said were Muslim insurgents, and numerous other
attacks.
After a police operation in early February 2012, the Russian authorities boasted
that they had killed the last known suspect in the Moscow subway bombings.
Capturing militants alive to put them on trial is not necessarily a priority.
All of Mr. Tsarnaev’s movements during his trip last year are not known. His
father, Anzor, in interviews has described the trip as innocuous and said he
nearly always knew where his son was. They twice traveled together to Chechnya
to visit relatives, the father said, but he otherwise stayed near home.
Dagestan is a place where the graffiti outside one mosque says, “Victory or
Paradise.”
Living in such circumstances may have had an impact on Mr. Tsarnaev even if he
did not join any organized militant group, said Mairbek Vatchagaev, president of
the Association of Caucasus Studies in Paris. He noted that the violence is
worse in Dagestan than in Chechnya or Ingushetia, neighboring republics that are
also predominantly Muslim and have a history of violence.
Mr. Vatchgaev and others noted the numerous crosscurrents in Mr. Tsarnaev’s
profile: the sleeping-in that could conflict with morning prayers, for instance,
or his desire to leave the United States but also to become an American citizen.
Mr. Tsarnaev applied for citizenship last fall, three months after returning
from Dagestan and around the time it was granted to his younger brother,
Dzhokhar.
Something, it seems, may have driven Tamerlan Tsarnaev to violence, and Russian
news outlets have reported that investigators are looking into connections he
may have had with mosques known to promote extremist views.
But relatives said they could not fathom how the young men they knew could be
the terrorists who bombed the Boston Marathon. Their aunt, Patimat Suleimanova,
said, “They couldn’t commit an act like this.”
Ellen Barry and Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from
Moscow,
and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: April 22, 2013
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to an interview
with Patimat Suleimanova. It took place on Sunday,
April 21, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON — The two men suspected in the Boston Marathon
bombings were armed with a small arsenal of guns, ammunition and explosives when
they first confronted the police early Friday, and were most likely planning
more attacks, the authorities said Sunday.
United States officials said they were increasingly certain that the two
suspects had acted on their own, but were looking for any hints that someone had
trained or inspired them. The F.B.I. is broadening its global investigation in
search of a motive and pressing the Russian government for more details about a
Russian request to the F.B.I. in 2011 about one of the suspects’ possible links
to extremist groups, a senior United States official said Sunday.
New details about the suspects, their alleged plot and the widening inquiry
emerged on Sunday, including the types of weapons that were used and the bomb
design’s link to a terrorist manual. Lawmakers also accused the F.B.I. of an
intelligence failure, questioning whether the bureau had responded forcefully
enough to Russia’s warnings.
The surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, remained in a Boston hospital in
serious condition. The authorities said they believed that he had tried to kill
himself, because a gunshot wound to his neck “had the appearance of a
close-range, self-inflicted style,” the senior United States official said.
As investigators intensified their search for clues, the investigation’s focus
shifted in the last two days from a manhunt that relied heavily on cutting-edge
surveillance technology to help track down the suspects to more traditional
investigative methods. Those approaches include interviews with friends,
relatives and others who knew the suspects and examinations of computers,
phones, writings and their possessions.
More details of what the authorities said was the original plot were becoming
clearer. The Boston police commissioner, Edward Davis, said the authorities
believed that Mr. Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, 26, had planned more
attacks beyond the bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, which
killed three people and wounded more than 170. When the suspects seized a
Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle and held the driver hostage, they told him
that they planned to head to New York, the senior United States official said
Sunday.
It was not clear whether the suspects had told the driver what they planned to
do there.
Mr. Davis told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday: “We have reason to
believe, based upon the evidence that was found at that scene — the explosions,
the explosive ordnance that was unexploded and the firepower that they had —
that they were going to attack other individuals.”
Along with determining that the suspects had made at least five pipe bombs, the
authorities recovered four firearms that they believe the suspects used,
according to a law enforcement official. The authorities found an M-4 carbine
rifle — a weapon similar to ones used by American forces in Afghanistan — on the
boat where the younger suspect was found Friday night in Watertown, Mass., 10
miles west of Boston.
Two handguns and a BB gun that the authorities believe the brothers used in an
earlier shootout with officers in Watertown were also recovered, said one
official briefed on the investigation. The authorities said they believe the
suspects had fired roughly 80 rounds in that shootout, in which Tamerlan
Tsarnaev was fatally wounded, the official said.
Among the unanswered questions facing investigators are where the suspects
acquired their weapons and explosives, how they got the money to pay for them,
and whether others helped plan and carry out the attack last Monday. Mayor
Thomas M. Menino of Boston said he believed the brothers were not affiliated
with a larger network. “All of the information that I have, they acted alone,
these two individuals, the brothers,” he said on ABC News’s “This Week.”
Some investigators said they believe the suspects used a design for the
pressure-cooker bombs they allegedly detonated from a manual published in the
online English-language magazine of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. Mr. Menino
said Tamerlan had “brainwashed” his younger brother to follow him and “read
those magazines that were published on how to create bombs, how to disrupt the
general public, and things like that.”
The suspects’ uncle Ruslan Tsarni, who lives in Maryland, said in an interview
on Sunday that he had first noticed a change in the older brother in 2009. Mr.
Tsarni sought advice from a family friend, who told him that Tamerlan’s
radicalization had begun after he met a recent convert to Islam in the Boston
area. Mr. Tsarni said he had later learned from a relative that his nephew had
met the convert in 2007.
As scrutiny increased on how the brothers had been radicalized, Representative
Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who heads the Homeland Security Committee,
and Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican on the panel, sent a
letter to the directors of three of the nation’s leading intelligence-gathering
agencies calling the F.B.I.’s handling of the case “an intelligence failure.”
They said Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the fifth man since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks
to be suspected of committing terrorism while under investigation by the bureau.
Agents had questioned him in 2011 in response to a request from the Russian
government, a year before he traveled to Chechnya and Dagestan, predominantly
Muslim republics in the North Caucasus region of Russia. Both have been hotbeds
of militant separatists.
The request from the Russian government was directed to the F.B.I.’s legal
attaché at the American Embassy in Moscow in January 2011, a senior United
States official said. Tamerlan spent six months in Chechnya and Dagestan in
2012.
The Russians feared Tamerlan could be a risk, and said their request was “based
on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer,
and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the
United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground
groups,” the F.B.I. said in a statement Friday.
A senior United States official said Sunday that despite requests from American
officials for more details at the time, this was all the information the
Russians provided.
The F.B.I. responded by checking “U.S. government databases and other
information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications,
possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity,
associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and
education history,” it said in the statement.
The bureau sent two counterterrorism agents from its Boston field office to
interview Tamerlan and family members, a senior United States official said
Saturday.
According to the F.B.I.’s statement, “The F.B.I. did not find any terrorism
activity, domestic or foreign,” and conveyed those findings to “the foreign
government” — which officials say was Russia — by the summer of 2011.
Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and former F.B.I. agent who
heads the House Intelligence Committee, defended the bureau, saying on NBC’s
“Meet the Press” that it “did a very thorough job.” But on CNN’s “State of the
Union,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said: “The fact
that we could not track him has to be fixed. It’s people like this that you
don’t want to let out of your sight, and this was a mistake. I don’t know if our
laws are insufficient or the F.B.I. failed, but we’re at war with radical
Islamists, and we need to up our game.”
The F.B.I. has pressed Russian authorities for more details about Moscow’s
original request on Tamerlan, as well as any information the Russian
intelligence services have developed since then, according to a senior United
States official.
These discussions are “sensitive,” the official said, because of the differences
in protocol and laws between the two countries, and the Russians’ reluctance to
disclose confidential intelligence to foreign governments.
Tensions also escalated Sunday over how to handle the case of the surviving
suspect. Some Republican lawmakers want President Obama to declare Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev an “enemy combatant,” putting him into military detention and
questioning him at length without a lawyer.
But the administration has said terrorism suspects arrested inside the United
States should be handled exclusively in the criminal justice system, and gave no
sign it intends to do otherwise in Mr. Tsarnaev’s case. Moreover, there is no
evidence suggesting that he is part of Al Qaeda; the United States is engaged in
an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, not all Muslim extremists.
In the days after the bombing, analysts and agents for the F.B.I. used special
video technology that allowed them to string together hours and hours of footage
and to enhance the quality.
They will now begin to employ more conventional techniques. As prosecutors
worked to complete the criminal complaint against Mr. Tsarnaev, hundreds of
police detectives and F.B.I. agents — including members of the Joint Terrorism
Task Force in Boston, plus nearly 250 agents from 24 of the F.B.I.’s 56 field
offices — continued to work on the investigation, officials said.
Their efforts included analyzing records from the brothers’ phones and
computers, to find associates and witnesses and extremist group affiliations.
The agents also scoured credit card records and other material seized from their
apartment and car for evidence of bomb components, the backpacks used or any
other evidence that could tie them to the bombings.
Reporting was contributed by Marc Santora,
William K. Rashbaum and Ethan Bronner from New York;
Brian Knowlton and Charlie Savage from Washington;
and Emmarie Huetteman from Montgomery Village, Md.
April 20, 2013
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and JOHN SCHWARTZ
WATERTOWN, Mass. — All of Boston rode a roller coaster of
emotions last week, from horror at the bloody bombings during the annual
marathon to a grim wait under lockdown while the suspects were pursued, to pure
euphoria once the second suspect was captured in a parked boat.
And by Saturday, suddenly, life had almost snapped back into place. Pedestrians
and traffic reclaimed the streets of Watertown.
Dunkin’ Donuts was open, and Mardy Kozelian, 49, a building inspector, brought
in his children. Like everyone else, he was relieved to be able to go outside.
He was also relieved that SWAT teams were no longer barging into homes here and
military Humvees no longer occupied the streets.
“Last night, a lot of people wished they had a gun in their house,” Mr. Kozelian
said. “It’s crazy that in 12 hours it’s back to normal.”
But all around Watertown, the only subject was the surreal transformation of
this quiet suburban town into a stage for the final act of a gruesome drama that
had played out all week. People spent Saturday trying to make sense of it.
Mike Doucette, 27, a chimney sweep, had witnessed one of the most unsettling
moments of the whole week — when one of the suspects was escaping the scene of a
shootout and drove over the other, his older brother, who had been mortally
wounded. The brothers were identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who is now
hospitalized, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died after the shootout.
Mr. Doucette said that the older brother was already lying in the street after
the shootout and the younger one was speeding away from the scene when the
undercarriage of the car caught the older brother. He said the car dragged the
older brother about 30 feet, right in front of Mr. Doucette’s house, where a
dark streak remains in the street. When the younger brother bumped into a police
cruiser, the body was dislodged, Mr. Doucette said.
The scene had become a tourist site by Saturday, with people taking pictures,
not only of the bloodstained street, but also where fragments of shrapnel had
lodged in the siding of several houses.
Franklin Street, where the younger brother was captured on Friday hiding in a
boat, remained blocked off on Saturday. But it quickly became a destination for
curious neighbors and camera crews. David Henneberry, the owner of the boat, was
not available for interviews, but neighbors said he was retired and very fond of
the craft, which he used for fishing.
As people milled around the street, very few said they were concerned that no
one had read Mr. Tsarnaev his Miranda rights. Perhaps the most adamant was
DeAnna Finn, who lives a few houses from where the suspect was captured. “Civil
rights?” she asked rhetorically. “When you do something like this, you just
signed a contract giving away your rights.”
She declared: “An eye for an eye. Stick him in a cell with a pressure cooker,” a
reference to the crude devices the suspects are believed to have used to set off
explosions at the marathon, which killed 3 people on Monday and injured more
than 170 others.
One resident who disagreed on this topic was Pamela Rosenstein, 44, who is a
project director at “Nova” for WGBH-TV, a public broadcaster in Boston. “They
have to proceed as carefully within the judicial system as they did in capturing
him,” she said.
Other neighbors were amazed at the number of bullet holes around town, in the
walls of people’s houses, in trees and in stop signs.
“Houses are full of bullet holes,” said Laura Buch, a musicologist in Watertown,
“and it’s miraculous that none of the people inside are full of bullet holes.”
At the same time, investigators from the F.B.I. were interviewing neighbors and
retracing the path that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev took during his rampage through town.
Investigators in white hazardous-materials suits were taking pictures on
Saturday of the boat, from which the white shrink wrap had been removed,
revealing that the boat’s windshield had been broken.
“Now we’re back to being the most boring street in the country,” said Stacy
Rolfe, 30, a catering manager, who said that as the second suspect fled through
town in the wee hours of Friday, he ran right past her front door.
Dumitru and Olga Ciuc lived just a couple of doors down from where the boat was
parked, and on Friday night, a police officer ordered them out, although he let
them take their dog.
When the Ciucs, who immigrated to the United States from Romania, were allowed
to return later that night to the house where they have lived for more than 20
years, they found the ransacked remnants of a SWAT command center. Officers had
taken positions in second-floor rooms of their home that overlooked the 20-foot
boat. Dressers were shifted about, and blinds and windows were removed. In a
room that their granddaughter uses, a flower-patterned comforter had been thrown
about, and a “Dora the Explorer” music book and large stuffed dog were splayed
on the bed, under a pile of windows and blinds.
Mr. Ciuc picked up a window panel from the bed to reinstall it into what was now
a gap in his wall where a stiff wind blew through, whipping up shiny, silver
curtains. He smirked.
“Oh, my God,” he said. “I love the F.B.I.”
On Saturday morning, Sunny McDonough, 34, a hairstylist and accountant who lives
in Watertown, brought her 3-year-old daughter to Dunkin’ Donuts for a treat
after having been cooped up for so long.
Ms. McDonough said she expected the ordeal to bring more people to Watertown.
“Now we’re on the map,” she said. “And I think our property values are going to
go up by 10 percent. Everyone knows where we are now, and they might be more
inclined to visit and go to the diner and the stores.
“We’re really a safe, suburban community,” she said — and then caught herself
and smiled. “Except for the terrorist hiding in the boat.”
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Watertown, Mass.,
April 20, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Much of the country was still waking up to the mayhem and
confusion outside Boston on Friday morning when Senator Charles Grassley decided
to link the hunt for terrorist bombers to immigration reform.
“How can individuals evade authorities and plan such attacks on our soil?” asked
Mr. Grassley, the Iowa Republican, at the beginning of a hearing on the Senate’s
immigration bill. “How can we beef up security checks on people who wish to
enter the U.S.?”
The country is beginning to discuss seriously the most sweeping overhaul of
immigration since 1986, with hearings in the Senate last week and this week, and
a possible vote by early summer. After years of stalemate, the mood has shifted
sharply, with bipartisan Congressional coalitions, business and labor leaders,
law-enforcement and religious groups, and a majority of the public united behind
a long-delayed overhaul of the crippled system.
Until the bombing came along, the antis were running out of arguments. They
cannot rail against “illegals,” since the bill is all about making things legal
and upright, with registration, fines and fees. They cannot argue seriously that
reform is bad for business: turning a shadow population of anonymous, underpaid
laborers into on-the-books employees and taxpayers, with papers and workplace
protections, will only help the economy grow.
About all they have left is scary aliens.
There is a long tradition of raw fear fouling the immigration debate. Lou Dobbs
ranted about superhighways from Mexico injecting Spanish speakers deep into the
heartland. Gov. Jan Brewer told lies about headless bodies in the Arizona
desert. And now Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, is warning of
radical Islamists posing as Hispanics and infiltrating from the southern border.
But the Boston events have nothing to do with immigration reform. Even if we
stop accepting refugees and asylum seekers, stop giving out green cards and
devise a terror-profiling system that can bore into the hearts of 9-year-olds,
which seems to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s age when he entered the United States, we
will still face risks. And we will not have fixed immigration.
There is a better way to be safer: pass an immigration bill. If terrorists, drug
traffickers and gangbangers are sharp needles in the immigrant haystack, then
shrink the haystack. Get 11 million people on the books. Find out who they are.
The Senate bill includes no fewer than four separate background checks as
immigrants move from the shadows to citizenship. It tightens the rules on
employment verification and includes new ways to prevent misuse of Social
Security numbers. It has an entry-exit visa system to monitor traffic at borders
and ports.
And if we are serious about making America safer, why not divert some of the
billions now lavished on the border to agencies fighting gangs, drugs, illegal
guns and workplace abuse? Or to community policing and English-language classes,
so immigrants can more readily cooperate with law enforcement? Why not make
immigrants feel safer and invested in their neighborhoods, so they don’t fear
and shun the police? Why not stop outsourcing immigration policing to local
sheriffs who chase traffic offenders and janitors?
As we have seen with the failure of gun control, a determined minority wielding
false arguments can kill the best ideas. The immigration debate will test the
resilience of the reform coalition in Congress. Changes so ambitious require
calm, thoughtful deliberation, and a fair amount of courage. They cannot be
allowed to come undone with irrelevant appeals to paranoia and fear.
Department of Homeland Security officials decided in recent
months not to grant an application for American citizenship by Tamerlan
Tsarnaev, one of two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings, after a
routine background check revealed that he had been interviewed in 2011 by the
F.B.I., federal officials said on Saturday.
Mr. Tsarnaev died early Friday after a shootout with the police, and officials
said that at the time of his death, his application for citizenship was still
under review and was being investigated by federal law enforcement officials.
It had been previously reported that Mr. Tsarnaev’s application might have been
held up because of a domestic abuse episode. But the officials said that it was
the record of the F.B.I. interview that threw up red flags and halted, at least
temporarily, Mr. Tsarnaev’s citizenship application. Federal law enforcement
officials reported on Friday that the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Tsarnaev in January
2011 at the request of the Russian government, which suspected that he had ties
to Chechen terrorists.
The officials pointed to the decision to hold up that application as evidence
that his encounter with the F.B.I. did not fall through the cracks in the vast
criminal and national security databases that the Department of Homeland
Security and the F.B.I. review as a standard requirement for citizenship. The
application, which Mr. Tsarnaev presented on Sept. 5, also prompted “additional
investigation” of him this year by federal law enforcement agencies, according
to the officials. They declined to say how far that examination had progressed
or what it covered.
The handling of Mr. Tsarnaev’s application could be crucial for the Obama
administration in the Senate debate that began this week over a bipartisan bill,
which the president supports, for a sweeping immigration overhaul. Some
Republicans skeptical of the bill have said they will watch the Boston bombings
investigation to see if it reveals security lapses in the immigration system
that should be closed before Congress proceeds to other parts of the bill,
including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
The record of the F.B.I. interview was enough to cause Homeland Security to hold
up Mr. Tsarnaev’s application. He presented those papers several weeks after he
returned from a six-month trip overseas, primarily to Russia, and only six days
after his brother, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, had his own citizenship application
approved. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is in custody and is in serious condition in a
hospital.
Late last year, Homeland Security officials contacted the F.B.I. to learn more
about its interview with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, federal law enforcement officials
said. The F.B.I. reported its conclusion that he did not present a threat.
At that point, Homeland Security officials did not move to approve the
application nor did they deny it, but they left it open for “additional review.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s record also showed that he had been involved in an episode
of domestic violence in 2009. His father, Anzor, said in an interview on Friday
in the Russian republic of Dagestan, where he lives, that Tamerlan had an
argument with a girlfriend and that he “hit her lightly.”
Under immigration law, certain domestic violence offenses can disqualify an
immigrant from becoming an American citizen, and perhaps expose him to
deportation. But the Homeland Security review found that while Mr. Tsarnaev was
arrested, he was not convicted in the episode. The law requires a serious
criminal conviction in a domestic violence case for officials to initiate
deportation, federal officials said.
Both Tsarnaev brothers came to the United States and remained here legally under
an asylum petition in 2002 by their father, who claimed he feared for his life
because of his activities in Chechnya. Both sons applied for citizenship after
they had been living here as legal permanent residents for at least five years,
as the law requires.
William K. Rashbaum and Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.
April 20, 2013
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON — With thousands of tips pouring in from the
public, investigators for the Federal Bureau of Investigation were homing in on
the Boston Marathon bombing suspects on Thursday morning — or so they thought.
By that afternoon, however, the promising leads had collapsed, and officials
confronted a risky decision: proceed without the help of the public to avoid
tipping off the suspects or publicize images of them and risk driving them
deeper into hiding or worse.
F.B.I. officials, who had been debating all week whether to go to the public,
were ultimately convinced that they had to release the photographs because the
investigation was stalling and bureau analysts had finally developed clear
images of the suspects from hours of video footage.
“We were working the videos, and the footage was getting better and better as
the week went on, and by Thursday we got a good frontal facial shot,” a senior
law enforcement official said. “That tipped it.”
The official added: “With that type of quality photo, there was no doubt about
who they were. We had these murderers on the loose, and we couldn’t hold back,
and we needed help finding them.”
The decision — which involved Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Robert S.
Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I. — was one of the most crucial turning
points in a remarkable crowd-sourcing manhunt for the plotters of a bombing that
killed three people and wounded more than 170.
While the decision to publicize the suspects’ identities resulted in the arrest
of one of the men, it set in motion a violent string of events that lasted for
26 hours. Over that time, a police officer was killed, one of the suspects died,
several officers sustained life-threatening injuries and one of the country’s
major cities was shut down.
On Saturday morning, the younger of the two suspects, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19,
remained in serious condition at a Boston hospital. His brother, Tamerlan
Tsarnaev, 26, died early Friday after a shootout with the police.
The authorities knew that broadly distributing the images — some captured by
ubiquitous surveillance cameras and cellphone snapshots and winnowed down using
sophisticated facial-recognition software — would accelerate the digital
dragnet, but they did not realize the level of chaos it would create.
Intelligence and law enforcement officials said the authorities in Boston
weighed the risks of some mayhem against their growing fear that time was
slipping away and that heavily armed and increasingly dangerous men, and
possibly accomplices, could wage new attacks in the Boston area or beyond.
Federal authorities involved in the case had briefed administration and
Congressional officials on their hopes to arrest the suspects early Thursday
without revealing their hand. But those plans vanished by that afternoon.
“We thought we had good leads,” the senior law enforcement official said. “We
were working on some stuff, and we got to a point where it leveled off, and then
there was nothing imminent, so we moved with what we thought would result in
identifying them.”
The authorities first developed information about the suspects’ whereabouts late
Thursday when one of them was seen in video footage that was being reviewed from
a convenience store in Cambridge that had just been robbed.
Shortly after the suspects left the convenience store, the authorities received
a report that a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had
been ambushed and killed.
And then, for two hours, there was no sign of the suspects.
It was only after the suspects decided not to kill the owner of a sport utility
vehicle that had been carjacked and instead threw him out of his car around 1
a.m. — a decision that ultimately undid their plans to elude the authorities —
that they re-emerged on the authorities’ radar.
“If he stayed in the car, they could have tried to drive to New Hampshire or
something — it would have added some real time to things, which would have been
bad and who knows what they would have done,” the law enforcement official said.
“They were desperate and acting pretty crazy.”
The driver called 911, telling the authorities that the two people who had held
him up at gunpoint had said they were the marathon bombers. The authorities put
out an all-points bulletin for the S.U.V., and officers in Watertown, 10 miles
west of Boston, spotted it just minutes later.
A chaotic chase ensued, with the suspects throwing pipe bombs out of the
speeding vehicle. Of the five that were thrown, three exploded, injuring several
officers.
The suspects were ultimately cornered by the police and, over several minutes,
engaged in a shootout in the middle of Watertown. Armed with handguns and long
firearms, the suspects injured several officers. The older suspect, who was
strapped with explosives, was killed as he approached the officers.
