Boston Marathon Terrorist Bombing
Only hours after reports that a terrorist bomb had exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in April 2013, Mike Kelly was dispatched to Boston. The timing of the bombing was especially significant. The marathon takes place on “Patriot’s Day,” which commemorates the opening battles of the American Revolution in 1975 at Lexington and Concord. For the next week after the bombing, Kelly filed daily columns. And then, for the next five years, he tracked the recovery journey of one man – a street musician – who happened to be standing across the street from the exploding bomb. Here are his columns:
Heartbreak That Changes a City Forever
April 17, 2013
BOSTON -- The bells on the old Arlington Street Church chimed a slow and somber rendition of "America the Beautiful" as Mallory Mathias gazed in silence at the spot where the bombs tore into her city's heart.
"It's been very quiet today," said Mathias, 27, a behavioral therapist. "But you can't live in fear."
There are many ways to measure a city. Here in Boston on Tuesday, the heart of this proud and parochial city grappled with the hard truth that it was now part of America's litany of terror targets.
But as New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pa., discovered after the 9/11 attacks and Oklahoma City learned in 1995, there is no easy set of rules for Boston to follow as it ponders the mystery of why someone would kill innocent people so brutally and without warning.
Even as almost 400 Bostonians gathered on Tuesday evening for a candlelight vigil at the Arlington Street Church, where the Massachusetts Convention ratified the U.S. Constitution in 1788, there were no easy answers.
"Yesterday our city was terrorized," said Arlington's senior minister, the Rev. Kim Crawford Harvie as she began the vigil. "Today, we gather heartbroken, angry and afraid. But let us not give in to the emotions at the root of terrorism."
"Everyone wants to help each other," said Mathias, as she walked down Boylston Street a few hours before the vigil toward a marathon finish line that was now a crime scene. "Everyone is going out of their way to be nice, and that's nice to see here. But this will take some time."
Her voice trailed off. She tugged on her blue hooded sweat shirt with "Boston" inscribed across the chest. Across Boylston Street, a discarded silver foil runner's blanket -- a remnant of a city's joy at staging a marathon marking the day its residents rose up against the British army at the battles of Lexington and Concord. Down the block sat a discarded latex glove from a medical team -- a remnant of the city's new pain.
Throughout the day, mourners stacked flowers along a metal fence that blocked off the crime scene on Boylston Street. A few feet away, National Guard troops shuffled and jammed their hands in their pockets to keep warm in the suddenly-cold evening wind.
"It's still a process of coming to grips that we are a part of the post-9/11 world," said John Bonacci, 50, a public safety officer at Endicott College.
Like many others, Bonacci came to the finish line neighborhood on Tuesday to pay his respects, but also to measure the kinds of scars his city would have to live with.
"Boston feels like a safe city," he said. "We're open and free. But I guess this is the price of a free society."
Dale and Beverly Bearden, who both work in local financial services firms and live nearby, walked up with their Italian water dogs, Dolce and Rocco. On Patriots' Day, they habitually went to nearby Fenway Park to watch a Red Sox baseball game, then strolled to the finish of the marathon to watch the stream of runners.
"It's Boston's day to celebrate," Beverly said.
"But what's despicable is the timing of the bombs," Dale said. "They went off when there would be the most number of runners passing through the finish."
"It's a sea of happiness," said Beverly, describing how she often watched finishers from previous marathons file down Boylston Street, wrapped in the silver-foil blankets. "Now look."
She turned and shot a glance down Boylston, mostly empty except for the curious and the police and National Guard.
After sundown, the mourners filed into the Arlington Street Church. Some hugged friends they recognized. Others just sat in silence in the wooden pews or in the balcony. From the tower, which overlooks Boston's Public Gardens and the Boston Common, the bells now played "Abide With Me."
Inside, a pianist played Claude Debussy's "Claire de Lune," then sang a slow, mournful rendition of John Lennon's "Imagine."
But, as befitting the outside mood of the day, another young man got up from his pew and walked to the back of the church to find an usher. The young man handed the usher a large green book bag.
"Excuse me, this was left in a pew, and there is no one there," the young man said.
As the usher reached for the bag, a woman appeared.
"It's mine," she said, quickly turning away and returning to her pew.
"Keep it with you," the usher said.
It was only a brief moment in a city's montage of pain and confusion. But it underscored a new reality: What was once as normal as someone misplacing a book bag now takes on an air of suspicion.
"As big as Boston is, we're tight-knit. We're technically a city, but we're really a village," said Michael McMahon, 20, a student at Suffolk University.
Each year, the village that is Boston came together for Patriots' Day.
"It's such a joyous event," said Jessie Davis, 25, a catering accounts manager. "Today is heartbreaking."
Davis did not run the marathon, but on this day she jogged through the city's streets as what she described as a personal statement of strength.
"The people who live in this city and love this city need to join together," Davis said. "Boston will never be exactly the same. But we need to pull together."
At the Arlington Street Church, one of Boston's newer residents, Azad Sadri, took a seat in a rear pew and cradled a still-unlit candle the ushers had just given to those who had come to the vigil. Sadri, 34, who grew up in San Francisco, arrived in Boston only a year ago to take a job with a biotech firm, but quickly felt comfortable and welcomed.
"There is a spirit here that is very accepting," he said. "I feel like everybody's in shock today. But this is a strong city. I just hope it never loses its innocence."
As the vigil ended, Pastor Harvie asked congregants to "pass the light" from person to person, with each one lighting their 4-inch white candle. Then, everyone rose and walked across Arlington Street to the public gardens and lined the edge of a lagoon.
Harvie asked for a moment of silence, then for each person to pray for "peace in our city and peace in our hearts."
Afterwards, the group held its candles aloft.
This is the new normal for this city that played such a key role in giving America its revolutionary spirit: On one end of Boylston Street, a candlelight vigil and a plea for hope. On the other, a crime scene.
Moment of Horror Frozen in Time
April 18, 2013
BOSTON -- They piled flowers and teddy bears all day Wednesday by the clock in the square where time has been stopped in memory of this city's littlest victim.
His name is Martin Richard. He was 8 years old when he died earlier this week in a terrorist bomb blast near the finish line of the Boston Marathon with two other young people, 23-year-old Lu Lingzi and 29-year-old Krystle Campbell.
In any terrorist attack, every casualty is a tragedy, every scar a reminder of a horrific moment.
But the death of Martin Richard has become especially emblematic in this wounded city. His mother, Denise, was struck in the head by bomb shrapnel and remained hospitalized with Martin's 7-year-old sister, Jane, who lost a leg.
At Peabody Square in the Dorchester neighborhood that Martin called home with his family, the clock has been frozen at 2:50 -- the moment when the first of two bombs exploded at the marathon finish line on Boylston Street.
"The clock is in the center of the neighborhood and is a symbol for the community," said clock keeper Jeffery Gonyeau, who flipped the off switch, reset the hands on the clock to the moment of the attack. He doesn't know when he plans to turn it back on. "It seemed appropriate."
"You do your best to protect your children," said Patti Walsh, who drove from Franklin with her husband, daughter and son to leave a bouquet of red, white and yellow carnations at the frozen-in-time Peabody clock. "When something like this happens, you can't believe it."
One of the last acts by Martin Richard's family was to eat ice cream near the marathon finish line. One of Martin's last acts was to see his father complete the marathon.
He was the youngest victim, to be sure. But the two women who died with him also have come to symbolize the pain of this city in different ways during this tragic week because their lives symbolize so much about Boston.
Lu Lingzi came to America from China with a modest dream. She wanted to take top-flight graduate courses in math and statistics at Boston University.
But in her short time in Boston, she also managed to embrace the city's iconic habit of sarcasm that is the source of so much of its humor -- and delight to outsiders. One of her last acts was to post a photo on a Chinese social media website of her morning breakfast -- of bread and fruit.
"My wonderful breakfast," she wrote in English.
Krystle Campbell was a daughter of working-class Boston -- that hardscrabble culture depicted in such movies as "Good Will Hunting." Her father labored as a plumber, her mother in the cafeteria at the Harvard Business School. One of her first jobs was serving food at her mother's side in the Harvard cafeteria.
In recent years, Campbell was renowned in her family for putting in 80-hour workweeks as a catering manager at the Jasper White Summer Shack restaurant.
But one of her last acts had nothing to do with her job. When her grandmother Lillian became sick, Campbell moved in to help with extra care.
"She was always right there if you needed her," Lillian told a press conference.
On Wednesday, as Boston roiled with reports that authorities had images of a man who may have left the bombs and as the federal courthouse had to be evacuated after what turned out to be a phony bomb threat, mourners converged on Peabody Square with its frozen-in-place clock and its memorial to little Martin Richard.
Many left flowers and talked of Martin's gap-toothed smile or the fact that he loved to play soccer, baseball and hockey. A few left American flags. One person left a poster with two praying hands. A few spoke of the photograph of Martin with a hand-scrawled poster with a prescient message for a peace march by his school: "No more hurting people. Peace."
"It's so sad," said 9-year-old Tu Nguyen as he paused with his mother at the Peabody clock. "Martin was just a year younger than me."