After Tamerlan Tsarnaev was shot, the younger brother — who was low on
ammunition — shifted to the driver’s seat of the car from the passenger’s seat,
slammed it into reverse, ran over his brother, sped away and quickly abandoned
the vehicle. From that point until he was captured roughly 20 hours later, he
was again off the authorities’ radar.
It was only at that point that the authorities learned the identities of the
suspects. As the authorities and emergency responders were rushing the older
brother to the hospital, the F.B.I. used a small portable machine to scan the
suspect’s fingerprint, and it quickly returned the result: Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
At the hospital, efforts to save his life were unsuccessful.
With a name, the F.B.I. and other investigators began an intensive search of
their databases, and agents fanned out across the country to interview family
members and others who might have known the suspects. That led the authorities
to uncover the files from two years ago revealing a request from the Russian
government that the F.B.I. conduct a background check on the older brother to
determine if he had been radicalized.
The F.B.I. had determined that he was not a threat, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev
traveled to the Dagestan and Chechnya regions of Russia early last year.
By early Friday, Watertown had been transformed into an armed camp, with
hundreds of police officers and agents searching house by house, and the Boston
area was shut down.
But by 6 p.m. Friday, there was still no sign of the young fugitive, and Gov.
Deval Patrick lifted the restrictions.
That order allowed a Watertown resident to go outside for the first time all
day, where he spotted blood on a boat in his backyard. He pulled back the tarp
on top, peered in and saw a young man covered in blood.
Within minutes, police cars were screaming toward the home. Shots were fired. By
8:45 p.m., Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whom the authorities believed had suffered a
bullet wound at some point in the chaos, was in custody and being rushed to the
hospital.
April 20, 2013
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER, CHARLIE SAVAGE and WILLIAM K.
RASHBAUM
The capture of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect raises a
host of freighted legal issues for a society still feeling the shadow of Sept.
11, including whether he should be read a Miranda warning, how he should be
charged, where he might be tried and whether the bombings on Boylston Street
last Monday were a crime or an act of war.
The suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, was taken, bleeding, to a hospital on
Friday night, and it remained unclear on Saturday whether he was conscious.
The authorities would typically arraign a suspect in a courtroom by Monday, a
process that involves his being represented by a lawyer.
Most experts expected the case to be handled by the federal authorities, who
were preparing a criminal complaint, including the use of weapons of mass
destruction, which can carry the death penalty because deaths resulted from the
blasts.
The decision to seek the death penalty must be made by Attorney General Eric H.
Holder Jr. Under federal law, prosecutors must go through what is known within
the Justice Department as a death-penalty protocol, under which the United
States Attorney’s Office and Justice Department lawyers in Washington analyze
all aspects of the crime, as well as the defendant’s background, criminal
history and other characteristics.
“I think we can expect the prosecution to put together a meticulous case based
on the forensic evidence, the videos, eyewitness test and any statements that
the surviving defendant makes to the authorities,” said Kelly T. Currie, who led
the Violent Crimes and Terrorism section in the Brooklyn United States
Attorney’s Office from 2006 to 2008, where he supervised a number of terrorism
prosecutions.
“I would think it’s going to be a very strong case, and ultimately all the
pieces put together are cumulatively going to show a pretty full mosaic of this
defendant’s actions leading up to the attack and in its wake,” Mr. Currie said.
Massachusetts has no death penalty, so a defense attorney in this case might
seek to have the case tried in state court. State and county officials might
also be eager to prosecute the defendant in the deaths of four of their
residents.
President Obama described the attack that Mr. Tsarnaev and his older brother,
Tamerlan, 26, were accused of committing as “terrorism.” Tamerlan Tsarnaev was
killed.
The administration has said it planned to begin questioning the younger Mr.
Tsarnaev for a period without delivering the Miranda warning that he had a right
to remain silent and to have a lawyer present.
Normally such a warning is necessary if prosecutors want to introduce statements
made by a suspect in custody as evidence in court, but the administration said
it was invoking an exception for questions about immediate threats to public
safety. The Justice Department has pressed the view that in terrorism cases the
length of time and type of questioning that fall under that exception is broader
than what would be permissible in ordinary criminal cases, a view upheld by a
federal judge in the case of the man convicted of trying to bomb a Detroit-bound
airliner in 2009.
Civil libertarians have objected to the more aggressive interpretation of the
exception to the Miranda rule, which protects the Constitutional right against
involuntary self-incrimination. Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the
American Civil Liberties Union, said that it would be acceptable to withhold
Miranda before asking whether there were any more bombs hidden in Boston, but
that once the F.B.I. went into broader questioning, it must not “cut corners.”
But some prosecutors suggested that if any confession was unnecessary to convict
him, then the F.B.I. might keep him talking without a warning without ultimately
invoking the more disputed version of the public-safety exception to introduce
it in court.
“I see a fairly strong case against this young man based on a great deal of
evidence so, as a prosecutor, the top of my list would not be necessarily to
Mirandize him and get a usable confession,” said David Raskin, a former federal
prosecutor in terrorism cases in New York.
At the same time, some Republican senators, including John McCain of Arizona and
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, argued that using the criminal-justice system
was a mistake and that Mr. Tsarnaev should instead be held indefinitely by the
military as an “enemy combatant,” under the laws of war, and questioned without
any Miranda warning or legal representation, in order to gain intelligence.
Still, there is not yet any public evidence suggesting that Mr. Tsarnaev was
part of Al Qaeda or its associated forces — the specific enemy with which the
United States is engaged in an armed conflict. And some legal specialists also
doubted that the Constitution would permit holding a suspect like Mr. Tsarnaev
as an enemy combatant.
“This is an American citizen being tried for a crime that occurred domestically,
and there is simply no way to treat him like an enemy combatant — not even
close,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and seasoned defense
lawyer.
Whether legal proceedings take place in state or federal court — and both could
occur, one after the other — a defense lawyer for Mr. Tsarnaev could contend
that a fair trial was impossible in the Boston area and seek to have it moved.
The lawyer could argue that so many people in Boston were affected by the
bombings that no objective jury could be empaneled. The trial of Timothy
McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber responsible for killing scores and injuring
hundreds in 1995, was moved to Colorado.
On the other hand, witnesses and officials are all in the Boston area, and a
trial that required them to travel extensively could be seen by a judge as an
inappropriate burden on the community.
Based on statements by the authorities to date, the case against Mr. Tsarnaev
appears relatively strong. The F.B.I. released videos showing him and his
brother at the marathon in the area of the explosions, carrying backpacks like
those that forensic tests indicated contained the pressure-cooker bombs that
killed three and maimed scores. Boston’s top F.B.I. official said when the
videos were released that Mr. Tsarnaev, then identified as Suspect 2, placed one
bag at the site of the second explosion, outside the Forum restaurant, moments
before the second blast.
Law-enforcement officials have also said the brothers admitted to the bombings —
as well as to the killing on Thursday night of a Massachusetts Institute of
Technology campus police officer — to a man whose car they stole at gunpoint.
There is, in addition, the possibility of testimony by one of the bombing
victims, a man whose legs were blown off, who told the F.B.I. that he saw
Tamerlan Tsarnaev place the other bomb.
Officers who exchanged gunfire with the brothers Friday morning would also be
witnesses, and their testimony would most likely focus on the gun battle.
Thomas Anthony Durkin, a defense lawyer and former assistant United States
attorney in Chicago, said he doubted that a fair trial could be had for Mr.
Tsarnaev anywhere in the country, given the emotion around the case. In any
case, he said, the primary goal of a defense lawyer would be “to save his life.”
To that end, he and others said, three factors would most likely be highlighted
— Mr. Tsarnaev’s relative youth, at 19; the influence his older brother seems to
have had on him; and his own impressive past of sports, friendships and academic
performance.
Mr. Dershowitz, who said that any lawyer who took the case would become the most
despised person in the country, agreed that a number of factors should play a
role in preventing the death penalty. On the other hand, he noted, Mr. Tsarnaev
is accused of putting down “a bag full of nails and bombs in front of an
8-year-old kid, and that will probably trump everything.”
April 20, 2013
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s announcement that it
would question the Boston Marathon bombing suspect for a period without first
reading him the Miranda warning of his right to remain silent and have a lawyer
present has revived a constitutionally charged debate over the handling of
terrorism cases in the criminal justice system.
The administration’s effort to stretch a gap in the Miranda rule for questioning
about immediate threats to public safety has alarmed advocates of individual
rights.
Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union,
said it would be acceptable for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ask the
suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, a naturalized American citizen, about
“imminent” threats, like whether other bombs are hidden around Boston. But he
said that once the F.B.I. gets into broader questioning, it must not “cut
corners.”
Mr. Tsarnaev remained hospitalized on Saturday for treatment of injuries
sustained when he was captured by the police on Friday night, and it was not
clear whether he had been questioned.
“The public safety exception to Miranda should be a narrow and limited one, and
it would be wholly inappropriate and unconstitutional to use it to create the
case against the suspect,” Mr. Romero said. “The public safety exception would
be meaningless if interrogations are given an open-ended time horizon.”
At the other end of the spectrum, some conservatives have called for treating
terrorism-related cases — even those arising on American soil or involving
citizens — as a military matter, holding a suspect indefinitely as an “enemy
combatant” without a criminal defendants’ rights. Two Republican senators, John
McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, called for holding Mr.
Tsarnaev under the laws of war, interrogating him without any Miranda warning or
defense lawyer.
“Our goal at this critical juncture should be to gather intelligence and protect
our nation from further attacks,” they said. “We remain under threat from
radical Islam and we hope the Obama administration will seriously consider the
enemy combatant option.”
The Miranda warning comes from a 1966 case in which the Supreme Court held that,
to protect against involuntary self-incrimination, if prosecutors want to use
statements at a trial that a defendant made in custody, the police must first
have advised him of his rights. The court later created an exception, allowing
prosecutors to use statements made before any warning in response to questions
about immediate threats to public safety, like where a gun is hidden.
The question applying those rules in terrorism cases arose after a Nigerian
named Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on
Dec. 25, 2009. After landing in Michigan, he was given painkillers for burns and
confessed to a nurse. He also spoke freely to F.B.I. agents for 50 minutes
before going into surgery.
After he awoke, the F.B.I. read Mr. Abdulmuttalab the Miranda warning, and he
stopped cooperating for several weeks.
Republicans portrayed the Obama administration’s handling of the case in the
criminal justice system as endangering national security, setting the template
for a recurring debate.
In late January 2010, Mr. Abdulmuttalab’s family and lawyer persuaded him to
start talking again, and he provided a wealth of further information about Al
Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Later, during pretrial hearings, his lawyers asked a
federal judge, Nancy G. Edmunds, to suppress the early statements.
But Judge Edmunds ruled that the statement to the nurse had been voluntary and
lucid despite the painkillers, and that the 50-minute questioning was a “fully
justified” use of the public safety exception. She declined to suppress the
statements, and Mr. Abdulmuttalab pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in
prison.
By then, the Justice Department had sent the F.B.I. a policy memo urging agents,
when questioning “operational terrorists,” to use a broad interpretation of the
public safety exception. The memo asserted that giving the “magnitude and
complexity” of terrorism cases, a lengthier delay is permissible, unlike
ordinary criminal cases.
“Depending on the facts, such interrogation might include, for example,
questions about possible impending or coordinated terrorist attacks; the
location, nature and threat posed by weapons that might post an imminent danger
to the public; and the identities, locations and activities or intentions of
accomplices who may be plotting additional imminent attacks,” it said.
Judge Edmunds’s ruling was seen by the administration as confirmation that its
new policy was constitutional — and that it was neither necessary nor
appropriate to put domestic cases in military hands.
Stephen Vladeck, an American University law professor, said the middle ground
sought by the administration has put both the civil libertarian and national
security conservative factions in a bind.
“This is the paradox of progressive national security law, which is how do you
at once advocate for the ability of the civilian courts without accepting that
some of that includes compromises that are problematic from a civil liberties
perspective?” he said. “The paradox is just as true for the right, because they
are ardent supporters of things like the public-safety exception, but its
existence actually undermines the case for military commissions.”
Three years ago, when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was assigned by his
high school English teacher to write an essay on something he felt passionate
about, he chose the troubled land of his ancestors: Chechnya. He wrote to Brian
Glyn Williams, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
“He wanted to know more about his Chechen roots,” recalled Mr. Williams, a
specialist in the history of Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim republic in
Russia’s southern Caucasus Mountains. “He wanted to know more about Russia’s
genocidal war on the Chechen people.”
Mr. Tsarnaev was born in Dagestan and had never lived in neighboring Chechnya,
relatives said, but it fascinated him. The professor sent him material covering
Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Chechens to Central Asia, in which an estimated
30 percent of them died, and the two brutal wars that Russia waged against
Chechen separatists in the 1990s, which killed about 200,000 of the population
of one million.
As law enforcement and counterterrorism officials try to understand why Mr.
Tsarnaev, 19, and his older brother, Tamerlan, 26, would attack the Boston
Marathon, they will have to consider a cryptic mix of national identity,
ideology, religion and personality.
Even President Obama, when he addressed the nation on Friday night after
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured, seemed to be searching for answers. “Why did
young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our
country, resort to such violence?” he said.
It remains to be seen whether personal grievance or some type of ideology drove
the Tsarnaevs to pack black powder into pressure cookers to kill and maim people
they had never met, as investigators say they did.
Both brothers were open about their devotion to Islam, and Tamerlan’s Web
postings suggested an attraction to radicalism, but neither appears to have
publicly embraced the ideology of violent jihad. The construction of the bombs
used in Boston resembled instructions in the magazine Inspire, the online
publication of the Al Qaeda branch in Yemen, but the design is also available
elsewhere on the Internet.
Their relatives have expressed anguished bafflement at their reported actions,
and it is conceivable that the motive for the attack will remain as inscrutable
as those of some mass shootings in recent years.
Still, as investigators try to understand the brothers’ thinking, search for
ties to militant groups and draw lessons for preventing attacks, they will be
thinking of a handful of notable cases in which longtime American residents who
had no history of violence turned to jihadi terrorism: the plot to blow up the
New York subway in 2009, the Fort Hood shootings the same year and the failed
Times Square bombing of 2010, among others.
“I think there’s often a sense of divided loyalties in these cases where
Americans turn to violent jihad — are you American first or are you Muslim
first? And also of proving yourself as a man of action,” said Brian Fishman, who
studies terrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington.
Mr. Fishman cautioned that it was too early to draw any firm conclusions about
the Tsarnaev brothers, but said there were intriguing echoes of other cases in
which young men caught between life in America and loyalty to fellow Muslims in
a distant homeland turned to violence, partly as a way of settling the puzzle of
their identity.
Akbar Ahmed, the chairman of Islamic studies at American University in
Washington, described such men: “They are American, but not quite American.” His
new book, “The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terrorism Became a
War on Tribal Islam,” examines how tribal codes of hospitality, courage and
revenge have shaped the reaction to American counterterrorism strikes.
“They don’t really know the old country,” Professor Ahmed said of young
immigrants attracted to jihad, “but they don’t fit in to the new country.”
Add feelings of guilt that they are enjoying a comfortable life in America while
their putative brothers and sisters suffer in a distant land and an element of
personal estrangement — say, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s statement in an interview long
before the attack that after five years in the United States, “I don’t have a
single American friend” — and it is a combustible mix.
“They are furious,” Mr. Ahmed said. “They’re out to cause pain.”
After about a decade in the United States, the Tsarnaev brothers had both
enrolled in college — the elder brother at Bunker Hill Community College, though
he had dropped out; the younger at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
Tamerlan was a Golden Gloves boxer and was married with a child; Dzhokhar had
been a popular student at a Cambridge school and earned a scholarship for
college.
On the face of it, they were doing reasonably well. But the same might have been
said, at least at certain stages in their lives, of those behind other recent
attacks. Faisal Shahzad, who staged the failed Times Square bombing at age 30,
had graduated from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, earned an M.B.A.
and worked as a financial analyst. He married an American-born woman of
Pakistani ancestry, and they had two children. But as he became steadily more
focused on radical religion, he traveled to Pakistan and sought training as a
terrorist.
Just six months earlier, in November 2009, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, then 39, was
accused of opening fire on a crowd of soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood, Tex.,
killing 13 people. Born in Virginia to Palestinian parents, he had graduated
from medical school and become an Army psychiatrist.
But he began to ponder what he felt was a conflict between his duty as an
American soldier and his allegiance to Islam. Months before the shootings,
investigators say, he consulted Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemeni-American
cleric who was later killed in an American drone strike, about whether killing
his fellow soldiers to prevent them from fighting Muslims in Afghanistan would
be justified.
Even Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan-American who plotted to attack the New York
subway with backpacks loaded with explosives, spent five years as a popular
coffee vendor in Manhattan’s financial district, with a “God Bless America” sign
on his cart. He was 24 at the time of his arrest.
In the history of Islamic radicalism, there are far more prominent figures who
spent time in the United States. The Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, who would become the
most influential philosopher of jihad against the West, visited on an
educational exchange program from 1948 to 1950, developing a deep-seated
revulsion for what he saw as American materialism and immorality.
In the 1980s, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who went on to plan the Sept. 11 attacks,
spent four years studying in North Carolina, earning an engineering degree. His
American sojourn did not stop him from devoting the next two decades to plotting
against Western and American targets.
If the grim Chechen history that Mr. Williams, the University of Massachusetts
professor, shared with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, turns out to be part of their
motivation, one might have expected their anger to have been directed at
Russians, not Americans. But in the mid-1990s, Mr. Williams said, the Chechen
separatist movement split between those who focused locally on the struggle for
independence and others who saw their fight as part of a global jihad.
In the propaganda pioneered by Al Qaeda, terrorism is merely self-defense
against a perceived American war on Islam. There has been no more stark
statement of this belief than the courtroom declarations of Mr. Shahzad as he
pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life without parole for the failed bombing
in Times Square.
Calling himself “a Muslim soldier,” Mr. Shahzad denounced the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq and drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. The drones, he
said, “kill women, children, they kill everybody.”
“It’s a war, and in war, they kill people,” he added. “They’re killing all
Muslims.”
Bomb Investigation Pivots to a New Mystery: Motive
April 20, 2013
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
With one suspect dead and the other captured and lying
grievously wounded in a hospital, the investigation into the Boston Marathon
bombings turned on Saturday to questions about the men’s motives, and to the
significance of a trip by one of the bombers took to Chechnya.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed early Friday after a shootout with police in
Watertown, Mass., traveled to Russia for six months in 2012. Law enforcement
officials are now conducting a review of that trip to see if Mr. Tsarnaev might
have met with extremists or received training from them while abroad, current
and former intelligence and law enforcement officials said.
Kevin R. Brock, a former senior F.B.I. and counterterrorism official, said,
“It’s a key thread for investigators and the intelligence community to pull on.”
The investigators began scrutinizing the events in the months and years before
the fatal attack, as Boston began to feel like itself for the first time in
nearly a week. Monday had brought the bombing, near the finish line of the
Boston Marathon, which killed three and wounded scores, and the tense days that
followed culminated in Friday’s lockdown of the entire region as police searched
for Mr. Tsarnaev’s younger brother from suburban backyards to an Amtrak train
bound for New York City.
On Saturday morning, federal prosecutors were drafting a criminal complaint
against Mr. Tsarnaev’s brother and suspected accomplice in the bombings,
Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, who was wounded in the leg and neck and had lost a
great deal of blood when he was captured Friday evening. The F.B.I. and local
law enforcement agencies continued to gather evidence and investigate the
bombings, the slaying of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer
Thursday night and the subsequent battle with the police that left another
officer critically wounded.
An official said the criminal complaint would likely include a constellation of
charges stemming from both the bombings and the shooting, possibly including the
use of weapons of mass destruction, an applicable charge for the detonation of a
bomb. That charge, the official said, carries a maximum penalty of death. While
Massachusetts has outlawed the death penalty, federal law allows it.
President Obama and Republican lawmakers devoted their weekly broadcast
addresses to the Boston attack, with both sides finding a common voice over the
five days of uproar and lockdown leading up to the death of the elder Mr.
Tsarnaev, an amateur boxer who seemed to follow a path of anger and alienation,
and the capture of his seemingly more easygoing and Americanized brother.
In his weekly address, the president applauded the “heroism and kindness” on
display in the aftermath of the bombings. “Americans refuse to be terrorized,”
he said. “Ultimately, that’s what we’ll remember from this week.”
In the Republican response, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina sounded a note
of national unity. While the bombers hoped to “shake the confidence of a city,”
he said, “they have instead only strengthened the resolve of our nation.”
The seeds of arguments to come were already apparent, however. Questions arose
concerning the arrest and prosecution of the surviving brother, and whether he
should be given a Miranda warning and other elements of constitutional rights in
criminal cases. Further attention surrounds the government’s early scrutiny of
Tamerlan Tsarnaev and whether warning signs may have been missed.
In the hours after the arrest, Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and
John McCain of Arizona, both Republicans, issued a statement late Friday calling
for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is a naturalized American citizen, to be treated like
a terrorist, not a criminal, with reduced constitutional rights and no right to
remain silent as promised in Miranda warnings.
“It is absolutely vital the suspect be questioned for intelligence gathering
purposes,” the statement said. “The least of our worries is a criminal trial
which will likely be held years from now.”
The statement, released on Mr. Graham’s Facebook page, was immediately attacked
by civil libertarians like Ellis Hughes of Durham, N.C., who wrote, “That is
immoral, unconstitutional and wrong. Don’t let your fear or political ambitions
damage our moral compass.”
In fact, investigators did invoke what the Justice Department has called a
public-safety exception to delay the discussion of the Miranda rule with Mr.
Tsarnaev.
As federal officials now step up their investigation, an important element will
be the trip the elder brother made to Russia and Chechnya in 2012. In early
2011, the F.B.I. said in a statement, “a foreign government” — now acknowledged
by officials to be Russia — asked for information about Tamerlan, “based on
information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and
that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United
States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground
groups.” A senior law enforcement official said they feared he could be a risk,
and “they had something on him and were concerned about him, and him traveling
to their region.”
The bureau responded to the request by checking “U.S. government databases and
other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone
communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of
radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history
and plans, and education history,” the statement explained. The bureau also
interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and family members. According to the statement,
“the FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign,” and conveyed
those findings to “the foreign government” by the summer of 2011. As the law
enforcement official put in, “We didn’t find anything on him that was
derogatory”
Mr. Tsarnaev did travel to Russia early last year and returned six months later,
on July 17, a law enforcement official said. He spent most of the time with his
father in Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region, the men’s father,
Anzor Tsarnaev, told a Russian interviewer, but “we went to Chechnya to visit
relatives,” he said.
Members of the Tsarnaev family in Makhachkala recalled those interviews vividly.
In an interview in Russia, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the two men, said
that the F.B.I. had questioned her older son closely. She recalled that they
told her he was “an excellent boy,” but “At the same time they told me he is
getting information from really, extremist sites, and they are afraid of him.”
The state news agency RIA Novosti quoted the father, Anzor Tsarnaev, about the
F.B.I. agents close questioning, “two or three times,” of Tamerlan. The elder
Tsarnaev, who lives in a five-story, yellow brick building in a working-class
neighborhood of the city, recalled that the agents told his son, “We know what
you read, what you drink, what you eat, where you go.” He said that they told
Tamerlan that the questioning “is prophylactic, so that no one set off bombs on
the streets of Boston, so that our children could peacefully go to school.”