"A lot of people are staying inside," said Brandi Brooks, 17, as she took her 2-year-old daughter, Shaianne, for a walk by Peabody Square.
"I thought about going to the marathon, but I'm glad I didn't," Brooks said, glancing at her daughter.
"She would have been with me."
Such was the day and the tone of mourners. As they learned more about the victims -- especially the multilevel tragedy of the Richard family -- their comments became more personal.
Some mourners paused at Peabody Square, then walked several blocks to the gray, three-story wood frame house where the Richards lived and where children drew chalk pictures of a dove and a butterfly on the sidewalk.
But after arriving at the home, many did not seem to know what to do, except to stand in silence and then walk away.
"You've got to move, but there is that nagging feeling that there is something that's not complete," said Vann Snyder, 56, a political consultant who knows the family and who drove through the Dorchester neighborhood on Wednesday. "You just don't think this kind of thing would happen. This stuff happens in New York or L.A."
Around the corner from the Richard home, a woman who gave her name only as Carolyn knelt by a chain link fence to plant morning glories.
"It's very sad what happened," Carolyn said, adding that she is trying hard to find a small measure of hope each day.
She shook her head at the thought, then pushed another morning glory seed into the soil.
"We pick up," Carolyn said, seeming to speak to herself as much as everyone else. "That's what we do because love conquers all. Bad people will lose."
Back at Boylston Street, the story of how little Martin died even resonated with a group of officers from the Port Authority police who brought a van filled with food and soft drinks for Boston police officers guarding the marathon bomb site or helping with the investigation.
"When I heard about the bombing, I got this twinge. I know what this is like," said Port Authority Officer Vincent Zappulla of River Vale, who ran a communications center at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.
Zappulla carries his own set of painful memories from the 9/11 attacks, the Ground Zero cleanup and the funerals of so many fellow officers who perished. But hearing of the death of Martin Richard brought a renewed pain, he said.
"How much can his family endure?" Zappulla asked.
Peter Killeen, a Little Falls psychotherapist who counseled Port Authority police after the 9/11 attacks and came to Boston with them this week, found himself on Wednesday trying to find meaningful answers to the death of Martin Richard -- and its meaning for all Bostonians.
"The freedom and carefree attitude of Boston will no longer exist as we once knew it," Killeen said. "This changes the world as we know it. The bastion of innocence is gone."
Back at Peabody Square, Bud Smedley stopped and wondered how the Richard family would heal -- indeed, how his city would heal, too.
"Can we come back?" he said. "Oh, yes. This is Boston."
Smedley's voice trailed off. Healing, he said, will take time.
How long? He did not know.
For now, time in Boston is frozen.
Obama Tells Wounded City: 'We'll Finish the Race'
April 19, 2013
BOSTON -- Wes Meserve, a finish-line volunteer at his city's unfinished marathon, is not afraid to admit that he needed an emotional jump-start, a reminder that the community he calls home was still vibrant and full of life.
On Thursday, he got that message from a president who has learned the hard way in recent months to be a consoler-in-chief.
Presidents are expected to show up after tragedies and disasters, whether it's the brutal mass murder in December of children and educators at a Connecticut elementary school or last fall's merciless wreckage of the Jersey Shore by an unprecedented storm.
But Thursday's visit to Boston by President Obama seemed to carry an even more profound meaning and comfort for this wounded city.
It was as if Boston needed to be reassured that the bombs that cut short its renowned marathon had not set off a marathon of civic disillusion -- that its personality and strength had not been snuffed out. As Meserve noted as he waited outside Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross for the interfaith service where Obama spoke: "Just tell us that we are a strong city."
Meserve is 24, and on Monday he signed up to hand out food and blankets to marathon finishers on Boylston Street.
When the first of two terrorist bombs exploded, Meserve was only 20 feet away, fetching silver foil blankets for exhausted runners.
"I don't know how I escaped," he said. "I just did."
Inside the 138-year-old cathedral, which is the home church of Boston's Roman Catholic community, Obama praised race volunteers like Meserve, as well as Boston's police, firefighters and other emergency responders who offered some form of help after the two blasts killed three people and injured almost 180 others. To many of the 1,700 onlookers in the church, Obama's words seemed like a welcome balm -- emotional medicine for a city's shattered emotional state.
"We come together to pray, and mourn, and measure our loss," Obama said. "But we also come together today to reclaim that state of grace -- to reaffirm that the spirit of this city is undaunted, and the spirit of this country shall remain undimmed."
In some ways, it was a speech that touched all the obvious rhetorical and political bases. Obama's words were personal and moderately humorous at times. He referenced Biblical scripture. He mentioned Boston's history. He read the names of the dead: 8-year-old Martin Richard, 23-year-old Lu Lingzi and 29-year-old Krystle Campbell.