Those comments, he said, disturbed him. “This conversation took place a year and
a half ago. But there is a question, why would they talk about it then?”
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva expressed confidence in her sons’ innocence. “I am 100
percent sure this is a set-up,” she told an interviewer on Russia Today. Growing
up, she said, “Nobody talked about terrorism.” While her older son “got involved
in religion, religious politics five years ago,” she said, “he never told me
that he would be on the side of jihad.”
It was in the aftermath of the visit to Dagestan and Chechnya, however, that the
most obvious alienation emerged. One month after Tamerlan Tsarnaev returned to
the United States, a YouTube page that appeared to belong to him was created and
featured multiple jihadi videos that he had endorsed in the past six months. One
video features the preaching of Abdul al-Hamid al-Juhani, an important ideologue
in Chechnya; another focuses on Feiz Mohammad, an extremist Salafi Lebanese
preacher based in Australia. He also created a playlist for Russian musical
artist Timur Mucuraev, one of which promotes jihad, according to the SITE
Intelligence Group, which monitors statements by jihadists.
Mr. Tsarnaev and his younger son first came to the United States legally in
April 2002 on 90-day tourist visas, federal law enforcement officials said. Once
in this country, the father applied for political asylum, claiming he feared
deadly persecution based on his ties to Chechnya. Dzhokhar, who was 8 years old,
applied for asylum under his father’s petition, the officials said, and became a
naturalized citizen on Sept. 11 of last year. Tamerlan Tsarnaev came to the
United States later, and applied applied last September 5 to become a United
States citizen, federal law enforcement officials said.
Although Anzor Tsarnaev has said that his older son’s citizenship application
was denied — and certainly would have been if he were under suspicion as a
potential terrorist — the officials said it was still in process and had not
been either approved or denied.
As a routine part of his application, Tamerlan was subject to a criminal
background check by the F.B.I. Authorities there confirmed that he had been
involved in a domestic violence incident during the time he was a green card
holding resident, the officials said. A review of the incident delayed
Tamerlan’s citizenship application, the officials said, but it was not deemed it
serious enough to halt it.
The return to normal from the total lockdown that paralyzed the city on Friday
will be gradual. On Saturday morning Logan International Airport was still being
operated at a heightened state of security.
Reporting was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt from Washington, Ellen Barry
from Moscow, Katherine Q. Seelye from Boston and Julia Preston from New York.
The violent overnight trail carved through Greater Boston by
the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings has left in its wake two more
victims, both young police officers who became friends as classmates in a police
academy. Now one officer is dead, and the other is hospitalized, fighting for
his life.
The tragic intertwining of these four lives began around 10:20 Thursday night,
when, according to law enforcement officials, the police at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology received reports of gunfire on the Cambridge campus.
Responding officers soon found their colleague, an M.I.T. officer, Sean A.
Collier, 26, dead from multiple gunshots after possibly being ambushed in his
police vehicle.
As investigators were determining that two men — believed to be the suspects,
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19 — had shot Officer Collier,
word came from another part of Cambridge of a carjacking of a Mercedes-Benz
sport utility vehicle at gunpoint by two men who would release its owner a
half-hour later.
Within two hours, some of the officers who had responded to the shooting at
M.I.T. were racing to Watertown, about five miles to the west, where the local
police had tried to pull over the carjacked vehicle. In the ensuing shootout,
the older Mr. Tsarnaev was shot dead, and a Massachusetts Bay Transportation
Authority police officer, Richard H. Donohue, 33, was seriously wounded.
Throughout the night and into the day, most of the nation focused its attention
on the search for the younger Mr. Tsarnaev, a dragnet that had the Boston area
in a nerve-jangling lockdown. Meanwhile, friends and family members of the two
officers mourned and worried on the sidelines of an unfolding international
event.
Officer Collier was a compact man with a crackling intellect who seemed born to
be a police officer. “People come into police work for a lot of reasons,” the
M.I.T. police chief, John DiFava, said. “He was one of those who came on because
it was really what he was meant to do with his life.”
Sean Collier grew up in Wilmington, a leafy town of about 22,000 people less
than 20 miles north of Boston. After high school, he graduated from Salem State
University with a degree in criminal justice and eventually began working as an
information-technology employee for the Police Department in Somerville, a
congested blue-collar city hard against Cambridge.
According to Somerville’s mayor, Joseph A. Curtatone, everybody in the city
seemed to know Mr. Collier, even though he was a kid from Wilmington. In
addition to vastly improving the Police Department’s Web site, he immersed
himself in the community, volunteering, for example, with the Somerville Boxing
Club, a youth-outreach program, the mayor said.
“It’s like he was a lifer here,” Mr. Curtatone said.
But he yearned to shed civilian garb for a police uniform. When Mr. Collier
applied for a job with the M.I.T. police, Chief DiFava had already received high
recommendations for this young man from the chief’s neighbor, a Somerville
deputy police chief, and a cousin, a Somerville police officer.
In January 2012, Mr. Collier joined the ranks of nearly 60 M.I.T. police
officers, all armed with semiautomatic pistols. Their job is to keep safe a
small city of 11,000 people, many of them foreign graduate students who, Chief
DiFava said, “come from places where the cops are not their friends.”
But the chief said Officer Collier won over many students, in part by joining
the Outing Club, whose members hike, ski and explore the New England outdoors.
“And I’ll tell you, they loved him,” Chief DiFava said.
That affection is reflected in many online reminiscences from students who
recalled his easygoing but protective nature. Among the outdoors crowd, he was
known for his willingness to yodel, for sharing his pepperoni snacks, and for
making the most of every moment, as when he wrote a note inviting people to hike
a part of the White Mountains on the anniversary of an ascent of Mount Everest
by the Polish mountaineer Krzysztof Wielicki:
“... so feel free to bring any Polish dishes, wear Poland’s colors (red and
white), bring a Polish flag (because you know you have one laying around your
apartment), or just actually be from Poland (cool!) to commemorate this awesome
feat.”
But Officer Collier harbored his greatest passion for police work. An M.I.T.
colleague, Officer Robert Molino, recalled that the young officer arrested a
“bad egg” shortly after he was hired, so impressing some Boston police officers
that they called him Cobra, a nickname that stuck.
Officer Collier recently bought a Ford pickup truck, and he was hinting to
friends that he was about to leave M.I.T. for another job. Mayor Curtatone of
Somerville confirmed that the city was about to hire Officer Collier as a police
officer.
“He would have been a superstar for us,” the mayor said.
On Thursday, Officer Collier once again donned the light blue shirt and dark
blue trousers of an M.I.T. police officer. Toward the end of his shift, the
officer who had a way of putting foreign students at ease was shot and killed,
the police say, by brothers from another country.
A few hours later, Officer Donohue — Officer Collier’s friend from the M.B.T.A.
Transit Police Academy’s 25th Municipal Police Officers Class, in 2010 — was
shot once during a gunfight with the two brothers. He was taken to Mount Auburn
Hospital in Cambridge, where he was listed Friday night in critical but stable
condition.
Officer Donohue grew up in Winchester, a pleasant suburb several miles north of
Boston. After high school, he attended the Virginia Military Institute, where a
schoolmate, Jake Copty, remembered him as “a fun and laid-back cadet with a
wicked sense of humor.”
According to The Boston Globe, Officer Donohue and his wife have a 7-month-old
son and live in Woburn, where neighbors say he is a good athlete and runner. The
Globe also reported that his former neighbors in Winchester had honored him by
lining their yards with small American flags.
Just three months ago, the M.B.T.A. transit police chief, Paul MacMillan,
awarded Officer Donohue a certificate of commendation for rushing to the aid of
a man stabbed in the throat in Boston’s Chinatown station. On Friday, Chief
MacMillan was honoring the officer again.
“Facing extraordinary danger, Officer Donohue never hesitated in fully engaging
the terrorists in order to protect the citizens of the commonwealth,” the chief
said in a statement. “I am extremely proud of him, and cannot say enough about
his heroic actions.”
Meanwhile, the Collier family members issued a statement of their own,
expressing heartbreak over the loss, and saying the only solace is in knowing
that their Sean had died doing what he had committed his life to do, and
bravely.
Dina Kraft contributed reporting from Cambridge, Mass.
April 19, 2013
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW
While the Boston area lay paralyzed by a lockdown, with one
terror suspect dead and another on the loose as a massive manhunt filtered
through the area’s arteries, we got a better sense of the second young man.
It’s complicated.
The suspects were brothers. The one who was on the loose was taken into custody
on Friday evening. He was the younger of the two, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19. The
elder, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a confrontation with authorities,
but not before participating in the fatal shooting of an M.I.T. police officer,
the carjacking of an S.U.V. and the shooting of a transit police officer, who
was critically injured.
They were from Chechnya. Tamerlan was a boxer; Dzhokhar, a college student.
“A picture has begun to emerge of 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an
aggressive, possibly radicalized immigrant who may have ensnared his younger
brother Dzhokhar — described almost universally as a smart and sweet kid — into
an act of terror,” The Boston Globe reported Friday.
The Globe quoted a person named Zaur Tsarnaev, who the newspaper said identified
himself as a 26-year-old cousin of the suspects, as saying, “I used to warn
Dzhokhar that Tamerlan was up to no good.” Tamerlan “was always getting into
trouble,” he added. “He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used
to strike his girlfriend. He hurt her a few times. He was not a nice man. I
don’t like to speak about him. He caused problems for my family.”
But what about that image of Dzhokhar as sweet?
On Friday, BuzzFeed and CNN claimed to verify Dzhokhar’s Twitter account. The
tweets posted on that account give a window into a bifurcated mind — on one
level, a middle-of-the-road 19-year-old boy, but on another, a person with a
mind leaning toward darkness.
Like many young people, the person tweeting from that account liked rap music,
saying of himself, “#imamacbookrapper when I’m bored,” and quoting rap lyrics in
his tweets.
He tweeted quite a bit about women, dating and relationships; many of his
musings were misogynistic and profane. Still, he seemed to want to have it both
ways, to be rude and respectful at once, tweeting on Dec. 24, 2012: “My last
tweets felt too wrong. I don’t like to objectify women or judge anyone for their
actions.”
He was a proud Muslim who tweeted about going to mosque and enjoying talking —
and even arguing — about religion with others. But he seemed to believe that
different faiths were in competition with one another. On Nov. 29, he tweeted:
“I kind of like religious debates, just hearing what other people believe is
interesting and then crushing their beliefs with facts is fun.”
His politics seemed jumbled. He was apparently a 9/11 Truther, posting a tweet
on Sept. 1 that read in part, “Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that
9/11 was an inside job.” On Election Day he retweeted a tweet from Barack Obama
that read: “This happened because of you. Thank you.” But on March 20 he
tweeted, “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” This sounds like a take on a
quote from Edmund Burke, who is viewed by many as the founder of modern
Conservatism: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men
to do nothing.”
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had strong views on the Middle East, tweeting on Nov. 28,
“Free Palestine.” Later that day he tweeted, “I was going to make a joke about
Hamas but it Israeli inappropriate.”
Toward the end of last year, the presence of dark tweets seemed to grow — tweets
that in retrospect might have raised some concerns.
He tweeted about crime. On Dec. 28 he tweeted about what sounds like a
hit-and-run: “Just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching my
car into reverse and driving away from the accident.” And on Feb. 6 he tweeted,
“Everything in life can be free if you run fast enough.”
He posted other tweets that could be taken as particularly ominous.
Oct. 22: “i won’t run i’ll just gun you all out #thugliving.”
Jan. 5: “I don’t like when people ask unnecessary questions like how are you?
Why so sad? Why do you need cyanide pills?”
Jan. 16: “Breaking Bad taught me how to dispose of a corpse.”
Feb. 2: “Do I look like that much of a softy?” The tweet continued with “little
do these dogs know they’re barking at a lion.”
Feb. 13: “I killed Abe Lincoln during my two hour nap #intensedream.”
The last tweet on the account reads: “I’m a stress free kind of guy.” The whole
of the Twitter feed would argue against that assessment.
April 19, 2013
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE and SERGE F. KOVALESKI
One was a boxer, one a wrestler. One favored alligator shoes
and fancy shirts, the other wore jeans, button-ups and T-shirts.
The younger one — the one their father described as “like an angel” — gathered
around him a group of friends so loyal that more than one said they would
testify for him, if it came to that.
The older one, who friends and family members said exerted a strong influence on
his younger sibling — “He could manipulate him,” an uncle said — once told a
photographer, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.”
A kaleidoscope of images, adjectives and anecdotes tumbled forth on Friday to
describe Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the two brothers
suspected of carrying out the bombings at the Boston Marathon that killed three
people and gravely wounded scores more.
What no one who knew them could say was why the young men, immigrants of
Chechnyan heritage, would set off bombs among innocent people. The Tsarnaevs
came with their family to the United States almost a decade ago from Kyrgyzstan,
after living briefly in the Dagestan region of Russia. Tamerlan, who was killed
early Friday morning in a shootout with law enforcement officers, was 15 at the
time. Dzhokhar, who was in custody Friday evening, was only 8.
In America, they took up lives familiar to every new immigrant, gradually
adapting to a new culture, a new language, new schools and new friends.
Dzhokhar, a handsome teenager with a wry yearbook smile, was liked and respected
by his classmates at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where celebrities like
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had walked the halls before him. A classmate
remembered how elated he seemed on the night of the senior prom. Wearing a black
tuxedo and a red bow tie, he was with a date among 40 students who met at a
private home before the event to have their photos taken, recalled Sierra
Schwartz, 20.
“He was happy to be there, and people were happy he was there,” Ms. Schwartz
said. “He was accepted and very well liked.”
A talented wrestler, he was listed as a Greater Boston League Winter All-Star.
“He was a smart kid,” said Peter Payack, 63, assistant wrestling coach at the
school. In 2011, the year he graduated, was awarded a $2,500 scholarship by the
City of Cambridge, an honor granted only 35 to 40 students a year.
For Tamerlan, life seemed more difficult.
A promising boxer, he fought in the Golden Gloves National Tournament in 2009,
and he was noticed by a young photographer, Johannes Hirn, who took him as a
subject for an essay assignment in a photojournalism class at Boston University.
“There are no values anymore,” Tamerlan said in the essay, which was later
published in Boston University’s magazine The Comment. “People can’t control
themselves.”
Anzor Tsarnaev, the brothers’ father, who returned to Russia about a year ago,
said in a telephone interview there that his older son was hoping to become an
American citizen — Dzhokhar became a naturalized citizen in 2012, but Tamerlan
still held a green card — but that a 2009 domestic violence complaint was
standing in his way.
“Because of his girlfriend, he hit her lightly, he was locked up for half an
hour,” Mr. Tsarnaev said. “There was jealousy there.” Tamerlan later married and
had a small child. He was interviewed by the F.B.I. in 2011 when a foreign
government asked the bureau to determine whether he had extremist ties,
according to a senior law enforcement official.
Yet Dzhokhar admired and emulated his older brother.
Peter Tean, 21, a high school wrestling teammate, said that he thought
Dzhokhar’s intense interest in rough-and-tumble sports came from a desire to be
like his brother.
“He’s done these violent sports because his brother’s a boxer,” Mr. Tean said.
“He really loves his brother, looks up to him.”
At the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Dzhokhar began to struggle
academically. According to a university transcript reviewed by The New York
Times, he was failing many of his classes. The transcript shows him receiving
seven failing grades over three semesters, including F’s in Principles of Modern
Chemistry, Intro to American Politics and Chemistry and the Environment.
According to the transcript, Dzhokhar received a B in Critical Writing and a D
and D-plus in two other courses.
San, 22, a former classmate at the university who would identify himself only by
his first name, said that Dzhokhar had told him he was having trouble in some
courses.
“He was talking about how he wasn’t doing as good as he expected,” San said. “He
was a really smart kid, but having a little difficulty in college because going
from high school to college is totally different.”
San said that he would be willing to testify on Dzhokhar’s behalf.
“I feel like all of his friends would do that,” he said.
In Cambridge, where Dzhokhar lived in the third-floor unit of a caramel-colored
wood-frame triple-decker on Norfolk Street, the brothers were often seen
together. It is a multicultural neighborhood where hardware stores and butcher
shops are mixed with cafes and Brazilian and Portuguese restaurants. Neighbors
said that people were constantly coming and going at the apartment and that they
were uncertain who lived there and who was just visiting. Sometimes they saw
people from the unit in the backyard. Tamerlan was fond of doing pull-ups on the
trellis, they said.
The brothers’ uncle Ruslan Tsarni, 42, said that on the night before he was
killed, Tamerlan had called Mr. Tsarni’s older brother. “He said to my brother
the usual rubbish, talking about God again, that whatever wrong he had done on
his behalf, he would like to be forgiven,” said Mr. Tsarni, who lives in
Montgomery Village, Md., outside Washington. “I guess he knew what he had done.”
Both brothers had a substantial presence on social media sites. On VKontakte,
Russia’s most popular social media platform, Dzhokhar described his worldview as
“Islam” and, asked to identify “the main thing in life,” answered “career and
money.” He listed a series of affinity groups relating to Chechnya, where two
wars of independence against Russia were fought after the Soviet Union
collapsed, and a verse from the Koran: “Do good, because Allah loves those who
do good.”
Their father said that Tamerlan would take his younger brother to Friday Prayer,
but dismissed the idea that Dzhokhar had become devout, saying that they
sometimes caught him smoking cigarettes.
“Dhzokhar listened to Tamerlan, of course, he also listened to us,” he said.
“From childhood it was that way. He had his own head on his shoulders, he was a
very gifted person. He had a gift of kindness, calmness, fairness — you
understand, goodness? For him to do what they’re saying, it doesn’t it doesn’t
fit him at all, it is not possible. Not at all.”
In Kyrgyzstan, the Tsarnaevs were part of a Chechen diaspora that dates back to
1943, when Stalin deported most Chechens from their homeland over concerns they
were collaborating with the invading Nazi Army. Most returned to Chechnya in the
1950s, after the death of Stalin and lifting of the deportation order, but some
stayed. The deportation was a searing, and in some cases, radicalizing
experience.
Adnan Z. Dzarbrailov, the head of a Chechen diaspora group in Kyrgyzstan, said
in a telephone interview that the Tsarnaev family lived near a sugar factory in
the small town of Tokmok, about 40 miles from Bishkek, the capital of
Kyrgyzstan. The last member of the family left years ago, he said. He described
them as “intelligentsia” and said that Dzhokhar and Tamerlan’s aunt was a
lawyer.
Yet that history does little to explain how the brothers became wanted criminals
in a horrific act of terrorism, their images captured on grainy surveillance
tape and broadcast across the nation.
Gilberto Junior, who owns an auto body shop in Somerville, just saw them as
“regular kids,” even if they had a taste for expensive cars.
So it did not especially alarm him when Dzhokhar rushed in on Tuesday, the day
after the bombing, and said he needed his car immediately, never mind that the
repairs had not been done and the white Mercedes wagon had no bumper and no
taillights.
The younger Tsarnaev brother seemed nervous, he said. He was biting his nails
and his knees were bending back and forth a bit; it occurred to Mr. Junior that
he might be on drugs.
“At the time I didn’t think about anything,” Mr. Junior said. “How could I judge
him? I knew that he was nervous.”
Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr., John Eligon,
Adam B. Ellick and Dina Kraft from Cambridge, Mass.;
Ellen Barry from Moscow; Andrew E. Kramer from Yekaterinburg,
Russia;
Julia Preston from New Haven; and Emily S. Rueb from New York.
Kitty Bennett, Susan C. Beachy and Sheelagh McNeill
April 19, 2013
The New York Times
By OLIVER BULLOUGH
LONDON
I COULD always spot the Chechens in Vienna. They were darker-haired than the
Austrians; they dressed more snappily, like 1950s gangsters; they never had
anything to do.
There are thousands of Chechen refugees in Austria, and thousands more in
Poland, France, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Dubai and elsewhere (as well as scattered
communities in the United States). Wherever they are, they stand out, a nation
apart.
The word most linked to “Chechen” is “terrorist,” because of the attacks against
the audience at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater in 2002, against children in Beslan,
North Ossetia, in 2004, and now the marathon in Boston. But terrorists were only
ever a tiny fraction of the population. A more accurate word to link to
“Chechen” would be “refugee.” Perhaps 20 percent, perhaps more, of all Chechens
have left Chechnya in the last 20 years.
Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old suspect in the Boston bombings, was born
to a Chechen family. He was just a baby when Boris N. Yeltsin sent tanks to
subdue his rebellious nation. At this point, we know very little about the
suspect’s motivations. It’s unclear how much time, if any, he’d spent in
Chechnya, while he spent years living in the United States. All we know is that,
for his generation, Chechnya has always been a place of violence, abductions,
widows, orphans and rape: a place to escape from, not to go home to.
The war for control of this scrap of territory in southern Russia has lasted
almost without break from 1994 to the present day, and has cost uncounted
thousands of lives. When I first visited its capital, Grozny, in the early
2000s, it was a wasteland of twisted steel, shattered concrete and chewed-up
asphalt. Chechens would show me postcards of the city before the Russian
artillery had done its work, with its smart houses and the pleasant promenades
along the Sunzha River. But I think even they had ceased quite believing that
the postcards showed the same city. It’s no surprise so many fled.
In 2008, I spent a month traveling through Europe’s Chechen diaspora, trying to
understand how the people had been affected by what they had survived. I met
Birlant and her husband, Musa, in the town of Terespol, the entry point for
Chechens coming to claim asylum in Poland. Birlant’s father and brother had been
shot in front of her. Now she lived in a bleak hostel in a pine forest, along
with 48 other Chechen families, and hated it there; they wanted to go to
Austria.
“If you cannot treat people like people, then why won’t they let us go to a
country that will?” asked Musa.
It was a sentiment I often heard. Wherever they were, they wanted to go
somewhere else, do something else, be someone else. Could I take them to London?
Perhaps life was better where I lived. Musa called me for years after that one
brief meeting, from Helsinki, from Stockholm, from Oslo, never sounding any
happier.
Umar Israilov in Vienna was different. He was learning German, looking for a
job. He had found a lawyer to seek redress through the European Court of Justice
for the abuse he had suffered. He gave me hope. Umar might have been tortured.
He might be poor and discriminated against. But here was a Chechen refugee who
spoke about the future as something to look forward to.
He was shot dead less than a year later, in January 2009. An Austrian jury
accepted prosecutors’ argument that the Kremlin’s allies in Chechnya had been
annoyed that he was talking to journalists and sent assassins after him.
There is injustice in every direction for Chechen refugees. They lost their
homes in a war they did not start, ended up in countries they did not want to be
in and faced retaliation if they spoke out. It is hardly surprising that the
Internet is full of forums where they discuss their predicament; the predicament
of their compatriots at home; the predicament of fellow Muslims in Afghanistan,
Syria or Iraq.
We do not know what pushed Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was captured after a standoff
with police in a Boston suburb Friday night, and his brother, Tamarlan, 26, who
was killed after a police chase the night before, over the edge. Perhaps among
the motivations was a 2007 appeal from the Chechan militant leader Doku Umarov.
“Today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Palestine, our brothers are fighting,” he
said. “Our enemy is not Russia only, but everyone who wages war against Islam.”
But there was enough in America already to alienate young men like Adam Lanza,
Dylan Klebold and all the other mass murderers in recent history. There are
enough weapons to kill anyone you want, and a madman can always find an excuse
for murder if he looks for one.
Combine the fact that the Tsarnaev brothers were apparently isolated young men
in America with the fact that they had access to the full power of jihadist
ideology. Perhaps what we saw in Boston was Beslan meets Columbine; Sandy Hook
meets Dubrovka. Let us hope that those two toxic varieties of modern violence
never meet again.
Oliver Bullough is the author of “Let Our Fame Be Great:
Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus.”
April 19, 2013
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
and MICHAEL COOPER
BOSTON — The teenage suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings,
whose flight from the police after a furious gunfight overnight prompted an
intense manhunt that virtually shut down the Boston area all day, was taken into
custody Friday night after the police found him in nearby Watertown, Mass.,
officials said.
The suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, was found hiding in a boat just outside
the area where the police had been conducting door-to-door searches all day, the
Boston police commissioner, Edward Davis, said at a news conference Friday
night.
“A man had gone out of his house after being inside the house all day, abiding
by our request to stay inside,” Mr. Davis said, referring to the advice
officials gave to residents to remain behind locked doors. “He walked outside
and saw blood on a boat in the backyard. He then opened the tarp on the top of
the boat, and he looked in and saw a man covered with blood. He retreated and
called us.”
“Over the course of the next hour or so we exchanged gunfire with the suspect,
who was inside the boat, and ultimately the hostage rescue team of the F.B.I.
made an entry into the boat and removed the suspect, who was still alive,” Mr.
Davis said. He said the suspect was in “serious condition” and had apparently
been wounded in the gunfight that left his brother dead.
A federal law enforcement official said he would not be read his Miranda rights,
because the authorities would be invoking the public safety exception in order
to question him extensively about other potential explosive devices or
accomplices and to try to gain intelligence.
The Boston Police Department announced on Twitter: “Suspect in custody. Officers
sweeping the area,” and Mayor Thomas M. Menino posted: “We got him.”
President Obama praised the law enforcement officials who took the suspect into
custody in a statement from the White House shortly after 10 p.m., saying,
“We’ve closed an important chapter in this tragedy.”
The president said that he had directed federal law enforcement officials to
continue to investigate, and he urged people not to rush to judgment about the
motivations behind the attacks.
The discovery of Mr. Tsarnaev came just over 26 hours after the F.B.I.
circulated pictures of him and his brother and called them suspects in Monday’s
bombings, which killed three people and wounded more than 170. Events unfolded
quickly — and lethally — after that. Law enforcement officials said that within
hours of the pictures’ release, the two shot and killed a campus police officer
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, carjacked a sport utility vehicle,
and led police on a chase, tossing several pipe bombs from their vehicle.
Then the men got into a pitched gun battle with the police in Watertown in which
more than 200 rounds were fired and a transit police officer was critically
wounded. When the shootout ended, one of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, a
former boxer, had been shot and fatally wounded. He was wearing explosives,
several law enforcement officials said. But Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joe-HARR
tsar-NAH-yev) managed to escape — running over his older brother as he sped
away, the officials said.
His disappearance, and fears that he could be armed with more explosives, set
off an intense manhunt. SWAT teams and Humvees rolled through residential
streets. Military helicopters hovered overhead. Bomb squads were called to
several locations. And Boston, New England’s largest city, was essentially shut
down.
Transit service was suspended all day. Classes at Harvard, M.I.T., Boston
University and other area colleges were canceled. Amtrak halted service into
Boston. The Red Sox game at Fenway Park was postponed, as was a concert at
Symphony Hall. Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts urged residents to stay
behind locked doors all day — not lifting the request until shortly after 6
p.m., when transit service in the shaken, seemingly deserted region was finally
restored.
As the hundreds of police officers fanned out across New England looking for
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, investigators tried to piece together a fuller picture of the
two brothers, to determine more about the bombing at the Boston Marathon.
The older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, (tam-arr-lawn tsar-NAH-yev) was
interviewed by the F.B.I. in 2011 when a foreign government asked the bureau to
determine if he had extremist ties, according to a senior law enforcement
official. The government knew that he was planning to travel there and feared
that he might be a risk, the official said.
The official would not say which government made the request, but Tamerlan
Tsarnaev’s father said that he traveled to Russia in 2012.
“They had something on him and were concerned about him and him traveling to
their region,” the official said. The F.B.I. conducted a review, examining Web
sites that he had visited, trying to determine whether he was spending time with
extremists and ultimately interviewing him. The F.B.I. concluded that he was not
a threat. “We didn’t find anything on him that was derogatory,” the official
said. The F.B.I. released a statement late Friday confirming it had scrutinized
Mr. Tsarnaev but “did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign.” It
had requested more information from the foreign government, it said, but had not
received it.
Now officials are scrutinizing that trip, to see if he might have met with
extremists while abroad.
The brothers were born in Kyrgyzstan, an official said, and were of Chechen
heritage. Chechnya, a long-disputed Muslim territory in southern Russia, sought
independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and then fought two bloody
wars with the authorities in Moscow. Russian assaults on Chechnya were brutal,
killing tens of thousands of civilians as terrorist groups from the region
staged attacks in central Russia.
The older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, traveled to Russia from the United States
early last year and returned six months later, on July 17, a law enforcement
official said. His father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said his son had mostly stayed with
him at his home in Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region, but that the
two men had also visited Chechnya.
“We went to Chechnya to visit relatives,” Mr. Tsarnaev said in an interview in
Russia.
The trip will come under intense scrutiny to determine whether he met with
extremist groups or received training, current and former intelligence and law
enforcement officials said. Kevin R. Brock, a former senior F.B.I. and
counterterrorism official, said, “It’s a key thread for investigators and the
intelligence community to pull on.”
Anzor Tsarnaev, who maintained that his sons were innocent and had been framed,
said that during the trip to Chechnya his son had “only communicated with me and
his cousins.”
The hunt for the bombing suspects took a violent turn Thursday night when the
two men are believed to have fatally shot an M.I.T. police officer, Sean A.
Collier, 26, in his patrol car, the Middlesex County district attorney’s office
said. After that, a man was carjacked nearby by two armed men, who drove off
with him in his Mercedes S.U.V.
At one point, the suspects told the man “to get out of the car or they would
kill him,” according to a law enforcement official. But then they apparently
changed their plans, and forced the man to drive, the official said. At one
point, the older brother took the wheel.
“They revealed to him that they were the two who did the marathon bombings,” the
official said, adding that the suspects also made some mention to the man of
wanting to head to New York. At one point they drove to another vehicle, which
the authorities believe was parked and unoccupied. There, the suspects got out
and transferred materials, which the authorities believe included explosives and
firearms, from the parked car to the sport utility vehicle.
The victim was released, uninjured, at a gas station on Memorial Drive in
Cambridge, law enforcement officials said.
After he called the police, they went off in search of his car, and a frenzied
chase began.
The police and the suspects traded gunfire, and “explosive devices were
reportedly thrown” from their car, law enforcement officials said. A transit
police officer, Richard H. Donohue, was shot in the right leg and critically
wounded.
Officer Donohue had nearly bled to death from his wound when he arrived at the
hospital, said a person familiar with his treatment. The hospital’s trauma team
gave him a transfusion and CPR, and got his blood pressure back up, but he was
still on a ventilator, the person said.
Finally, the brothers faced off against the police on a Watertown street in what
officials and witnesses described as a furious firefight.
A Watertown resident, Andrew Kitzenberg, 29, said he looked out his third-floor
window to see two young men of slight build engaged in “constant gunfire” with
police officers. A police vehicle “drove towards the shooters,” he said, and was
shot at until it was severely damaged. It rolled out of control, Mr. Kitzenberg
said, and crashed into two cars in his driveway. The gunmen, he said, had a
large, unwieldy bomb that he said looked “like a pressure cooker.”
“They lit it, still in the middle of the gunfire, and threw it,” he said. “But
it went 20 yards at most.” It exploded, he said, and one man ran toward the
gathered police officers. He was tackled, but it was not clear if he was shot,
Mr. Kitzenberg said.
The explosions “lit up the whole house,” another resident, Loretta Kehayias, 65,
said. “I screamed. I’ve never seen anything like this, never, never, never.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Kitzenberg said, the other man got back into the sport utility
vehicle he had been driving, turned it toward officers and “put the pedal to the
metal.” The car “went right through the cops, broke right through and continued
west.”
He left behind his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who had been gravely
wounded, and who was taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Dr. David Schoenfeld, who was catching up on paperwork at his home in Watertown
after midnight on Friday, had heard the sirens, and then the gunfire, and the
explosions. So he called Beth Israel Deaconess, where he works in the emergency
room, and told them to prepare for trauma patients for the second time this
week.
He said that he arrived about 1:10 a.m. Fifteen minutes later, an ambulance
carrying Tamerlan Tsarnaev pulled up. He was handcuffed, unconscious, and in
cardiac arrest, Dr. Schoenfeld said.
As a throng of police officers looked on, Dr. Schoenfeld and a team of other
trauma doctors and nurses began to perform CPR.
“There was talk before the patient arrived about whether or not it was a
suspect,” Dr. Schoenfeld said. “But ultimately it doesn’t matter who it is,
because we’re going to work as hard as we can for any patient who comes through
our door and then sort it out after. Because you’re never going to know until
the dust settles who it is.”
The trauma team put a breathing tube in the patient’s throat, Dr. Schoenfeld
said, then cut open his chest to see if blood or other fluid was collecting
around his heart. His handcuffs were removed at some point during the
resuscitation attempt, he said, because “when the patient is in cardiac arrest
and we’re doing all these procedures, we need to be able to move their arms
around.”
The team was unable to resuscitate him, and pronounced him dead at 1:35 a.m.
Only as they prepared to turn the body over to the police did Dr. Schoenfeld
look closely at the patient’s face and see that he resembled one of the suspects
whose pictures had been released by the F.B.I. hours earlier. “We all obviously
had some suspicion given the really large police presence,” he said, “but we
didn’t have a clear identification from the police.”
Dr. Schoenfeld, whose emergency room treated a number of people injured in the
bombings on Monday, said he had not had time to process what he had been through
early Friday.
“I can’t say what I’ll be feeling as I reflect on this later on,” he said in an
interview before Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured. “But right now I’m more
concerned with everybody who’s still out there and still in harm’s way.”
He added, “I worry about everybody in the city, that everyone’s going to be
O.K.”
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Boston,
and William K. Rashbaum and Michael Cooper from New York.
Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr.
and John Eligon from Cambridge, Mass.;
Jess Bidgood from Watertown, Mass.;
Serge F. Kovaleski and Timothy Rohan from Boston;
Ravi Somaiya from New York;
Eric Schmitt and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington;
Andrew Siddons from Montgomery Village, Md.;
Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul;
Ellen Barry and Andrew Roth from Moscow;
and Andrew E. Kramer from Asbest, Russia.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: April 19, 2013
An earlier version misspelled the name of a resident
who described the police activity in Watertown, Mass.
April 19, 2013
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
BOSTON — The scene was extraordinary. The hub of the universe,
as Boston’s popular nickname would have it, was on lockdown from first light
until near dark on Friday. A vast dragnet for one man had brought a major
American city to a standstill.
The people were gone, shops were locked, streets were barren, the trains did not
run. The often-clogged Massachusetts Turnpike was as clear as a bowling lane.
With just a few words from Gov. Deval Patrick, this raucous, sports-loving,
patriotic old city became a ghost town. The governor had said to stay away, stay
inside. His warning applied not only to the city, but to a half-dozen
comfortable towns just outside its limits. The entire region had become a
gigantic active crime scene.
The lockdown caught many residents off guard, including Michael Demirdjian, 47,
a postal worker who was pulled over by a flock of police cars while trying to
take his new puppy to his home in Watertown near the scene of a dramatic early
morning shootout.
“They were everywhere,” Mr. Demirdjian said of investigators. “My backyard,
everybody’s backyard, front yard, up and down the streets.” His house was
blocked off, so he spent much of the day marooned in a mall parking lot where
the news media had set up.
Todd Wigger, 25, a software salesman, used the occasion to take a nap. When he
blinked awake on Friday afternoon, he was surprised to see how empty the streets
were outside his South End apartment.
“This time Friday, there’s lots of traffic and beeping horns,” he said as a
plastic bag wafted across Dartmouth Street, a four-lane thoroughfare,
unobstructed by cars. But he said he respected the police and wanted to help any
way he could. “So here we are,” he shrugged, “waiting and wondering.”
This seemed to be the general attitude as residents contemplated the marathon
bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 170 others.
Janet Hammer, 59, a physician assistant, said in a phone interview from her home
in Cambridge, near the scene of much police activity, that the streets were
deserted.
“Everyone here is really obeying,” she said, not out of fear but out of civic
respect and trust. “People realize that you have to actually allow space for
this investigation.” After a pause, she added, “I don’t know how long we’ll do
it — at some point, people will want a gallon of milk.”
The Red Sox canceled their home baseball game, leaving their opponents, the
Kansas City Royals, stuck at a downtown hotel. The Bruins canceled, too,
frustrating hockey fans who just a few nights earlier had welcomed the team back
by joining in singing the national anthem, with tears in their eyes.
Barbara Moran, 42, a science writer who was home in Brookline with her husband
and two energetic young children, said the unexpected time off was like a snow
day without the snow. “We made cookies, read books, watched videos and I looked
at my watch and it was only 9 a.m.,” she said. At that point, she set up the
trampoline, hoping the children would wear themselves out.
The harder part was answering questions from her 5-year-old about why they
suddenly had the day off. (She settled on, “There are bad men out there.”)
The day was riddled with false alarms.
Parts of Commonwealth Avenue, a major artery through Boston, were blocked off
while agents checked for a potential danger in Kenmore Square. When that alarm
proved false, another danger zone popped up somewhere else. And for some, the
day and the wall-to-wall news coverage became tedious.
At least one business decided to buck the tide.
Loic Le Garrec, owner of Petit Robert Bistro, sent an e-mail to his loyal
patrons telling them that the restaurant would be open for dinner Friday night.
He said he received some negative e-mails from people who felt he was trying to
make money off a bad situation. But he said this was not so. After the dreary
business of the last week, he said, he wanted to give people something to look
forward to.
“Most people need a place to go after staying in the house all day,” he said,
“and the staff needs the work.”
But mainly, he said, he thought shutting down the city sent the wrong message.
“We shouldn’t be hiding,” he said over the clatter of dishes. “It’s not us that
are wrong here.”
As it happened, the restaurant opened its doors just as city and state officials
announced they were lifting the lockdown.
Jess Bidgood contributed reporting from Watertown, Mass.
April 19, 2013
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and MICHAEL COOPER
BOSTON — One of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings
was killed early Friday morning after leading the police on a wild chase after
the fatal shooting of a campus police officer, while the other was sought in an
immense manhunt that shut down large parts of the area. Gov. Deval Patrick of
Massachusetts said residents of Boston and its neighboring communities should
“stay indoors, with their doors locked.”
The two suspects were identified by law enforcement officials as brothers. The
surviving suspect was identified as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge,
Mass., a law enforcement official said. The one who was killed was identified as
his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. The authorities were investigating whether
the dead man had a homemade bomb strapped to his body when he was killed, two
law enforcement officials said.
The manhunt sent the Boston region into the grip of a security emergency, as
hundreds of police officers conducted a wide search and all public transit
services were suspended.
Col. Timothy P. Alben of the Massachusetts State Police said investigators
believed that the two men were responsible for the death of a Massachusetts
Institute of Technology police officer and the shooting of an officer with the
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the region’s transit authority. “We
believe these are the same individuals that were responsible for the bombing on
Monday at the Boston Marathon,” he said.
Officials said that the two men were of Chechen origin. Chechnya, a
long-disputed, predominantly Muslim territory in southern Russia sought
independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and then fought two bloody
wars with the authorities in Moscow. Russian assaults on Chechnya were brutal
and killed tens of thousands of civilians, as terrorist groups from the region
staged attacks in central Russia. In recent years, separatist militant groups
have gone underground, and surviving leaders have embraced fundamentalist Islam.
The family lived briefly in Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region,
near Chechnya, before moving to the United States, said a school administrator
there. Irina V. Bandurina, secretary to the director of School No. 1, said the
Tsarnaev family left Dagestan for the United States in 2002 after living there
for about a year. She said the family — parents, two boys and two girls — had
lived in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan previously.
The brothers have substantial presences on social media. On Vkontakte, Russia’s
most popular social media platform, the younger brother, Dzhokhar, describes his
worldview as “Islam” and, asked to identify “the main thing in life,” answers
“career and money.” He lists a series of affinity groups relating to Chechnya,
and lists a verse from the Koran, “Do good, because Allah loves those who do
good.”
One former schoolmate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School
in Massachusetts described him as “very sweet,” adding, “I never heard anyone
say a bad word about him.” Another, Meron Woldemariam, 17, the manager of the
school volleyball team that Mr. Tsarnaev had played for, said that he had left
the team in the middle of the season to wrestle. She described him as normal —
sociable, friendly and fun to talk to. He was a senior when she was a freshman.
The older brother left a record on YouTube of his favorite clips, which included
Russian rap videos, as well as testimonial from a young ethnic Russian man
titled “How I accepted Islam and became a Shiite,” and a clip “Seven Steps to
Successful Prayer.”
Alvi Karimov, the spokesman for Ramzan A. Kadyrov, leader of Chechnya, said the
Tsarnaev brothers had not lived in Chechnya for many years. He told the Interfax
news service that, according to preliminary information, the family “moved to a
different region of the Russian Federation from Chechnya many years ago.” He
continued, “Then the family lived for a long time in Kazakhstan, and from there
moved to the United States, where the members of the family received residency
permits.”
“In such a way, the figures who are being spoken about did not live in Chechnya
at a mature age, and if they became ‘bad guys,’ then this is a question that
should be put to the people who raised them,” he said.
Early Friday, a virtual army of heavily armed law enforcement officers was going
through houses in Watertown, outside of Boston, one by one in a search for the
second suspect. The police had blocked off a 20-block residential area and urged
residents emphatically to stay inside their homes and not answer their doors.
The Boston police commissioner, Edward Davis, said, “We believe this to be a man
who’s come here to kill people, and we need to get him in custody.”
In Washington, as well as in the Boston area, law enforcement and
counterterrorism officials were scrambling to determine whether the two brothers
had any accomplices still at large and whether they had any connections to
foreign or domestic terrorist organizations.
Intelligence analysts were poring over the brothers’ e-mails, cellphone records
and postings on Facebook and other social media for clues. Authorities have also
started interviewing family members, friends and other associates for
information about the men, and any possible ties to extremist groups or causes,
officials said.
Federal officials are also investigating any travel by the brothers outside the
United States, perhaps to receive training. “They will take these guys’ lives
apart,” said one senior retired law enforcement official.
The older brother apparently traveled to Turkey in 2003. The Turkish interior
minister, Muammer Guler, confirmed reports that he had arrived there on July 9,
2003, with three others carrying the same surname, and left the country 10 days
later from Ankara, the capital, the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency reported.
“It is estimated that they were a family,” Mr. Guler said. “We established that
they had no connection with Turkey.”
There was no information on Tsarnaevs’ next destination after Ankara.
As the manhunt grew in intensity, law enforcement officials throughout New
England tried to chase down leads.
The authorities in Boston notified transit police officials that there was a
possibility the surviving suspect had boarded the last Amtrak train from Boston
bound for New York City in the early morning on Friday, according to an official
with knowledge of the matter.
The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police, which has authority
over the tracks in New York and Connecticut, along with the police from Norwalk,
Ct., stopped that train between the East Norwalk and Westport, Ct., stations;
the Norwalk Police Department’s SWAT team swept the train, but did not find the
suspect, the official said. While the authorities believe it was unlikely he was
aboard, they were reviewing video surveillance footage from the stations in
Providence, New Haven and New London to be sure that the suspect did not get off
before the train was stopped and searched.
At least one Metro North train, operated by the M.T.A. on the same tracks over
which Amtrak travels, was also stopped by the Westport Police for reasons that
were unclear, the official said.
And the Connecticut State Police announced that it had received information
suggesting that the suspect could be operating a gray Honda CRV, with a
Massachusetts registration number 316 ES9. “Connecticut troopers are posted
strategically in our state and continue to communicate with Massachusetts
authorities,” the state police said in a statement.
In Boston, where gunfire ricocheted around a tranquil neighborhood, residents
were later told to go into their basements and stay away from windows.
The pursuit began after 10 p.m. Thursday when two men robbed a 7-Eleven near
Central Square in Cambridge. A security camera caught a man identified as one of
the suspects wearing a gray hooded shirt.
About 10:30 p.m., the police received reports that Sean Collier, a campus
security officer at M.I.T., had been shot while he sat in his police cruiser. He
was found with multiple gunshot wounds, according to a statement issued by the
acting Middlesex district attorney, Michael Pelgro, Cambridge Police
Commissioner Robert C. Haas and the M.I.T. police chief, John DiFava. The
officer was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was pronounced
dead.
A short time later, the police received reports of an armed carjacking of a
Mercedes sport-utility vehicle by two males in the area of Third Street in
Cambridge, the statement said. “The victim was carjacked at gunpoint by two
males and was kept in the car with the suspects for approximately a half-hour,”
the statement said. He was later released, uninjured, at a gas station on
Memorial Drive in Cambridge.
The police immediately began to search for the vehicle and pursued it into
Watertown. During the chase, “explosive devices were reportedly thrown from car
by the suspects,” the statement said, and the suspects and police exchanged
gunfire in the area of Dexter Avenue and Laurel Street.
During that exchange, a transit police officer was shot and critically wounded.
The wounded transit police officer was identified as Richard H. Donohue, and he
was taken to Mt. Auburn Hospital, where he was listed in critical condition
Friday morning.
The officer had nearly bled to death from a gunshot wound to his right leg when
he arrived at the hospital, said a person familiar with his treatment. The
hospital’s trauma team gave him a blood transfusion and cardiopulmonary
resuscitation, and got his blood pressure back up, but he was still on a
ventilator, the person said.
A Watertown resident, Andrew Kitzenberg, 29, said he looked out his third-floor
window to see two young men of slight build in jackets engaged in “constant
gunfire” with police officers. A police S.U.V. “drove towards the shooters,” he
said, and was shot at until it was severely damaged. It rolled out of control,
Mr. Kitzenberg said, and crashed into two cars in his driveway.
The two shooters, he said, had a large, unwieldy bomb that he said looked “like
a pressure cooker.”
“They lit it, still in the middle of the gunfire, and threw it,” he said. “But
it went 20 yards at most.” It exploded, he said, and one man ran toward the
gathered police officers. He was tackled, but it was not clear if he was shot,
Mr. Kitzenberg said.
The explosions, said another resident, Loretta Kehayias, 65, “lit up the whole
house.” She said, “I screamed. I’ve never seen anything like this, never, never,
never.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Kitzenberg said the other man got back into the S.U.V., turned it
toward officers and “put the pedal to the metal.” The car “went right through
the cops, broke right through and continued west.”
The two men left “a few backpacks right by the car, and there is a bomb robot
out there now,” he said.
During this exchange, an MBTA police officer was seriously wounded and taken to
the hospital.
At the same time, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was critically injured with multiple gunshot
wounds and taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, where he was
pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m., officials said.
A doctor who works at Beth Israel, and who lived in the area of the chase and
shootout, said he was working at home around 1 a.m. when he heard the wailing
sirens. He said at a news conference at Beth Israel that he recognized that
something was wrong and alerted his emergency room to prepare for something.
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Boston,
and Michael Cooper from New York.
Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr, Jess Bidgood,
Serge F. Kovaleski and John Eligon from Boston;
William K. Rashbaum and Ravi Somaiya from New York;
Eric Schmitt from Washington;
Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul and Ellen Barry from Moscow.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: April 19, 2013
An earlier version misspelled the name of a resident
who described the police activity in Watertown, Mass.
One of two suspects wanted in Monday’s deadly Boston marathon
bombing was killed early Friday in a violent standoff with the police in a quiet
residential neighborhood just west of Boston. The second suspect remained at
large following what authorities described as a deadly crime spree that left one
police officer dead and another seriously wounded.
One suspect, seen in pictures released Thursday by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation wearing a black hat, had been shot , said Timothy P. Alben of the
Masschusetts State Police in a press conference early Friday morning.
Authorities later confirmed that he had died. The other suspect, pictured in a
white hat, was at large, likely extremely dangerous and the subject of a
sweeping manhunt in Watertown, a quiet residential community near Boston.
“We believe this to be a terrorist,” said Boston Police Commissioner Edward
Davis. “We believe this to be a man who’s come here to kill people. We need to
get him in custody.”
The marathon bombing killed three and wounded more than 170.
It seemed early on Friday as though it was the first in a series of violent
crimes perpetrated by the two young men in the Boston area this week.
Police confirmed that, at around 10:30 p.m. there had been a robbery at a 7/11
store in Central Square, Cambridge, apparently by the white-hatted suspect.
Shortly afterward, a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology was shot and killed while responding to a suspicious incident. Police
chased the two suspects, apparently in a black Mercedes SUV, to Watertown, where
two residents of Laurel Street said they heard what sounded like firecrackers
going off shortly before midnight. When they looked out of their windows, they
saw the two young men taking cover behind the black Mercedes, in a shootout with
dozens of police about 70 yards away. A transit police officer was shot, said a
police spokesman, Dave Procopio, and was in serious condition.
A Watertown resident, Andrew Kitzenberg, 29, said he looked out his third-floor
window to see two young men of slight build in jackets engaged in “constant
gunfire” with police officers. A police SUV “drove towards the shooters,” he
said, and was shot at until it was severely damaged. It rolled out of control,
Mr. Kitzenberg said, and crashed into two cars in his driveway.
The two shooters, he said, had a large, unwieldy bomb that he said looked “like
a pressure cooker.”
“They lit it, still in the middle of the gunfire, and threw it. But it went 20
yards at most.” It exploded, he said, and one of the two men ran toward the
gathered police officers. He was tackled, but it was not clear if he was shot,
Mr. Kitzenberg said.
The explosions, said another resident, Loretta Kehayias, 65, “lit up the whole
house. I screamed. I’ve never seen anything like this, never, never, never.”
Meanwhile, the other young man, said Mr. Kitzenberg, got back into the SUV,
turned it toward officers and “put the pedal to the metal.” The car “went right
through the cops, broke right through and continued west.”
The two men left “a few backpacks right by the car, and there is a bomb robot
out there now.” Police had told residents to stay away from their windows, he
said.
At least two people, one of whom appeared to be a police officer and the other a
man in handcuffs were taken from the scene in ambulances, said a Dexter Street
resident who declined to give his name.
The F.B.I. early Friday released new images of the two young men being sought in
the marathon bombings, as part of a campaign to identify them.
Jess Bidgood, Joan Nassivera, Anastasia Economides,
and Jeremy Zilar contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: April 19, 2013
An earlier version misspelled the name of a resident
who described the police activity in Watertown, Mass.
April 18, 2013
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, MICHAEL COOPER
and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
BOSTON — In a direct appeal for help from the public, the
F.B.I. on Thursday released pictures and video of two young men who officials
believe may be responsible for the explosions that killed three people and
wounded more than 170 during the Boston Marathon.
Officials said they have images of one of the men putting a black backpack on
the ground just minutes before two near-simultaneous blasts went off near the
finish line of the marathon at 2:50 p.m. on Monday. One video, which officials
said they did not release, shows the two men walking slowly away after a bomb
exploded while the crowd fled.
At a news briefing here, Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the
F.B.I.’s Boston field office, initiated the unprecedented crowd-sourcing manhunt
by urging the public to look at the pictures and video on the F.B.I.’s Web site,
fbi.gov. The two men appear to be in their 20s, but Mr. DesLauriers did not
characterize their appearance or offer an opinion as to their possible ethnicity
or national origin.
“Somebody out there knows these individuals as friends, neighbors, co-workers,
or family members of the suspects,” Mr. DesLauriers said firmly and grimly into
the cameras. “Though it may be difficult, the nation is counting on those with
information to come forward and provide it to us.”
Almost immediately, calls started flooding the bureau’s office complex in
Clarksburg, W. Va. Traffic to the F.B.I.’s Web site spiked to the highest levels
ever, an official said. For a brief time, the site was offline.
Typically, about two dozen analysts sitting in cubicles in Clarksburg answer
calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But in the days after Monday’s attacks,
the center was inundated with calls and it has since increased the numbers of
analysts and agents, according to a law enforcement official.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Director Robert S. Mueller III of the
F.B.I. were directly involved in the decision to release the images, a senior
law enforcement official said.
Michael R. Bouchard, a former assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said that in releasing the pictures and video,
the authorities took a calculated risk.
“If you don’t release the photos, the bad guys don’t know you’re on to them
while you’re looking,” said Mr. Bouchard, who helped oversee the Washington-area
sniper case in 2002 and now runs his own security firm in Vienna, Va. “If you do
release them, you run the risk they see them and change their appearance or go
underground. The authorities made a calculated decision the benefits of
releasing the photos outweighed the risks of holding back and trying to identify
them themselves.”
He said several characteristics in the images selected for release are
distinctive: the emblem on one man’s hat, the backpacks they carried, their
gaits, and seeing them walking together.
“They don’t know if these guys are from out of town, so they had to cast their
net wider,” said Mr. Bouchard, who said the widespread use of social media and
cellphones make such identifications easier than just a few years ago. “Now the
public becomes a force multiplier.”
In the Washington sniper case, he said, the culprits’ car was spotted by a truck
driver less than eight hours after photographs were made public.
At the briefing, Mr. DesLauriers did not specify what led the F.B.I. to call the
two men suspects, but he said that the decision was “based on what they do in
the rest of the video.” According to officials, when the blasts went off, most
people fled in panic, but these two did not and instead walked away slowly,
almost casually.
“We have a lot more video than what we released,” the official said. “The sole
purpose of what we released was to show the public what they looked like.”
The fact that F.B.I. officials chose to make the video images public suggested
to some people familiar with law enforcement tactics that they have not been
able to match them with faces in government photo databases, said Jim Albers,
senior vice president at MorphoTrust USA, which supplies facial recognition
technology to the United States. The F.B.I. has a collection of mug shots of
more than 12 million people, mostly arrest photos.
“The only conclusion you can reach is that they don’t have a match they have
confidence in,” Mr. Albers said.
That could be a question of the quality of the images of the two suspects — the
video clips posted by the bureau do not include high-resolution frontal images
of the two men’s faces, as would be ideal for facial recognition software, Mr.
Albers said. Or it may be that the search software, which produces a list of
matches ranked by probability, simply did not find a persuasive match.
One law enforcement official said that the suspects in the images captured the
interest of the authorities because of their bags: crime scene investigators
recovered portions of a shredded black backpack that they believe carried
explosives, this official said, and they were able to determine the brand and
model of the bag. The backpack carried by at least one of the men in the videos
appeared to be a match, the person said.
The briefing Thursday took place a few hours after President Obama spoke at an
interfaith service of healing at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Almost
1,800 people packed the pews and hundreds more outside listened intently as his
words were broadcast into the morning sun.
His theme was the marathon, both as road race and metaphor, and he began his
remarks with the same phrase that he used to end them: “Scripture tells us to
run with endurance the race that is set before us.”
He mourned the dead and assured the maimed that they were not alone. “We will
all be with you as you learn to stand and walk and, yes, run again,” he said.
“Of that, I have no doubt. You will run again.”
He spoke in personal terms. With a nod to his years as a student at Harvard Law
School and to his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention here when he burst on
the national political stage, he embraced this heartbroken city as his own.
And whoever the perpetrators may be, Mr. Obama dismissed them as “small, stunted
individuals who would destroy instead of build.” But mostly he rallied the
living as he reflected this city’s determined spirit.
“Like Bill Iffrig, 78 years old — the runner in the orange tank top who we all
saw get knocked down by the blast — we may be momentarily knocked off our feet,
but we’ll pick ourselves up,” the president said. “We’ll keep going. We will
finish the race.”
If the perpetrators sought to intimidate or terrorize Boston, he said, “well, it
should be pretty clear by now that they picked the wrong city to do it.” The
crowd cheered as if at a sports arena. “Not here in Boston.”
The president connected with Boston’s spirited sports fervor as he painted a
more hopeful future in which “we come together to celebrate life and to walk our
cities and to cheer for our teams when the Sox, then Celtics, then Patriots or
Bruins are champions again — to the chagrin of New York and Chicago fans.” And
this time next year, he said, “the world will return to this great American city
to run harder than ever and to cheer even louder for the 118th Boston Marathon.”
The mourners clapped enthusiastically and gave him a standing ovation; as he
returned to his seat, he wiped away a tear.
The interfaith service where Mr. Obama spoke, “Healing Our City,” brought
together Christian, Muslim and Jewish religious leaders, as well as state and
local leaders. Former Gov. Mitt Romney, who was Mr. Obama’s rival in last year’s
presidential election, was among the dignitaries at the service.
Boston’s long-serving mayor, Thomas M. Menino, who recently announced that he
would not seek a sixth term, rose from the wheelchair he has been using since he
broke his leg last week and stood at the lectern to proclaim, “We are one
Boston.” He said he had never loved the people of his city more.
“And yes, we even love New York City more,” he said to chuckles from the pews as
he thanked Boston’s rivals for playing “Sweet Caroline,” an unofficial Boston
Red Sox anthem, at Yankee Stadium.
Gov. Deval Patrick praised the city for its resilience and its compassion. “In a
dark hour,” he said, “so many of you showed so many of us that darkness cannot
drive out darkness, as Dr. King said; only light can do that.”
After the service, Pauline M. DiCesare, 76, of Wayland, Mass., who grew up in
Boston, remained in her pew.
“It was very uplifting, something we all need,” she said, as her voice cracked
with emotion. “It’s just the events of life. You’re down and you get up again
and life goes on, one step after another. Like the president said, the sun will
rise tomorrow.”
Outside the Gothic cathedral, Dina Juhasz, a nurse from Natick, Mass., who was
at the marathon and helped treat the wounded, said she appreciated the service.
“It’s way too early for closure,” she said. “It was a moment of acknowledgment
to say this was horrific and we are a community and we’re going to get through
this. It’s a beginning.”
Contact the F.B.I. with information at 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324) or
bostonmarathontips
.fbi.gov.
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Boston,
Michael S. Schmidt from Washington, and Michael Cooper from New
York.
Reporting was contributed by John Eligon,
Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Jess Bidgood from Boston;
William K. Rashbaum from New York; and Eric Schmitt
BOSTON — On marathon day, Boylston Street has always been a
place of completion and celebration instead of tragic disruption, a straightaway
toward home where medals are hung around satisfied necks, not where tourniquets
are tightened around mangled legs.
Boylston represents old Boston with the Public Library and Copley Square, and
new Boston with glassy department stores and restaurants and barhopping
adventurers. If the address is not as chic as Newbury Street, which runs
parallel, well, Newbury might have more upscale shopping, but it does not have
the final three and a half blocks of the Boston Marathon.
And yet Boylston Street is no longer simply a festive place where, every third
Monday in April, the ache of running 26.2 miles melts into exhausted
gratification. With the bombings that killed 3 and wounded more than 170,
Boylston joined Oklahoma City and ground zero and Shanksville, Pa., as the
latest name on a grim terror roll call.
On a cloudless early afternoon Wednesday, as word spread of video of a suspect,
the finishing area of the marathon remained eerily quiet and vacant, cordoned
off by crime-scene tape and metal barricades and the presence of police
officers. Investigators in white protective suits walked shoulder to shoulder,
carrying wands, searching for minute evidence. One dropped to his hands and
knees, face near the ground as if in prayer.
A sense of desertion, of hurried and unplanned removal, accompanied catastrophe
and jittery mourning. National flags of the United States, Algeria, Australia
and the Bahamas were visible from a block away, still fluttering along the
abandoned course. Bottles of water stood on tables, no runners around to drink.
A medical tent in which doctors had treated the shattered calm and splintered
limbs remained near the finish.
“We’re on the list of some of the most horrendous acts that have happened in
this country,” said Paul Norton, 55, a video producer for an insurance company,
as he took a lunchtime walk near the finish area. “I think they’ll bounce back.
The question is, in what form? There will need to be changes.”
The challenge, Mr. Norton said, will be to “preserve the spirit of one of the
premier events in our city while maintaining heightened security.”
As happened after the 9/11 attacks and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina,
a familiar attitude of resilience, defiance and commitment to recover has
prevailed. Kevin Cullen, a columnist for The Boston Globe, said in a television
interview that Boston cared deeply about only three things: “Politics, sports
and revenge.”
Established in 1897, a year after the modern Olympics began, the Boston race is
considered the oldest continual marathon. A feeling expressed by many is that
the race will not be diminished by the bombings, and will return bigger and
stronger. This optimism stems, in part, from the notion that because the
marathon is held every year, it provides an annual opportunity for renewal and
replenishment.
Amby Burfoot, 66, who won the 1968 Boston Marathon, encouraged organizers to
enlarge the field in a celebratory run next year, as they did for the 100th
running of the race in 1996. A number of runners said they planned to return in
2014, many to finish what they were not allowed to complete when the race was
halted Monday, and to show gratitude for volunteers and residents who received
widespread praise for their assistance in the tumult of the bombings.
“Are we going to let whoever did this defeat us, or are we going to rise above
it?” said Steve Michalski, 43, who works with autistic children in Salt Lake
City and who finished Monday’s race before the bombings.
Noting that participants in Boston must run qualifying times to enter and that
marathon running requires extreme dedication with months of training, Mr.
Michalski said: “These people have a drive to succeed and take on challenges.
They are not easily scared off.”
As he watched investigators near the finish line, Mark Sandham said he felt
certain that one or more surviving victims would enter Boston in the future,
either in a wheelchair or on foot, and that it would be a triumphant indication
of the city’s resolve.
“You know it’s going to happen,” said Mr. Sandham, 50, an insurance underwriting
manager. “It’s going to be a huge emotional moment.”
Jeff Putt, 39, jogged as near to the marathon course as he could during a
lunchtime workout. He ran Boston in 2009 and said he planned to run again this
year until he was injured from overtraining. For him, Boylston Street has always
meant “the finish.” He said he even buys his running shoes at a store nearby
because it is at the finish line.
As did others, Mr. Putt, an engineer who works in information technology, said
he hoped the bombings would not alter the character of the marathon. It has long
been a holiday celebration of neighborhoods and community and continuity, with
the course lined by hundreds of thousands of fans, drawn by a generational and
civic pull, watching the race as their parents and grandparents did.
“It’s always been so open, people coming in and out,” Putt said. “I hope it
retains its spirit and doesn’t become as restrictive as New Year’s Eve in New
York.”
Memorials sprung up along the perimeter of the approximately 12-block crime
scene, with well-wishers placing flowers and signs of support. “Keep on Running
Boston,” said one sign.
At Newbury and Dartmouth Streets, Mike Noori, 52, of Atlanta, placed a dozen
white roses at a barricade. One had its stem cut short in memory of Martin
Richard, an 8-year-old who, according to news accounts, died in the blast while
returning to meet his mother after hugging his father at the finish line.
The roses had been intended for Sina Noori, 45, Noori’s wife, a breast cancer
survivor who said she entered Monday’s race a year after undergoing a double
mastectomy. Ms. Noori, an interior designer, was about a half-mile from the
finish when the bombs detonated. She plans to return in 2014 to complete the
race and to show thanks for the strangers who lent her a phone and gave her a
ride to reconnect with her husband after the race was stopped.
“We don’t want the evil people who did this to get the satisfaction of changing
the symbol of Boston, which is freedom of movement, companionship,
sportsmanship,” said Mr. Noori, an electrical engineer.
Donna Murphy, 54, a nurse from Victoria, British Columbia, joined other
participants Wednesday in a show of solidarity by wearing blue marathon shirts
and jackets trimmed in gold as they walked near the finish. She also vowed to
return in 2014 for her fifth Boston Marathon.
“As somebody told me,” Ms. Murphy said, “they’ve made a lot of people angry and
they’re all faster than this person who did this.”
WASHINGTON — The bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday was
the end of more than a decade in which the United States experienced strikingly
few terrorist attacks, in part because of the far more aggressive law
enforcement tactics that arose after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In fact, the Sept. 11 attacks were an anomaly in an overall gradual decline in
the number of terrorist attacks since the 1970s, according to the Global
Terrorism Database, one of the most authoritative sources of terrorism
statistics, which is maintained by a consortium of researchers and based at the
University of Maryland.
Since 2001, the number of fatalities in terrorist attacks has reached double
digits in only one year, 2009, when an Army psychiatrist killed 13 people at
Fort Hood, Tex., officials say. That was a sharp contrast with the 1970s, by far
the most violent decade since the tracking began in 1970, the database shows.
But the toll of injuries in the double bombing in Boston, with 3 dead and 176
wounded, ranks among the highest casualty counts in recent American history,
exceeded only by Sept. 11, the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the 1995 Oklahoma
City bombing and the poisoning of restaurant salad bars with salmonella bacteria
by religious cultists in Oregon in 1984.
“I think people are actually surprised when they learn that there’s been a
steady decline in terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 1970,” said Gary LaFree, a
University of Maryland criminologist and the director of the National Consortium
for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, which maintains the
database.
In the 1970s, about 1,350 attacks were carried out by a long list of radical
groups, including extremists of the left and the right, white supremacists,
Puerto Rican nationalists and black militants, Dr. LaFree said. The numbers fell
in the 1980s, as the groups were eroded by arrests and defections, and again in
the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had inspired or
covertly supported some violent leftist groups, Dr. LaFree said.
He said there were about 40 percent more attacks in the United States in the
decade before Sept. 11 than in the decade after.
“As a result of 9/11, there’s been a revolution in the way law enforcement
treats this problem,” Dr. LaFree said. “Police agencies, led by the F.B.I., are
far more proactive. They’re interrupting the plots before the attacker gets out
the door.”
Spectators at the Boston Marathon described a heavy security presence, as has
become standard at public events since 2001, including bomb-sniffing dogs that
were deployed before the race. But the attack demonstrated an adage in
counterterrorism: security officials have to be good all the time, and
terrorists have to be good only once.
The terrorism consortium counted six past marathons disrupted by violent
episodes: three in Northern Ireland and one each in Bahrain, Pakistan and Sri
Lanka. The only deaths occurred in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2008, when a Tamil
Tiger militant blew himself up as a marathon started, killing 14 people and
wounding 83 others.
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, said that a marathon
was a particularly difficult event to secure. “It’s a 26-mile route, densely
packed in places, and you can’t search people the way you can for a stadium
event,” he said.
One other statistic offers a cautionary note as investigators search for clues
about the identity of the perpetrators of the Boston attack. About half of the
attacks worldwide, and nearly a third of those in the United States, have never
been solved, Dr. LaFree said.
April 16, 2013
The New York Times
By WENDY RUDERMAN
As hundreds of thousands of commuters, debarking from a
conveyor belt of trains and buses, flowed into New York City on Tuesday morning,
they were greeted by a painfully familiar sight:
Sentries of uniformed officers with assault weapons strapped to their chests.
Bomb-sniffing dogs. And baggage checkpoints outside subway entrances.
Such is life, post-Sept. 11, in a city that has learned to take no chances — a
lesson only underscored by the bomb attack on Monday in Boston.
“The fact is, there remain people who want to attack us,” Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg said at a news conference at City Hall on Tuesday afternoon. “As a
country, we may not be able to thwart every attack; we saw that yesterday. But
we must continue to do everything we possibly can to try.”
Yet even as the mayor and the police commissioner outlined the steps being taken
to protect the city, the challenges of safeguarding a global destination like
New York were made clear in the attacks in Boston.
The police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation can harden particular
buildings, making it more difficult for a terrorist to be able to plant a car
bomb nearby. But the Boston Marathon bombings represented a worst possible case
realized: a major urban event, like the New Year’s Eve ball drop or the
Thanksgiving Day Parade, where amorphous crowds converge in the streets.
The New York City police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, who also appeared at
the news conference, noted the reality that plugging every security hole during
grand-scale events, like the New York City Marathon, would be almost impossible.
“You always have to constantly re-evaluate, but there are certain events that
are going to be open, just by their very nature,” Mr. Kelly said. “The marathon
is 26 miles long so, you know, there are points of vulnerability by definition,
there are going to be.”
Less than an hour after the Boston explosions, New York City leaders increased
the police presence around many landmarks like Rockefeller Center and the Empire
State Building as well as storied hotels and houses of worship, Mr. Kelly said.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, speaking at a news conference in Albany on Tuesday, said
he had directed state agencies, including the Division of Homeland Security and
Emergency Services and the New York State Police, to be on heightened alert.
“There are no specific threats against New York City,” Mr. Kelly said. “But in
the aftermath of the horrific day that Boston experienced, we prepared as if
yesterday was a prelude to an attack here in New York, and that indeed has been
our S.O.P., our standard operating procedure, since 9/11.”
Mr. Kelly said that he dispatched two sergeants to Boston on Monday evening so
they could glean “granular information” about how the bombings were carried out
and employ that knowledge to thwart a similar attack here. “Obviously we want to
know why it was done and how it was done,” he said.
Both the commissioner and mayor urged New Yorkers to remain vigilant, keeping an
eye out for suspicious behavior or packages. Within the last 24 hours, the
police received 77 reports of a suspicious package, compared with 21 reports
during a similar period a year ago, Mr. Kelly said.
None turned up any explosive devices; the Central Terminal building at La
Guardia Airport was largely evacuated for about 45 minutes as emergency
personnel investigated a suspicious device.
“It turned out to be part of a light fixture that had wires on it,” a Port
Authority spokesman, Ron Marsico, said.
The fear of a copycat attack in New York was understandable, especially given
the demands that a city like New York presents.
“Every weekend there is something, some event here,” Edward Mullins, the
president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said. “The volume of events
is tremendous, and the exposure then becomes greater simply because the volume
is greater.”
He noted the difficulty in securing every garbage can, manhole cover or parked
car. And even with the Police Department’s additional baggage checkpoints at
subway entrances, there are never enough, he said.
“If we set up a check area on 42nd and 8th Avenue, somebody can still get on the
subway at 14th Street and 3rd Avenue,” he said. “Just because you are searching
me in one place doesn’t mean you can’t go through the backdoor and get into the
subway someplace else.”
April 16, 2013
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME
As she ran past each mile marker on Monday, Judy Toussaint
thought about the next name on the back of her shirt, which listed the 26
children and educators who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in
Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14.
At Mile 26, she reached up to touch the banner with the 26 stars circling the
Newtown emblem, which dedicated the last mile to the memory of the tragedy at
the school, which her youngest daughter attends. And when she triumphantly
finished her first Boston Marathon, her second marathon ever, and was reunited
with her family she had a thought — she should really take everyone back to that
banner for a picture to remember their day in Boston.
Then came the first boom, then a second, not far from that banner. And then it
was just frenzy, confusion, sirens, fear and the recognition that, impossibly,
her remembrance of that terrible day had turned into a reprise, not just a
tribute to those who died in Sandy Hook.
“I’m tired, not only from the marathon but emotionally as well; obviously we all
have a lot to process as a family and a town,” she said Tuesday. “And now we
need to reach out to the people of Boston as well, send support their way the
way people did for us.”
Ms. Toussaint, a mother of three ranging in age from 9 to 14, was among a team
of eight from Newtown who ran the marathon to honor those who died and to raise
money for Newtown Strong, a charity formed after the tragedy to raise
scholarship money for the surviving family members of those who died at Sandy
Hook. None of the eight were injured, and they knew of no one else from Newtown
who was injured in Boston.
For those from Newtown at the race and for those back home, the bombing on
Monday was a terrifying coda to their own tragedy.
Teri Alves, a third-grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary, who was eight months
pregnant and huddled with her students in a classroom closet on Dec. 14, said
the Boston bombing stirred fears that she had long been trying to repress.
“Now everyone’s reeling again,” she said. “We’re all trying to be positive and
move forward; then this happens.”
Ms. Alves ran in the 5K Sandy Hook Race for the Families in Hartford last month,
an event that enlisted not only 15,000 runners at the race itself, but also tens
of thousands more who ran it “virtually” from around the world, and made
donations.
Now at home, with her baby daughter, who was born in January, and her older
daughter, who is 3, Ms. Alves said she watched in horror as Boston’s tragedy
unfolded. “It stirred up all of those sickening feelings,” she said, adding that
she knew of many people who were running the marathon in support of Newtown
families. “Everyone was excited, upbeat, and then, bam. The fact that this can
happen anywhere, anytime; it’s just too much.”
The Newtown Strong team was organized in large part by two physicians, David
Oelberg, who had trained in Boston and is now chief of the pulmonary section at
Danbury Hospital, and Laura Nowacki, a pediatrician whose four children all went
to Sandy Hook (the youngest still attends), and who was one of the doctors who
rushed to the firehouse on Dec. 14 to treat the wounded children who never
showed up.
Dr. Nowacki saw the marathon as a way to raise money, pay tribute and give a
face to the massacre in Newtown. Struck by how much the marathon’s bucolic
beginning reminded her of home, she finished the race and was back at her hotel
when she first heard what had happened.
“You saw the police cars and heard the sirens; it felt like living in a war
zone, the same way it was at Sandy Hook,” she said. “It was an awful thing to
relive it all over again.” Still, she said: “We’re trying to focus on the good,
the way people responded. As runners, you have to get through the pain no matter
how awful, so we want to do something for the people of Boston. We know what
they’re going through.”
Dr. Oelberg, running his 4th Boston Marathon and his 15th marathon over all,
recalled a glorious day and a marathon experience like few others, now twisted
beyond recognition.“There’s nothing like when you turn onto Boylston Street and
you see the banners and hear the cheers,” he said. “It’s such a joyous
experience when you cross the finish line, and now it’s stained by this horrible
tragedy. I can’t get that thought out of my mind.”
He was also haunted by the way the team’s participation in the race had perhaps
unknowingly connected Newtown more closely to another tragedy.
“It makes me feel bad that for the people directly affected by our tragedy, our
presence in Boston may have just made some of their pain a little worse,” he
said.
But then, of course, especially in the never-ending media hothouse of American
life, it all gets linked up anyway. Back in Newtown the observances for Boston
began Monday. There was an interfaith vigil on Tuesday at Trinity Episcopal
Church, where the pastor, the Rev. Kathleen E. Adams-Shepherd, is from Boston.
“We really felt all the prayers from around the world and all the vigils that
were held for us,” she said. “When something like this happens, we want to make
sure we’re there for them, too.”
April 17, 2013
The New York Times
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
HONG KONG - Mourning for a Chinese student who was the third
victim killed in the Boston Marathon bombing rippled across her home country on
Wednesday, when Internet sites and news reports described and celebrated a young
woman whose ambitions for a career in finance were cut harshly short.
Boston University and the Chinese Consulate General in New York have said the
victim was a graduate student at the school, but the consulate said her family
asked that no personal details be disclosed. But a classmate, a Chinese
university official and a state-run newspaper in her home city have said she was
Lu Lingzi, who accompanied a friend to watch the Boston Marathon from near where
the blasts shook the streets.
Even without government confirmation that Ms. Lu was killed in the bomb blast on
Monday, Chinese Internet sites filled with mournful messages about a woman in
her mid-twenties whose ambitions took her from a rust-belt hometown of Shenyang
to Beijing and then the United States. Her account on Weibo, a Twitter-like
Chinese service used by tens of millions of people, attracted more than 10,000
messages, mostly of condolence, in the hours after Chinese media widely reported
her death.
“You are in heaven now, where there are no bombs,” said one typical message.
Ms. Lu’s own final message on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging service, was
posted on Monday and showed a picture of a bowl of Chinese fried bread, and said
“My wonderful breakfast.” Ms. Lu, shown on her Weibo page as a petite woman with
thick, shoulder-length hair, said there that she enjoyed food, music and
finance. Other Facebook photos showed her in poses at Toah Nipi, a Christian
retreat center in southern New Hampshire.
Although mutual perceptions of China and the United States are often
overshadowed by political rancor, Ms. Lu’s death gave a melancholy face to the
attraction that America and its colleges exert over many young Chinese. More
than 194,000 Chinese students were enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities in
the 2011-12 academic year, far exceeding any other country outside the United
States, according to the Institute of International Education. And Boston, with
its many colleges and the cachet of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, has long been a magnet for them.
Ms. Lu, whose resume boasts of a succession of academic achievements and
internships with financial firms, appeared to be among the many hoping that a
U.S. degree would pave the way to a prestigious job in finance or business. She
went to high school in Shenyang in northeast China, a cradle of state-driven
industrialization that fell on hard times in the 1990s, and then studied
international trade at the Beijing Institute of Technology, and statistics at
Boston University, according to her resume on LinkedIn, a social networking Web
site, where she also gave her score on the Graduate Record Examinations.
The American embassy in Beijing said it had been in contact with the dead
woman’s family in China, as well as the family of a graduate student from
Chengdu, in southwestern China, who was “gravely wounded” in the blast.
“We stand ready to provide any assistance to the family members to ensure they
are able to personally deal with this tragedy as quickly and easily as
possible,” an embassy statement said. “Our hearts go out to the families of all
victims of this senseless act of violence.”
In China, the Shenyang Evening News, a state-run newspaper that announced Ms.
Lu’s death on its Weibo account, darkened its Web page in honor of “A Shenyanger
who passed away in a far away place.” An editor at the newspaper said Ms. Lu’s
father confirmed his daughter’s death.
At the heart of the public mourning, however, there was a very private grief.
Ms. Lu’s classmates, and students at her former college in Beijing, were
reluctant to talk publicly about her death, other than to say that they
respected her family’s wishes for privacy
A Ph.D. student in the School of Management and Economics, where Ms. Lu once
studied, said she was surprised that the Chinese media had disclosed her name.
“Terrorist attacks always seem far away, yet suddenly it was so close,” said the
student, who declined to give her name. “Some friends were thinking about
applying for further studies in Boston. They’re quite worried.”
Wang Yao, a graduate student, who said she was Ms. Lu’s former classmate, begged
reporters to leave the grieving family alone. “They asked to be left alone,”
said Ms. Wang. “And that’s also the general understanding among our peer
classmates,” she said
At a daily news briefing in Beijing on Wednesday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry
spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, discussed the Chinese victims, while not releasing
the dead student’s name.
“Chinese leaders and the government are very concerned about the tragic death of
a Chinese student and the severe injury of another in the Boston Marathon
bombing case on April 15th,” Ms. Hua told reporters. She said the surviving
student suffered serious injuries, but her “condition is quite stable.”
Additional research by Mia Li and Patrick Zuo in Beijing,
April 16, 2013
The New York Times
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and JOHN ELIGON
BOSTON — Martin Richard and Krystle Campbell, two of three
people killed Monday at the Boston Marathon, shared something in common with
most of those injured by the blasts. They were there to watch others. They were
not supposed to be the subjects of a newspaper story.
Ms. Campbell, 29, who went almost every year to watch the runners cross the
finish line, was standing with a friend. Martin, 8, was standing with his
family.
On the campus of Boston University, administrators said Tuesday afternoon that
the third person killed was a graduate student. The Chinese Consulate in New
York said that the victim was a Chinese citizen but that it was not disclosing
her name at the request of her family. The university said she was watching the
race close to the finish line with two friends, one of whom was in stable
condition at Boston Medical Center.
On Tuesday, mourners dropped flowers on the front steps of the gray two-story
Victorian home where Martin lived with his family in the Dorchester section of
Boston.
Martin’s mother, Denise, and sister, Jane, 6, were badly injured by the blast.
His older brother Henry, 12, and his father, Bill, also survived the explosions,
said a spokesman for the family.
It was a shockingly sad turn for a family that was well-liked and active in the
community — one that ate four-cheese pizza and meatballs several nights a week
at a local Italian restaurant. They attended St. Ann Parish Neponset, a Roman
Catholic church. Bill Richard was president of the board of St. Mark’s Area Main
Street, a community revitalization organization.
The operator of a clock at the center of the neighborhood froze the hands at
2:50 on Tuesday, the time of the first blast.
“Bad things happen, I understand that,” said Suzanne Morrison, a close friend of
the family. “But why three times over that family endured what they endured
yesterday, that’s something I’ll never be able to process.”
Martin was kindhearted and had an “infectious smile,” Ms. Morrison said. She
said he had spent a school year in the same class as one of her daughters.
“He was the one boy that all the girls had a crush on,” Ms. Morrison said. “He
didn’t shun the girls. He would play with them. He was just a great, great kid.”
Mr. Richard released a statement, thanking “our family and friends, those we
know and those we have never met, for their thoughts and prayers. I ask that you
continue to pray for my family as we remember Martin.”
Martin was a third grader at Neighborhood House Charter School. He was
frequently in front of his house playing sports with his brother and sister,
whom a neighbor described as a tomboy. A red bicycle helmet sat on the front
lawn on Tuesday and there was a basketball hoop and hockey goal in the driveway.
“Very active, very normal American kids,” said a neighbor, Jane Sherman, 64,
describing the Richard children.
Martin would always tell her hi, Ms. Sherman said, but he was afraid of her
Rottweiler, Audra Rose.
About 10:30 on Monday night, Ms. Sherman said, she saw Mr. Richard walking into
his house, looking “white as a sheet.” She asked him what was wrong but he did
not answer. She then went to his house and asked a family friend who was at the
Richard home what had happened.
“He said, ‘Martin is dead.’ ”
Ms. Campbell’s family initially was told that she was merely injured, according
to her grandmother Lillian Campbell. Her identity was confused with that of a
friend who had been standing with her. Ms. Campbell’s parents learned their
daughter had died only when they entered the other woman’s hospital room,
Lillian Campbell said.
“We’re heartbroken at the death of our daughter,” her mother, Patty Campbell,
who could barely be understood through her tears, said in a statement she read
on the porch of the family’s Medford home on Tuesday afternoon. “She was a
wonderful person. She was sweet and kind and friendly and she was always
smiling.”
Ms. Campbell worked long days and nights as a restaurant manager, most recently
for Jimmy’s Steer House in Arlington, but friends said she never lost her sense
of humor.
“She made everyone feel special, and in her line of work, it’s really hard,”
said Laurie Jackson Cormier, who ran a park where Ms. Campbell managed a
restaurant for a number of years. “They work so damn hard, and you don’t often
come across everyone who has that attitude.”
Ms. Campbell grew up in Medford, graduating from the local public high school in
2001. She started working as a waitress in high school, and worked her way up to
a job as the manager of Hingham branch of the Summer Shack, a popular chain of
Boston seafood restaurants.
At the end of the summer season at the Summer Shack in 2009, she organized a hot
dog eating contest to rid the restaurant of hundreds of unsold sausages.
“I figured it’s the last weekend of the season, so why not have some people come
out and stuff their face?” she told The Boston Globe.
Ms. Campbell lived with her grandmother for almost two years, caring for her
after a medical procedure, before moving recently to Arlington and taking a new
restaurant job on the other side of the surf and turf divide.
Lillian Campbell said her granddaughter called several times a week and came to
see her most weeks. They had a cup of tea and “lots of laughs about foolish
things.”
“Every time she comes in the house to see anybody it’s a hug and a kiss, and
that’s how she left,” Lillian Campbell said.
“ ‘Love you, Nana,’ that’s what she said.”
Cate Seely, a friend of Ms. Campbell’s, ran the marathon on Monday. On Tuesday,
wearing her marathon jacket, she walked up to the Campbell family home with the
red rose she received after finishing the race and left it on the front steps.
Kitty Bennett and Michael Roston contributed research.
April 16, 2013
The New York Times
By GINA KOLATA, JERÉ LONGMAN and MARY PILON
BOSTON — So many patients arrived at once, with variations of
the same gruesome leg injuries. Shattered bones, shredded tissue, nails burrowed
deep beneath the flesh. The decision had to be made, over and over, with little
time to deliberate. Should this leg be amputated? What about this one?
“As an orthopedic surgeon, we see patients like this, with mangled extremities,
but we don’t see 16 of them at the same time, and we don’t see patients from
blast injuries,” Dr. Peter Burke, the trauma surgery chief at Boston Medical
Center, said.
The toll from the bombs Monday at the Boston Marathon, which killed at least
three and injured more than 170, will long be felt by anyone involved with the
city’s iconic sporting event. For the victims, the physical legacy could be an
especially cruel one for a group that was involved in the marathon: severe leg
trauma and amputations.
“What we like to do is before we take off someone’s leg — it’s extremely hard to
make that decision — is we often get two surgeons to agree,” Dr. Tracey Dechert,
a trauma surgeon at Boston Medical, said. “Am I right here? This can’t be saved.
So that way you feel better and know that you didn’t take off someone’s leg that
you didn’t have to take. All rooms had multiple surgeons so everyone could feel
like we’re doing what we need to be doing.”
The widespread leg trauma was a result of bombs that seemed to deliver their
most vicious blows within two feet off the ground. In an instant, doctors at
hospitals throughout the city who had been preparing for ordinary marathon
troubles — dehydration or hypothermia — now faced profound, life-changing
decisions for runners and spectators of all ages.
Some victims arrived two to an ambulance, some with huge holes in their legs
where skin and fat and muscle were ripped away by the bomb and with ball
bearings or nails from the bombs embedded in their flesh. Others had severed
arteries in their legs or multiple breaks in the bones of their legs and feet.
The shock wave from the blast destroyed blood vessels, skin, muscle and fat. And
at least nine patients — five at Boston Medical Center, three at Beth Israel
Deaconess Hospital and one at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — had legs or feet so
mangled they would need to be amputated.
Some of the attendant medical professionals, said Julie Dunbar, a chaplain at
Beth Israel, were faced with “more trauma than most ever see in a lifetime, more
sadness, more loss.”
There were only three fatalities, which doctors say was because the blast, low
to the ground, mostly injured people’s legs and feet instead of their abdomens,
chests or heads. And tourniquets stopped what could have been fatal bleeding in
many.
Dr. Allan Panter, 57, an emergency-room physician from Gainesville, Ga., was
standing 10 yards from the blast near the finish line, waiting for his wife,
Theresa, to complete her 16th Boston Marathon. Assisted by others, he said he
used gauze wraps to apply tourniquets to several victims, including a man who
appeared to be in his late 20s who lost both of his lower legs in the blast. He
said he saw another six or seven victims with belts tied around their wounded
legs.
Tourniquets, once discouraged because they were thought to cause damage to
injuries, have returned to favor and have been used to treat wounds inflicted by
explosive devices in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dr. Panter said.
“With blast injuries to the lower extremities that we’re getting in the Middle
East, you bleed out,” he said. Tourniquets “can help save lives. I don’t know if
they helped in this situation, but it sure couldn’t hurt.”
While there was some initial chaos in a medical tent near the finish line, and
some screaming and moaning by victims, it was generally an orderly scene, Dr.
Panter said. He assisted others in wheeling in a female victim who died, he
said. He described 20 to 30 cots in the tent with IV bags that had been intended
for dehydrated runners.
At least eight doctors and what seemed to be 20 or more nurses were stationed in
the tent. A man with a microphone stood in the center of the tent to coordinate
medical care. Arriving victims were assessed and categorized as 1 for critical,
2 for intermediate, 3 for “can wait” and “black tag” for anyone who appeared to
be dead, Dr. Panter said. An emergency medical technician outside the tent
coordinated ambulance service to hospitals.
“All in all, it was a pretty controlled environment,” said Dr. Panter, who has
been an emergency-room physician for 30 years. “I’ve seen a lot worse. They were
without question ready — not ready for those type of injuries, but they were
prepared.”
Once victims were transported to Boston’s hospitals, doctors had to carefully
coordinate their response. Each has a story of where they were when the bombs
went off and how they rushed to help and how, in some cases, they somehow just
missed being victims themselves.
Dr. Alok Gupta, who directed the surgical response at Beth Israel, said he often
goes to the finish line of the marathon to watch the race. But this year he was
so tired that he took a nap. Then he heard ambulance sirens and helicopters
outside his home in Back Bay, near the marathon finish. He was just beginning to
wonder why the sirens had not dissipated and why the helicopters were hovering
when his cellphone rang.
“The call was broken up,” he said. “All I heard was ‘mass casualty.’ ” And “we
need you,” he said.
He was out of the house in less than a minute and at the hospital five minutes
later. Then he and his colleagues set to work. They cleared the emergency room,
sending home those who could leave and sending others to beds elsewhere in the
building. They cleared intensive care, sending patients to other areas of the
hospital. Dr. Gupta directed a central command.
“Surgeons were notified, emergency-room physicians were notified, operating-room
personnel were notified, everyone was notified,” he said. Cellphone service in
Boston had been limited to prevent terrorists from using cellphones to detonate
any more bombs, so doctors, nurses and other medical professionals were
contacted with text messages.
About 10 minutes later, patients began to arrive. Each was put in a room and
assessed. Doctors described the situation as calm and efficient.
Seven patients at Beth Israel went directly to the operating room for emergency
surgery to stabilize them, stopping bleeding for example. Five went to intensive
care. At Brigham and Women’s Hospital, six patients went to the operating room
and nine to intensive care.
“I think a lot of these injuries are so devastating, it was pretty
straightforward — they weren’t going to be able to salvage these things,” said
Dr. Burke of Boston Medical Center. “We all would like to salvage whatever
extremities we can, but one thing we’ve learned in trauma is when you get too
much damage, you can create too much hassle, so you may get the amputation but
it may be a year down the line. Ten operations, failed operations, addictions to
narcotics for the chronic pains, all these kinds of things.” An early
amputation, Dr. Burke added, can mean a quicker return to a normal life.
Borrowing a tactic used by the military in Iraq, doctors at Beth Israel used
felt markers to write patients’ vital signs and injuries on their chests —
safely away from the leg wounds — so that if a patient’s chart was misplaced
during a transfer to surgery or intensive care, for example, there would be no
question about what was found in the emergency room.
Those who needed surgery would often need more than one operation on subsequent
days. Those with huge blast wounds that ripped out skin and muscle would need
plastic surgery. Those with severed arteries would need surgery, too.
Most of the injured taken to Beth Israel were no older than 50, said Dr. Michael
Yaffe, a trauma surgeon at the hospital. A few were runners, but most were
spectators who had prime viewing positions near the finish line.
At about 2 a.m. on Tuesday, the Beth Israel medical team left for home, to
return again at 6. They examined each patient before they left and again when
they returned. Often, in trauma, the doctors said, patients will not notice some
of their injuries until the major injury is taken care of.
The Boston Marathon is so special, a day to celebrate athleticism and the thrill
of the sport. For those runners who trained for months and now can be facing
months or years or rehabilitation, and the end of their running days, the bombs
took away “the thing they loved,” Dr. Yaffe said.
In the moments after the explosions, some patients recalled that they “thought
they would die as they saw the blood spilling out,” said Dr. George Velmahos,
chief of trauma services at Massachusetts General Hospital. When they awoke
Tuesday and realized they were still alive, they said they felt extremely
thankful, some even considering themselves lucky, Dr. Velmahos said.
“It’s almost a paradox,” he said, “to see these patients without an extremity to
wake up and feel lucky.”
Jess Bidgood and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 16, 2013
An earlier version of a photo caption in this story
misspelled the surname of a physician
who helped treat leg injuries at the Boston Marathon.
BOSTON — When Jeff Bauman woke up in a hospital bed on
Tuesday, an air tube was down his throat, both of his legs had been amputated at
the knee, and his father was by his side. He tried to talk, but he could not.
He looked angry, as he motioned his arms up and out like shock waves and
mouthed: “Boom! Boom!”
Jeff Bauman is the man in the photograph that has become an icon of the Boston
Marathon attack, the one showing a bloodied, distraught young man, holding his
left thigh, being wheeled away by a man in a cowboy hat. If the world could not
identify him immediately, Mr. Bauman’s father — also named Jeff Bauman —
certainly could.
That was his son with his legs destroyed, wearing a favorite shirt. That was his
son.
When the explosions went off at the Boston Marathon, Jeff Bauman, 52, called his
son’s cellphone again and again — no answer. He knew his son was there, to cheer
for his girlfriend, Erin Hurley, who was running her first Boston Marathon. For
an hour, he kept calling, calling. No answer.
Then his stepdaughter, Erika, called him. “Did you see the picture?” she asked.
“Jeffrey’s on the news. He got hurt.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure?” He was shouting now.
“Yes! Yes! I’m sure!” she shouted back.
Mr. Bauman found the picture on Facebook. It was not the whole picture, the one
that showed Jeff’s left leg blown off at the calf. He started calling
Boston-area hospitals and found his son registered at Boston Medical Center. He
and his wife, Csilla, drove from their home in Concord, N.H., and reached Jeff’s
side just before 8 p.m.
The surgery was already done. Both Jeff’s legs had been amputated at the knee.
He had lost an excessive amount of blood. During surgery, the doctors had to
keep resuscitating him, giving him blood and fluids, because he had lost so
much.
Jeff, 27, is a good kid, never got in trouble, his father said. He likes playing
guitar. He works behind the deli counter at Costco. He plans to pay off his
student loans and go back to school at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
During the marathon, he was standing at the finish line waiting for Ms. Hurley,
alongside her two roommates. Ms. Hurley was still about a mile away when the
blasts went off, far enough away that she did not know what had happened. Why
had everyone stopped?
Jeff was the first casualty brought to Boston Medical, his family was told. He
went through the first operation and then a second, about 1 a.m., to drain
internal fluids caused by the blunt trauma.
That night, Jeff’s half-brother, Alan, called from his boot camp at Lackland Air
Force Base in San Antonio, Tex. His father told him Jeff had been hurt but did
not say how badly. He planned to tell Alan the whole truth later.
The Baumans knew how lucky Jeff had been. “The man in the cowboy hat — he saved
Jeff’s life,” Ms. Bauman said. Mr. Bauman’s eyes widened. He said: “There’s a
video where he goes right to Jeff, picks him right up and puts him on the
wheelchair and starts putting the tourniquet on him and pushing him out. I got
to talk to this guy!”
The man in the cowboy hat, Carlos Arredondo, 52, had been handing out American
flags to runners when the first explosion went off. His son Alexander was a
Marine killed in Iraq in 2004, and in the years since he has handed out the
flags as a tribute.
With the first blast, Mr. Arredondo jumped over the fence and ran toward the
people lying on the ground. What happened next, he later recounted to a
reporter: He found a young man, a spectator, whose shirt was on fire. He beat
out the flames with his hands. The young man, who turned out to be Jeff Bauman,
had lost the lower portion of both legs. He took off a shirt and tied it around
the stump of one leg. He stayed with Mr. Bauman, comforting him, until emergency
workers came to help carry him to an ambulance.
He helped only one man, Mr. Bauman.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Baumans wondered what had become of the man in the
cowboy hat. They wanted to tell him that their son was alive, that he was moving
his arms and legs.
But he might be in the hospital for two more weeks. What would he do when he was
not so sedated? They plan to bring him his guitar. What would they say to him
when he came to?
The elder Mr. Bauman covered his mouth with his hand. “I just don’t know,” he
said, and he started to cry.
Binyamin Appelbaum contributed reporting from Boston,
and Kitty Bennett contributed research from New York.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 16, 2013
An earlier version of a photo caption accompanying this article
stated incorrectly that the elder Jeff Bauman was recovering
from a double amputation.
It is his son, also named Jeff Bauman, who was injured.
April 16, 2013
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, ERIC SCHMITT and SCOTT SHANE
BOSTON — The explosives that killed three people and injured
more than 170 during the Boston Marathon on Monday were most likely rudimentary
devices made from ordinary kitchen pressure cookers, except they were rigged to
shoot sharp bits of shrapnel into anyone within reach of their blast and maim
them severely, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
The pressure cookers were filled with nails, ball bearings and black powder, and
the devices were triggered by “kitchen-type” egg timers, one official said.
The resulting explosions sent metal tearing through skin and muscle, destroying
the lower limbs of some victims who had only shreds of tissue holding parts of
their legs together when they arrived at the emergency room of Massachusetts
General Hospital, doctors there said.
Law enforcement officials said the devices were probably hidden inside dark
nylon duffel bags or backpacks and left on the street or sidewalk near the
finish line. Forensic experts said that the design and components of the
homemade devices were generic but that the marking “6L,” indicating a six-liter
container, could help identify a brand and manufacturer and possibly lead to
information on the buyer.
New details about the explosives emerged as President Obamaannounced that the
F.B.I. was investigating the attack as “an act of terrorism,” and made plans to
come to Boston on Thursday for an interfaith service at the Cathedral of the
Holy Cross.
But officials said they still had no suspects in custody and did not give the
impression that they were close to making an arrest as they repeatedly noted
that the investigation was in its infancy.
“The range of suspects and motives remains wide open,” Richard DesLauriers, the
special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s Boston office, said at a televised
briefing on Tuesday afternoon. And, he added, no one has claimed responsibility.
At this stage of an inquiry, officials said it was not unusual for there to be
no suspects. But with the paucity of leads, Mr. DesLauriers and others pleaded
with members of the public to submit any photographs or video they may have
taken at the blast site to help in the investigation. At the briefing, Mr.
DesLauriers said that someone somewhere almost certainly heard a mention of the
marathon or the date of April 15.
“Someone knows who did this,” he said. “Cooperation from the community will play
a crucial role.”
Officials said that as of Tuesday afternoon, they had received more than 2,000
tips from around the world. As marathoners left through Logan Airport on
Tuesday, security personnel reminded them of the importance of sharing their
pictures with the F.B.I.
Counterterrorism specialists said the authorities would aim to match the faces
of any possible suspects, using facial recognition software, against an array of
databases for visas, passports and drivers’ licenses. “It’s our intention to go
through every frame of every video that we have to determine exactly who was in
the area,” Edward Davis, the Boston police commissioner, said at the news
briefing. “This was probably one of the most well-photographed areas in the
country yesterday.”
Boston was deserted on Tuesday morning, not only because many of the runners and
spectators were leaving town, but also because yellow police tape and metal
barriers still marked off a nearly mile-long area encompassing the two explosion
sites, one that the police described as the most complex crime scene they had
ever encountered.
At the morning commuter rush, the city’s subway system was uncharacteristically
quiet, watched over by the police and SWAT teams. Stores on Newbury Street,
Boston’s busy retail thoroughfare, were closed, and tables on the patio at
Stephanie’s, a restaurant there, were still covered in dishes left there on
Monday.
Among the three dead was an 8-year-old boy, Martin Richard of Dorchester. The
boy had been watching near the finish line and then moved back into the crowd;
the blast killed him and severely injured his mother and his sister.
Another spectator, Krystle Campbell, 29, of Arlington, Mass., also died Monday
from injuries she suffered while watching the marathon, her grandmother Lillian
Campbell said Tuesday.
The third person who died was identified by Boston University officials as a
graduate student there, and the Chinese Consulate in New York said that she was
a Chinese national. The university is waiting for permission from the family
before releasing her name. She was watching the race close to the finish line,
saidRobert Brown, president of the university, in an e-mail to the university
community.
Given the force of the blasts, doctors at area hospitals said that the death
toll could have been much higher but that the triage teams at the blast site had
done a good job of sending the victims to the hospitals capable of handling
them.
“The distribution worked wonderfully,” said Dr. Stephen K. Epstein, attending
emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “It was very easy
to match the number of patients to the resources available at each of the
hospitals.”
Boston is home to some of the most renowned medical institutions in the country.
Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital said that none of the hospitals were
overwhelmed, allowing victims to be attended to in rapid order and saving lives
in the process. Some victims were wounded so badly that even a delay of a few
minutes could have been fatal, doctors said.
The scale of the attack and the crude nature of the explosives, coupled with the
lack of anyone claiming to have been the perpetrator, suggested to experts that
the attacker could be an individual or a small group rather than an established
terrorist organization.
“This could have been a one-person job,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism
specialist at Georgetown University. “That makes it much harder to track. When
we catch terrorists, it’s usually because they’re part of a conspiracy and
they’re communicating with one another.”
Nonetheless, a senior law enforcement official said that authorities were also
looking into connections between pressure cookers and Al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula, the Qaeda franchise in Yemen, largely because the design of the
explosive device was described in a 2010 issue of the group’s online English
magazine, Inspire.
“The pressurized cooker is the most effective method,” the article said. “Glue
the shrapnel to the inside of the pressurized cooker.” The article was titled
“Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
Pressure cookers are designed to cook food quickly at high pressure. Pressure
cooker bombs work when explosive powder is set off inside the pot and the
resulting pressure builds until it exceeds the ability of the pot to contain it,
creating a blast of tremendous force. Rudimentary explosive devices made from
pressure cookers have been widely used in attacks in Afghanistan, India, Nepal
and Pakistan, all countries where the cooking device is common, according to a
Department of Homeland Security warning notice issued in 2010.
But they have occasionally turned up in attacks in the United States as
well:Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen who attempted a car-bomb attack on
Times Square in May 2010, had a pressure cooker loaded with 120 firecrackers
among the improvised explosives in his S.U.V. The devices smoked but never
exploded.
Instructions for assembling such devices can be found in many places on the Web,
including in terrorism “cookbooks” popular among domestic extremists, and the
Qaeda magazine is also easily available on the Internet. So the design did not
necessarily point to a foreign connection.
A law enforcement official said that the pressure cooker in Boston “was badly
damaged,” but that enough of it remained intact to identify it.
One brand of pressure cooker with “6L” on the bottom is made by the Spanish
company Fagor, which, according to its Web site, is the fifth-largest appliance
maker in Europe, with factories in six countries, including Spain, China and
Morocco, and subsidiaries in nearly a dozen more.
The company sells about 50,000 of the six-liter pots in the United States every
year, said Sara de la Hera, the vice president for sales and marketing at
Fagor’s United States subsidiary.
Ms. De la Hera said she was unaware of whether the company had been contacted by
investigators. It could not be immediately determined whether any other brand of
pressure cooker also has “6L” etched on the bottom.
“It will have to go through a many tests to see what they can glean further and
identify where it was produced and sold, and then look at it forensically,” a
law enforcement official said. Officials said on Tuesday that evidence from the
scene was being shipped to labs in Quantico, Va. Fox News showed pictures that
it said were from the crime scene that showed a chunk of a somewhat pulverized
stainless steel pressure cooker, with its UL number visible.
Steven Bartholomew, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives, said that the blast was powerful enough to toss debris on top of
buildings. “Some of that debris got projected on top of buildings, and embedded
in buildings in that finish line area, so that tells us we have a lot of work to
do,” Mr. Bartholomew said.
In Boston, as Tuesday wore on, many runners, clad in blue and gold jackets, made
pilgrimages to the police blockade on Boylston Street, pausing to take pictures
with their cellphones. Others came wearing jackets from previous marathons — a
symbol of accomplishment that in Boston turned into a sign of solidarity.
Bonnie Yesian was among many visitors marooned in the city, because her hotel —
and her luggage and identification — are inside the crime scene.
“I can’t fly, so I’m stuck,” said Ms. Yesian, who added that strangers and
marathon volunteers had offered her guest rooms and supplies.
Hundreds of people, including many runners, held a candlelight vigil Tuesday
night in Boston Common. “Such a perfect day, such a wonderful celebration, and
then to have this happen,” said Susan Springer, a psychologist. She said she was
there because “I wanted to find a way to come together as a community.”
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Boston,
and Scott Shane and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
Reporting was contributed by John Eligon,
Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Jess Bidgood from Boston,
Michael Cooper and William K. Rashbaum from New York,
and Mark Landler and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: April 16, 2013
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly
to marathon jackets worn by some participants.
They were available for purchase; they were not given to runners.
WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan, independent review of
interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States
engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore
ultimate responsibility for it.
The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every
American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed
discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top
advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on
some detainees in our custody.” The study, by an 11-member panel convened by the
Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, is to be released on
Tuesday morning.
Debate over the coercive interrogation methods used by the administration of
President George W. Bush has often broken down on largely partisan lines. The
Constitution Project’s task force on detainee treatment, led by two former
members of Congress with experience in the executive branch — a Republican, Asa
Hutchinson, and a Democrat, James R. Jones — seeks to produce a stronger
national consensus on the torture question.
While the task force did not have access to classified records, it is the most
ambitious independent attempt to date to assess the detention and interrogation
programs. A separate 6,000-page report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s
record by the Senate Intelligence Committee, based exclusively on agency
records, rather than interviews, remains classified.
“As long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United
States could again engage in torture,” the report says.
The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged
the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when
necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken
captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these
interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been
obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge
useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable,
the report says.
Interrogation and abuse at the C.I.A.’s so-called black sites, the Guantánamo
Bay prison in Cuba and war-zone detention centers, have been described in
considerable detail by the news media and in declassified documents, though the
Constitution Project report adds many new details.
It confirms a report by Human Rights Watch that one or more Libyan militants
were waterboarded by the C.I.A., challenging the agency’s longtime assertion
that only three Al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the near-drowning
technique. It includes a detailed account by Albert J. Shimkus Jr., then a Navy
captain who ran a hospital for detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison, of his
own disillusionment when he discovered what he considered to be the unethical
mistreatment of prisoners.
But the report’s main significance may be its attempt to assess what the United
States government did in the years after 2001 and how it should be judged. The
C.I.A. not only waterboarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained
them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept
them awake for days on end.
The question of whether those methods amounted to torture is a historically and
legally momentous issue that has been debated for more than a decade inside and
outside the government. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a
series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2005 concluding that the methods were not
torture if used under strict rules; all the memos were later withdrawn. News
organizations have wrestled with whether to label the brutal methods
unequivocally as torture in the face of some government officials’ claims that
they were not.
In addition, the United States is a signatory to the international Convention
Against Torture, which requires the prompt investigation of allegations of
torture and the compensation of its victims.
Like the still-secret Senate interrogation report, the Constitution Project
study was initiated after President Obama decided in 2009 not to support a
national commission to investigate the post-9/11 counterterrorism programs, as
proposed by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and others. Mr. Obama
said then that he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” Aides have said he
feared that his own policy agenda might get sidetracked in a battle over his
predecessor’s programs.
The panel studied the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, in Afghanistan
and Iraq, and at the C.I.A’s secret prisons. Staff members, including the
executive director, Neil A. Lewis, a former reporter for The New York Times,
traveled to multiple detention sites and interviewed dozens of former American
and foreign officials, as well as former detainees.
Mr. Hutchinson, who served in the Bush administration as chief of the Drug
Enforcement Administration and under secretary of the Department of Homeland
Security, said he “took convincing” on the torture issue. But after the panel’s
nearly two years of research, he said he had no doubts about what the United
States did.
“This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players,”
Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. He said he thought everyone involved in
decisions, from Mr. Bush down, had acted in good faith, in a desperate effort to
try to prevent more attacks.
“But I just think we learn from history,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “It’s incredibly
important to have an accurate account not just of what happened but of how
decisions were made.”
He added, “The United States has a historic and unique character, and part of
that character is that we do not torture.”
The panel found that the United States violated its international legal
obligations by engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions. It
questions recidivism figures published by the Defense Intelligence Agency for
Guantánamo detainees who have been released, saying they conflict with
independent reviews.
It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered
“acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations and medical professionals
who helped direct and monitor them. And it reveals an internal debate at the
International Committee of the Red Cross over whether the organization should
speak publicly about American abuses; advocates of going public lost the fight,
delaying public exposure for months, the report finds.
Mr. Jones, a former ambassador to Mexico, noted that his panel called for the
release of a declassified version of the Senate report and said he believed that
the two reports, one based on documents and the other largely on interviews,
would complement each other in documenting what he called a grave series of
policy errors.
“I had not recognized the depths of torture in some cases,” Mr. Jones said. “We
lost our compass.”
While the Constitution Project report covers mainly the Bush years, it is
critical of some Obama administration policies, especially what it calls
excessive secrecy. It says that keeping the details of rendition and torture
from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national
security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block
lawsuits by former detainees.
The report calls for the revision of the Army Field Manual on interrogation to
eliminate Appendix M, which it says would permit an interrogation for 40
consecutive hours, and to restore an explicit ban on stress positions and sleep
manipulation.
The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal
and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the
United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar
treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by
American officials when used by other countries.
The report compares the torture of detainees to the internment of Japanese
Americans during World War II. “What was once generally taken to be
understandable and justifiable behavior,” the report says, “can later become a
case of historical regret.”
April 16, 2013
The New York Times
By HAIDER JAVED WARRAICH
BOSTON
I WAS in the middle of having Chinese food with my wife and friends yesterday
afternoon when we heard the dull and deathly reverb. The water in our plastic
cups rippled. We looked at one another, and someone made a joke about that
famous scene in “Jurassic Park.” We tried to drown the moment in humor. But then
a rush of humanity descended upon us in the Prudential Center on Boylston
Street, right across from where the second bomb blast had just occurred, near
the marathon’s finish line.
People gushed across the hallway like fish in white water rapids. It was a blur
of bright clothes and shiny sneakers, everyone dressed up for Patriot’s Day
weekend on what was moments ago a beautiful spring day. Instantly, images of the
shootings in Aurora, Colo., Newtown, Conn., and Tucson came to mind. I felt my
thoughts reduced to singular flashes. My life, all of it, was the first. My
wife, sitting across me, was the second. I yelled out to her to run, and we did,
not knowing what had happened, only that it had to be something terrible.
We ran out of the food court and onto the terrace overlooking Boylston Street.
We could see people fleeing from the finish line even as, in the distance, other
weary marathoners kept running unknowingly toward the devastation. What was left
of the food court was a land frozen in an innocent time, forks still stuck in
half-eaten pieces of steak, belongings littered unattended. I felt fear beyond
words.
This was not my first experience with terror, having grown up in Pakistan. But
for some reason, I didn’t think back to those experiences. Looking onto to the
smoked, chaotic Boylston Street, I forgot about cowering in my childhood bedroom
as bombs and gunfire rained over the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, close to
our house. My mind did not go back to when I stood on the roof of my dormitory
in Karachi as the streets were overrun with burning buses and angry protesters
after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. None of the unfortunate experiences
of growing up in the midst of thousands of victims of terror, personally knowing
some of them, helped me in that moment. Nothing made it any easier.
Perhaps, if I had been thinking more clearly and hadn’t had my wife with me, I
might have gone down to try to help the wounded. But at that moment all I could
think about was getting us out of there. We lost our friends, then found them
again. Our cellphones weren’t working. And then, as we worked our way through
the dazed throngs in Back Bay, I realized that not only was I a victim of
terror, but I was also a potential suspect.
As a 20-something Pakistani male with dark stubble (an ode more to my hectic
schedule as a resident in the intensive-care unit than to any aesthetic or
ideology), would I not fit the bill? I know I look like Hollywood’s favorite
post-cold-war movie villain. I’ve had plenty of experience getting intimately
frisked at airports. Was it advisable to go back to pick up my friend’s camera
that he had forgotten in his child’s stroller in the mall? I remember feeling
grateful that I wasn’t wearing a backpack, which I imagined might look
suspicious. My mind wandered to when I would be working in the intensive care
unit the next day, possibly taking care of victims of the blast. What would I
tell them when they asked where I was from (a question I am often posed)?
Wouldn’t it be easier to just tell people I was from India or Bangladesh?
As I walked down Commonwealth Avenue, I started receiving calls from family back
home. They informed me about what was unfolding on television screens across the
world. I was acutely conscious of what I spoke over the phone, feeling that
someone was breathing over my shoulder, listening to every word I said. Careful
to avoid Urdu, speaking exclusively in English, I relayed that I was safe, and
all that I had seen. I continued to naïvely cling to the hope that it was a gas
explosion, a subway accident, anything other than what it increasingly seemed to
be: an act of brutality targeted at the highest density of both people and
cameras.
The next step was to hope that the perpetrator was not a lunatic who would
become the new face of a billion people. Not a murderer who would further fan
the flames of Islamophobia. Not an animal who would obstruct the ability of
thousands of students to complete their educations in the United States. Not an
extremist who would maim and hurt the very people who were still recovering from
the pain of Sept. 11. President Obama and Gov. Deval L. Patrick have shown great
restraint in their words and have been careful not to accuse an entire people
for what one madman may have done. But others might not be so kind.
Haider Javed Warraich is a resident in internal medicine
April 16, 2013
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
BOSTON — The day after two powerful bombs exploded near the
finish line of the Boston Marathon, a mile-square area around Copley Square here
remained cordoned off as a crime scene, and officials still had no one in
custody. Investigators searched a house in a nearby suburb late Monday night,
but later said the search had proved fruitless.
Hundreds of runners who had expected to leave Boston on Tuesday morning with a
sense of triumph after a night of celebration left instead with heavy hearts
after at least three people were killed. The bombings also sent 176 people to
area hospitals, including 17 who were critically injured, Police Commissioner
Edward Davis of Boston said Tuesday.
Among the dead was an 8-year-old boy, Martin Richard, of Dorchester, according
to Conor Yunits, a family spokesman. He had been watching the marathon with his
family; his mother and a sister were badly injured. The names of the other
victims have not been made public.
Late Monday night, law enforcement officials descended on an apartment building
in the suburb of Revere, about five miles north of Copley Square, linked to a
man the police took into custody near the scene of the bombings. But on Tuesday
morning, one law enforcement official said investigators had determined that the
man, who was injured in the blast and was questioned at the hospital, was not
involved in the attack.
A few details about the explosives emerged on Tuesday. Representative Michael
McCaul, a Texas Republican who heads the House Homeland Security Committee, said
the authorities believe the explosives were likely a “pressure-cooker device,”
similar to improvised explosive weapons used against American troops in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Mr. McCaul, a former federal prosecutor who received briefings
Tuesday morning from the F.B.I. and Homeland Security officials, said the
authorities still did not know whether the attack was a foreign or domestic
plot.
Surgeons at Boston hospitals said during a televised news conferences on Tuesday
that the devices were packed with small pellets and sharp “nail-like” objects
that were designed to maim victims.
Congressman Stephen Lynch, a Democrat of Massachusetts, said doctors had
identified material lodged in a survivor’s leg as a ball bearing.
The presence of a ball bearing, Mr. Lynch said, along with the timing of the
explosions, indicated that the device was probably built by someone with
expertise, “not some kid in his garage putting something together, I don’t
think.”
Mr. Lynch characterized the choice of the material as deliberate. “This is not a
device like Oklahoma City,” he said. “That was to bring the building down. The
ball bearings are meant as antipersonnel munitions. They’re trying to cause
carnage here.”
The authorities have not announced any arrests, and so far, no one has claimed
responsibility as the police conduct what they said was “a criminal
investigation that is a potential terrorist investigation.”
Law enforcement officials pleaded at a briefing Tuesday morning for anyone who
took pictures or video of the finish line at the time of the blast to submit
them boston@ic.fbi.gov or to call 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324).
The plea underscored just how pervasive cameras have become at events like the
marathon and how crucial they can be in helping the police piece together
crucial pieces of evidence. But it may also suggest how few clues the
authorities have otherwise.
The police also said they were examining footage from nearby security cameras
frame by frame as they continue their search for the identity of the person or
persons who placed explosive devices at the end of the 26.2-mile course.
Commissioner Davis said that officials were gradually reducing the size of the
crime scene, which on Tuesday stretched for 12 blocks in Copley Square, down
from 15 blocks on Monday. He said it was the most complex crime scene in the
history of the department.
City streets that normally would be clogged at rush hour were largely deserted
on Tuesday except for a cold wind and a few runners out for a morning jog. “It’s
very surreal,” said Mary Ollinger, 32, who works at Wentworth Institute of
Technology. “The streets are empty and the Common is filled with media trucks.”
At rush hour, the city’s subway system was uncharacteristically quiet, watched
over by a heightened police presence and SWAT team members. Parts of the city
seemed to have ground to a halt: Stores on Newbury Street, Boston’s busy retail
thoroughfare, were closed, and tables on the patio at Stephanie’s, a restaurant
there, were still covered in dishes left there on Monday.
Metal barriers and more police guarded the crime scene, forming something of a
black hole in a busy retail and business district in this city. Inside, the
streets were still littered in the detritus of the marathon — runners’ blankets,
water bottles, even a pile of bananas.
Hundreds if not thousands of office workers avoided the city on Tuesday because
of the closures. Maria Luna, 38, who lives in Watertown and usually commutes by
bus to her job as an investment analyst at John Hancock, said she was staying
home. “My manager told me it would be very limited access,” she said by phone.
The emergency protocol in her office was activated, she said, meaning that
essential workers, like those who must move cash on a time-sensitive basis,
could report to an off-site disaster recovery station in Portsmouth, N.H., where
the company has computers.
She said she felt a combination of sadness and terror. “Right now I have a big
ball in the pit of my stomach,” she said.
But many runners, clad in the blue and gold jackets given to this year’s
marathoners, made pilgrimages to the blockade on Boylston Street, pausing to
take pictures with their cellphones. Others came wearing jacket from previous
marathons — the symbol of accomplishment had, apparently, turned into a sign of
solidarity.
Alison Gardner, a runner from Austin, Tex., who completed the race on Monday
about 10 minutes before the blasts, left a potted hydrangea and tucked a bunch
of tulips into the metal barrier.
“It’s supposed to be a day of celebration today, and it’s a day of sadness,”
said Ms. Gardner.
Her companion, Bonnie Yesian, is among many visitors still marooned in the city,
because her hotel — and her luggage and identification — is inside the crime
scene.
“I can’t fly, so I’m stuck,” said Ms. Yesian, who said strangers and marathon
volunteers had offered her guest rooms and supplies in the meantime.
Marathon officials had set up an ad hoc site adjacent to the crime scene, where
runners who had been stopped before the finish line could pick up their medals
and bright yellow bags of belongings that they had left at the start. What would
ordinarily be a moment to bask in accomplishment was a grim occasion, as runners
— many with tears in their eyes — wondered what to make of a medal for a
marathon they had been unable to complete.
“It’s heartbreaking to not cross the finish line, you train so hard for this,”
said Lauren Field, an auctioneer who now lives in Hampstead, N.H., who was
stopped blocks from the finish line. “It’s sad, but I’m safe.”
Caroline Burkhart protested gently as a volunteer handed her a medal. “I didn’t
finish,” she said, explaining that she had stopped at mile 25.2. She took off
the medal and examined it. “Memories,” she said, with a shudder. “Next year,
I’ll wear it.”
In Dorchester, the street outside the home of Martin Richard, the 8-year-old
victim, a large two-story gray Victorian with a basketball hoop and a hockey
goal in the driveway, was filled with reporters and television cameras on
Tuesday. Mourners stopped to leave flowers in the front yard. A neighbor, Jane
Sherman, 64, described the Richard children as “very active, very normal
American kids.” Ms. Sherman, a real estate agent, said she would often see the
children outside the house playing. “They’re very happy-go-lucky kids,” she
said. “All of Dorchester is devastated.”
White House officials said that President Obama received updates overnight about
the investigation from Lisa Monaco, his chief counterterrorism and homeland
security adviser. “The president made clear that he expects to be kept up to
date on any developments and directed his team to make sure that all federal
resources that can support these efforts, including the investigation being led
by the F.B.I., be made available,” a White House official said. Mr. Obama is to
be briefed again later this morning by Ms. Monaco and the director of the
F.B.I., Robert Mueller.
Almost three-quarters of the 23,000 runners who participated in the race had
already crossed the finish line when a bomb that had apparently been placed in a
garbage can exploded around 2:50 p.m. in a haze of smoke amid a crowd of
spectators on Boylston Street, just off Copley Square in the heart of the city.
Twelve seconds later, another bomb exploded several hundred feet away.
On Tuesday morning officials said that the only explosive devices found were the
ones that exploded at the marathon — clarifying conflicting statements that were
given Monday in the chaotic aftermath of the blast, when some law-enforcement
officials had said that other devices were found. “There were no unexploded
devices found,” Gov. Deval Patrick said Tuesday morning.
Reporting was contributed by John Eligon and Jess Bidgood from
Boston,
Michael Cooper, Steve Eder, Ashley Parker,
William K. Rashbaum and Mary Pilon from New York, and Mark
Landler,
and Michael S. Schmidt, Eric Schmitt and Abby Goodnough
April 15,
2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
A marathon
is the most unifying of sporting events. The city that shows up to cheer on
thousands of runners doesn’t really know or care much about who wins; there are
no sides to root for or against. Those who stand on the sidelines — as they have
done in Boston since 1897 — come to celebrate runners from around the world. The
country or neighborhood of origin of the competitors matters far less than their
stamina.
On Monday, the weather for the 117th running of the Boston Marathon was cloudy
and a little chilly — just the way runners like it. Three hours after the
winners had broken the tape, there were still many runners on the course, and
hundreds of spectators on the sidewalk, when an explosion rocked the finish-line
area on Boylston Street, across from the main viewing stand. For a brief second,
the flags of scores of nations were bent downward by the blast.
A few marathoners were knocked over by the force of the explosion. Some runners,
locked in their trance, kept going until they realized something horrific had
just happened. When they turned back, they said they heard the screams and
wails, saw the column of rising smoke, and then the blood and limbs of victims.
There was broken glass and agony everywhere.
Fifteen seconds after the first one, there was another explosion a few blocks
away. It was clear this was not a random event but another concerted effort to
kill and maim innocent Americans, just because they had gathered in a vulnerable
spot on a day when no one’s mind was on terror. The police confirmed that bombs
were responsible for the mayhem; three more unexploded devices were found
elsewhere around the city. At least three people died — one of whom was 8 years
old — and dozens more were injured, some severely.
It could be a while before officials determine which malevolent ideology was
behind this attack. President Obama vowed to track down the perpetrators and
bring them to justice, praising Boston as a “tough and resilient town” that will
take care of itself and will be taken care of by the country. “The American
people will say a prayer for Boston tonight,” he said.
The simple joy of a 26.2-mile run was shattered on Monday. But the marathon will
be back next year, no matter how much security is required, and the crowds
should yell twice as loudly. No act of terrorism is strong enough to shatter a
tradition that belongs to American history.
BOSTON —
About 100 feet from the end of the 26.2-mile Boston Marathon, explosions shook
the street and sent runners frantically racing for cover. The marathon finish
line, normally a festive area of celebration and exhaustion, was suddenly like a
war zone.
“These runners just finished and they don’t have legs now,” said Roupen
Bastajian, 35, a Rhode Island state trooper and former Marine. “So many of them.
There are so many people without legs. It’s all blood. There’s blood everywhere.
You got bones, fragments. It’s disgusting.”
Had Mr. Bastajian run a few strides slower, as he did in 2011, he might have
been among the dozens of victims wounded in Monday’s bomb blasts. Instead, he
was among the runners treating other runners, a makeshift emergency medical
service of exhausted athletes.
“We put tourniquets on,” Mr. Bastajian said. “I tied at least five, six legs
with tourniquets.”
The Boston Marathon, held every year on Patriots’ Day, a state holiday, is
usually an opportunity for the city to cheer with a collective roar. But the
explosions turned an uplifting day into a nightmarish swirl of bloodied streets
and torn-apart limbs as runners were toppled, children on the sidelines were
maimed, and a panicked city watched its iconic athletic spectacle destroyed.
The timing of the explosions — around 2:50 p.m. — was especially devastating
because they happened when a high concentration of runners in the main field
were arriving at the finish line on Boylston Street. In last year’s Boston
Marathon, for example, more than 9,100 crossed the finish line — 42 percent of
all finishers — in the 30 minutes before and after the time of the explosions.
This year, more than 23,000 people started the race in near-perfect conditions.
Only about 17,580 finished.
Three people were killed and more than 100 were injured, officials said.
Deirdre Hatfield, 27, was steps away from the finish line when she heard a
blast. She saw bodies flying out into the street. She saw a couple of children
who appeared lifeless. She saw people without legs.
“When the bodies landed around me I thought: Am I burning? Maybe I’m burning and
I don’t feel it,” Ms. Hatfield said. “If I blow up, I just hope I won’t feel
it.”
She looked inside a Starbucks to her left, where she thought a blast might have
occurred. “What was so eerie, you looked in you knew there had to be 100 people
in there, but there was no sign of movement,” she said.
Ms. Hatfield wondered where another explosion might occur. She turned down a
side street and ran to the hotel where she had agreed to meet her boyfriend and
family after the race.
Amid the chaos, the authorities directed runners and onlookers to the area
designated for family members meeting runners at the end of the race. It was
traditionally a place of panting pride, sweaty hugs and exhausted relief.
But on Monday, it became a place of dread, as news of the attack spread through
the crowd and people awaited word. One woman screamed over the din toward the
streets roped off for runners: “Lisa! Lisa!”
Some saw the explosions as clouds of white smoke. To others, they looked orange
— a fireball that nearly reached the top of a nearby traffic light. Groups of
runners, including a row of women in pink and neon tank tops and a man in a red
windbreaker — kept going a few paces at least, as if unsure of what they were
seeing.
Some runners stopped in the middle of the street, confused and frightened.
Others turned around and started running back the way they came.
“It is kind of ironic that you just finished running a marathon and you want to
keep running away,” said Sarah Joyce, 21, who had just finished her first
marathon when she heard the blast.
Bruce Mendelsohn, 44, was at a party in a third-floor office above where the
bombs went off. His brother, Aaron, had finished the race earlier.
“There was a very loud boom, and three to five seconds later there was another
one,” said Mr. Mendelsohn, an Army veteran who works in public relations. He ran
outside. “There was blood smeared in the streets and on the sidewalk,” he said.
Mr. Mendelsohn could not be sure how many people had been killed or wounded, but
among the bodies he said he saw women, children and runners. The wounds, he
said, appeared to be “lower torso.”
As Melissa Fryback, 42, was heading into the home stretch, she realized she was
on pace for one of her best times ever. She steeled herself for the last three
miles and finished in 3 hours 44 minutes. She met up with her boyfriend, and the
two had made it about two blocks from the finish line when they heard the
blasts.
“I can’t help but wonder that if I hadn’t pushed like that, it could have been
me,” she said.
Boston hospitals struggled to keep up with the flow of patients. Massachusetts
General Hospital admitted 29 patients, 8 of them in critical condition; several
of them needed amputations, a spokesman said.
Late Monday night, Brigham and Women’s Hospital said it had seen 31 patients who
were wounded in the explosions, ranging from a 3-year-old to patients in their
60s. As many as 10 were listed in serious condition, and 2 were in critical
condition.
The Rev. Brian Jordan, a Franciscan priest based in Brooklyn, said he was in
Boston to say a pre-race Mass near the starting line for a group of about 100
friends who were running. The group included Boston firefighters, Massachusetts
State Police officers and several Army soldiers recently returned from Iraq.
Father Jordan, a veteran runner of 21 Boston Marathons himself, was about a
block away from the blasts when they occurred, heading toward the course to
watch his friends finish the race.
“I never heard that type of sound before,” he said by telephone. “It was like
cannons.”
He said he made his way through the fleeing crowd toward the explosions. “I saw
some blood,” he said.
He realized he could be more effective wearing his Franciscan habit, so he
returned to the firehouse and donned the brown robe of his order, and then
headed back out into the streets.
“All I could do was try to calm people down,” Father Jordan said. “Marathons are
supposed to bring people together.”
Jeff Constantine, 46, ended his first marathon a mile from the finish. It took
10 minutes to find out why. He was planning to finish the race at almost exactly
the time that the bomb went off.
“If I didn’t freeze up, if I hadn’t been slow, I would have been right there,”
he said.
His family had traffic to thank. They were running late after watching Mr.
Constantine run up Heartbreak Hill, the race’s most challenging stretch, and
never made it to the finish line.
Reporting was
contributed by John Eligon and Mary Pilon in Boston,
and Steve
Eder, Kirk Semple and Andrew W. Lehren in New York.
April 15,
2013
The New York Times
By JOHN ELIGON and MICHAEL COOPER
BOSTON —
Two powerful bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on
Monday afternoon, killing three people, including an 8-year-old child, and
injuring more than 100, as one of this city’s most cherished rites of spring was
transformed from a scene of cheers and sweaty triumph to one of screams and
carnage.
Almost three-quarters of the 23,000 runners who participated in the race had
already crossed the finish line when a bomb that had apparently been placed in a
garbage can exploded around 2:50 p.m. in a haze of smoke amid a crowd of
spectators on Boylston Street, just off Copley Square in the heart of the city.
Thirteen seconds later, another bomb exploded several hundred feet away.
Pandemonium erupted as panicked runners and spectators scattered, and rescue
workers rushed in to care for the dozens of maimed and injured, some of whom
lost legs in the blast, witnesses said. The F.B.I. took the lead role in the
investigation on Monday night, and Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in
charge of the bureau’s Boston office, described the inquiry at a news conference
as “a criminal investigation that is a potential terrorist investigation.”
The reverberations were felt far outside the city, with officials in New York
and Washington stepping up security at important locations. Near the White
House, the Secret Service cordoned off Pennsylvania Avenue out of what one
official described as “an abundance of caution.”
President Obama, speaking at the White House, vowed to bring those responsible
for the blasts to justice. “We will get to the bottom of this,” the president
said. “We will find who did this, and we will find out why they did this. Any
responsible individuals, any responsible groups will feel the full weight of
justice.”
Mr. Obama did not refer to the attacks as an act of terrorism, and he cautioned
people from “jumping to conclusions” based on incomplete information. But a
White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity afterward, said,
“Any event with multiple explosive devices — as this appears to be — is clearly
an act of terror, and will be approached as an act of terror.”
“However,” the official added, “we don’t yet know who carried out this attack,
and a thorough investigation will have to determine whether it was planned and
carried out by a terrorist group, foreign or domestic.”
Some runners were approaching the end of the 26.2-mile race when the two blasts,
in rapid succession, sent them running away from the finish line.
“The first one went off, I thought it was a big celebratory thing, and I just
kept going,” recalled Jarrett Sylvester, 26, a runner from East Boston, who said
it had sounded like a cannon blast. “And then the second one went off, and I saw
debris fly in the air. And I realized it was a bomb at that point. And I just
took off and ran in the complete opposite direction.”
There were conflicting reports about how many devices there were. One law
enforcement official said there had been four: the two that exploded at the
marathon and two others that were disabled by the police. The official said that
the devices appeared to have been made with black powder and ball bearings, but
that investigators were unsure how the two that exploded had been set off.
It was unclear Monday evening who might be responsible for the blast. Although
investigators said that they were speaking to a Saudi citizen who was injured in
the blast, several law enforcement officials took pains to note that no one was
in custody.
Some law enforcement officials noted that the blasts came at the start of a week
that has sometimes been seen as significant for radical American antigovernment
groups: it was the April 15 deadline for filing taxes, and Patriots’ Day in
Massachusetts, the start of a week that has seen violence in the past. April 19
is the anniversary of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building
in Oklahoma City.
The explosive devices used in the attacks on Monday were similar in size to the
device used in the 1996 attack at the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta
but were not nearly as large as the one used in Oklahoma City. In the Atlanta
attack, a pipe bomb was detonated near pedestrians, killing 2 and injuring more
than 100 — similar numbers to Monday’s attack.
The attack in Oklahoma City was far larger because the perpetrator used a truck
packed with thousands of pounds of explosives. The device killed more than 150
people.
The attack on Monday occurred in areas that had been largely cleared of vehicles
for the marathon. Without vehicles to pack explosives into, the perpetrators
would have been forced to rely on much smaller devices.
Officials stressed that they had no suspects in the attack. The Saudi man, who
was interviewed at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, had been seen running from the
scene of the first explosion, a person briefed on preliminary developments in
the investigation said on Monday afternoon. A law enforcement official said
later Monday that the man, was in the United States on a student visa and came
under scrutiny because of his injuries, his proximity to the blasts and his
nationality — but added that he was not known to federal authorities and that
his role in the attack, if any, was unclear.
The explosions brought life in Boston to a halt. Police officials effectively
closed a large part of the Back Bay neighborhood, which surrounds the blast
site; some transit stops were closed; planes were briefly grounded at Boston
Logan International Airport and the Boston Symphony Orchestra canceled its
Monday night concert. A Boston Celtics game scheduled for Tuesday was also
canceled.
Boston was bracing for a heightened law enforcement presence on Tuesday, with
its transit riders subject to random checks of their backpacks and bags, and
many streets in the center of the city likely to be closed to traffic as the
investigation continues. Gov. Deval Patrick said Monday night that “the city of
Boston is open and will be open tomorrow, but it will not be business as usual.”
Boston’s police commissioner, Ed Davis, urged people to stay off the streets.
“We’re recommending to people that they stay home, that if they’re in hotels in
the area that they return to their rooms, and that they don’t go any place and
congregate in large crowds,” he said at an afternoon news conference.
It had begun as a perfect day for the Boston Marathon, one of running’s most
storied events, with blue skies and temperatures just shy of 50 degrees. The
race typically draws half a million spectators. And long after the world-class
runners had finished — the men’s race was won by Lelisa Desisa Benti of
Ethiopia, who finished it in 2 hours, 10 minutes and 22 seconds — the sidewalks
of Back Bay were still thick with spectators cheering on friends and relatives
as they loped, exhausted, toward the finish line.
Dr. Natalie Stavas, a pediatric resident at Boston Children’s Hospital, was
running in the marathon with her father and was nearing the finish line when the
explosions shook the street.
“The police were trying to keep us back, but I told them that I was a physician
and they let me through,” she recalled in an interview.
First she performed CPR on one woman. “She was on the ground, she wasn’t
breathing, her legs were pretty much gone,” she said, adding that she feared
that the woman had not survived.
Then she tried to help a woman with an injury in her groin area, and a man who
had lost his foot. Dr. Stavas said t she had applied a tourniquet to the man’s
leg with someone’s belt. “He was likely in shock,” she said. “He was saying,
‘I’m O.K., doctor, I’m O.K.’ “
“Then ambulances started coming in by the dozen,” she said.
The blast was so powerful that it blew out shop windows and damaged a window on
the third floor of the Central Library in Copley Square, which was closed to the
public for Patriots’ Day.
A number of people were taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, said Dr.
Alasdair Conn, the hospital’s chief of emergency services — and several had lost
their legs.
“This is like a bomb explosion we hear about in Baghdad or Israel or other
tragic points in the world,” Dr. Conn said.
Several children were among the 10 patients who were brought to Boston
Children’s Hospital, including a 2-year-old boy with a head injury who was
admitted to the medical/surgical intensive care unit.
The police faced another problem as they tried to secure the blast scene: many
spectators dropped their backpacks and bags as they scattered to safety, and
investigators had to treat each abandoned bag as a potential bomb. There were
bomb scares at area hotels. At one point in the afternoon, Boston police
officials said that they feared that a fire at the John F. Kennedy Presidential
Library and Museum could have been related to the marathon bombs, but they later
said it seemed to be unrelated.
The Boston police said that they were getting numerous reports of suspicious
packages. Asked if they had found all the explosive devices, Mr. Davis, the
police commissioner, urged citizens to remain alert and said he was “not
prepared to say we’re at ease at this time.”
John Eligon
reported from Boston, and Michael Cooper from New York. Reporting was
contributed by Steve Eder, Ashley Parker, William K. Rashbaum, Katharine Q.
Seelye and Mary Pilon from New York, Mark Landler, Michael S. Schmidt, Eric
Schmitt and Abby Goodnough from Washington, and Joel Elliott, Dina Kraft, Tim
Rohan and Brent McDonald from Boston.
April 14,
2013
The New York Times
By SAMIR NAJI al HASAN MOQBEL
GUANTÁNAMO
BAY, Cuba
ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed
132, but that was a month ago.
I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I
will not eat until they restore my dignity.
I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never
been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.
I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but
still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin
Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used
to watch. They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to
care how long I sit here, either.
When I was at home in Yemen, in 2000, a childhood friend told me that in
Afghanistan I could do better than the $50 a month I earned in a factory, and
support my family. I’d never really traveled, and knew nothing about
Afghanistan, but I gave it a try.
I was wrong to trust him. There was no work. I wanted to leave, but had no money
to fly home. After the American invasion in 2001, I fled to Pakistan like
everyone else. The Pakistanis arrested me when I asked to see someone from the
Yemeni Embassy. I was then sent to Kandahar, and put on the first plane to
Gitmo.
Last month, on March 15, I was sick in the prison hospital and refused to be
fed. A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight military
police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed.
They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied
to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They
inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not
even permitted to pray.
I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I
can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in,
it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was
agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before.
I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.
I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell.
My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come.
Sometimes they come during the night, as late as 11 p.m., when I’m sleeping.
There are so many of us on hunger strike now that there aren’t enough qualified
medical staff members to carry out the force-feedings; nothing is happening at
regular intervals. They are feeding people around the clock just to keep up.
During one force-feeding the nurse pushed the tube about 18 inches into my
stomach, hurting me more than usual, because she was doing things so hastily. I
called the interpreter to ask the doctor if the procedure was being done
correctly or not.
It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused to
stop feeding me. As they were finishing, some of the “food” spilled on my
clothes. I asked them to change my clothes, but the guard refused to allow me to
hold on to this last shred of my dignity.
When they come to force me into the chair, if I refuse to be tied up, they call
the E.R.F. team. So I have a choice. Either I can exercise my right to protest
my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to painful force-feeding.
The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any
detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a
passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.
I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen’s president do
something, that is what I risk every day.
Where is my government? I will submit to any “security measures” they want in
order to go home, even though they are totally unnecessary.
I will agree to whatever it takes in order to be free. I am now 35. All I want
is to see my family again and to start a family of my own.
The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply.
At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with
exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.
And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and
risking death every day is the choice we have made.
I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world
will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.
Samir Naji al
Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002,
told this
story, through an Arabic interpreter, to his lawyers
at the legal
charity Reprieve in an unclassified telephone call.
April 5,
2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The hunger
strike that has spread since early February among the 166 detainees still at
Guantánamo Bay is again exposing the lawlessness of the system that marooned
them there. The government claims that around 40 detainees are taking part.
Lawyers for detainees report that their clients say around 130 detainees in one
part of the prison have taken part.
The number matters less than the nature of the protest, however: this is a
collective act of despair. Prisoners on the hunger strike say that they would
rather die than remain in the purgatory of indefinite detention. Only three
prisoners now at Guantánamo have been found guilty of any crime, yet the others
also are locked away, with dwindling hope of ever being released.
Detainees there have gone on hunger strikes many times since the facility opened
in 2002. A major strike in 2005 involved more than 200 detainees. But those
earlier actions were largely about the brutality of treatment the detainees
received. The protest this time seems more fundamental. Gen. John Kelly of the
Marines, whose Southern Command oversees Guantánamo Bay, explained the
motivation of the detainees at a Congressional hearing last month by saying,
“They had great optimism that Guantánamo would be closed” based on President
Obama’s pledge in his first campaign, but they are now “devastated” that nothing
has changed.
For 86 detainees, this is a particular outrage. They were approved for release
three years ago by a government task force, which included civilian and military
agencies responsible for national security.
But Congress outrageously has limited the president’s options in releasing them,
through a statute that makes it very difficult to use federal money to transfer
Guantánamo prisoners anywhere. Fifty-six of those approved for release are
Yemenis. The government, however, has said it will not release them to Yemen for
the “foreseeable future,” apparently because they might fall under the influence
of people antagonistic to the United States. That false logic would mean that no
Yemenis could ever travel to this country, but that is not the case.
The other 30 detainees approved for release are from different countries, though
the government will not say where they are from. Over the past decade, the
government has sent detainees to at least 52 countries, The Times and NPR have
determined, so it surely can find countries to take detainees who cannot be
returned home.
As for the remaining 80 prisoners, the three who have been convicted and the 30
or so who are subjects of active cases or investigations can be transferred to a
military or civilian prison. The rest are in indefinite detention — a legal
limbo in which they are considered by the government to be too dangerous to
release and too difficult to prosecute. Such detention is the essence of what
has been wrong with Guantánamo from the start. The cases of these detainees must
be reviewed and resolved according to the rule of law.
The government is force-feeding at least 10 of the hunger strikers.
International agreements among doctors say doctors must respect a striker’s
decision if he makes “an informed and voluntary refusal” to eat. But under
American policy, Guantánamo doctors cannot adhere to those principles. The Obama
administration justifies the force-feeding of detainees as protecting their
safety and welfare. But the truly humane response to this crisis is to free
prisoners who have been approved for release, end indefinite detention and close
the prison at Guantánamo.