But just as President Ronald Reagan did with his remarks after the Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986 and President Bill Clinton conveyed after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building 18 years ago today, Obama managed to strike a deep emotional chord with those who heard it.
To the onlookers at the cathedral and the rest of Boston, Obama offered a simple message. "Your resolve is the greatest rebuke to whoever committed this heinous act" and that the bombers "picked the wrong city."
"We carry on. We race. We strive," Obama added.
The crowd applauded. But even applause could not erase the nagging feeling among many that the bombers had not been apprehended yet. And while the FBI later released photos and video of two possible suspects in the bombing, investigators also said they still had no conclusive ideas about why the bombing even took place.
"People just want to feel safe again," said Carol Morrissey, who ran the X-ray operation at the Boston Medical Center where many bomb victims were brought by ambulances.
"I wish this would all end," added Scott Cicero, a Boston Medical Center surgical scrub nurse and former Army medic, who assisted doctors in performing several amputations on victims. "This was exactly like a battlefield."
Such emotions have been common all week among nurses, doctors and other health care workers. Even those who did not help to treat the victims felt as if they had been traumatized.
"It's very intense here right now because the perpetrator is at-large," said Derrick Clarke, 49, who took a day off from his job as a house painter to see Obama. "Nobody will rest until the police catch him. Nobody's sleeping right now."
Clarke said he went to downtown Boston on Monday afternoon to watch the marathon's winner -- roughly two hours before two blasts tore through the crowd, which had come to cheer on slower runners. After seeing Ethiopian marathoner Lelisa Desisa cross the finish line first with a time of 2 hours 10 minutes 22 seconds, Clarke went back to work.
The next day, he looked at photos of the bomb blast and realized how close he had come to danger.
"I looked at the pictures and I was right there where the bomb exploded," Clarke said. "I could be a dead man."
The sense of vulnerability that Clarke felt has become a common topic among many here this week -- and not just among those like him who were near the finish line at some point. Because of the public nature of the marathon on Boston's streets, many felt as if the bombs struck the entire city, not just the finish line.
"The marathon is not political. It's not religious. It's just people celebrating life," said Brian Eggar, 58, who grew up in Brielle. "It speaks to all the good things of mankind."
Until moving to Maine several years ago, Eggar rented office space for his executive search firm in a building near the finish line and lived in an apartment a block away.
"I know that area very well," he said. "To me, it's just as devastating as 9/11."
But while the psychic wounds from the blasts still need healing, Thursday's appearance by Obama seemed to signal a turning point of sorts.
"We may be momentarily knocked off our feet, but we'll pick ourselves up," Obama said to more applause. "We'll keep going. We will finish the race."
For Wes Meserve, such words -- indeed, Obama's mere appearance in his city -- has already prompted him to look to the finish line with a new sense of mission. Next year, Meserve says he does not plan to volunteer at that finish line. He plans to cross it -- as a runner.
"I just want closure," he said. "You can't live your life being worried about everything."
The Day That a City Stood Still
April 20, 2013
WATERTOWN, Mass. -- A day that began with the tense lockdown of one of America's largest cities ended Friday night with cheers along the streets of this tree-lined community as police caught the last of two suspected Boston Marathon bombers.
The whistles, whoops and applause of Watertown were a stark counterpoint to a day in which almost all of Boston took cover from even the most ordinary parts of life.
In Watertown, Hassan Shah merely wanted to take an afternoon walk through his hometown with his buddies, past the tile warehouse and the mattress factory. Maybe he figured he could make it to the Target store, the Best Buy or the Armenian pizza shop.
But the town was eerily silent. The stores were dark and almost every resident was obeying an order to "shelter in place," as authorities mounted a meticulous search for what they believed to be the last surviving member of the two-brother terror team that set off two bombs at the marathon.
"Nothing like this happens here," Shah said. "Nothing."
If America needed a reminder of how this new era of terrorism can quickly transform ordinary life, they found it Friday in this suburb of Boston -- indeed, across most of this bustling metropolitan landscape of more than 4 million people.
The lockdown rippled into nearby Cambridge, Newton, Somerville, even to the normally crowded boulevards of downtown Boston. Most people simply disappeared, along with most cars. Even the Red Sox and the Bruins canceled games.
What was left was a city that seemed straight out of an apocalyptic science-fiction movie.
Schools and universities canceled classes. Businesses told workers to stay home. The subways were shut down along with bus service. Taxis were curbed for most of the day.
Caravans of police cruisers with pulsating lights sped up and down empty streets and highways. Black-uniformed SWAT teams, their assault rifles at the ready and their bulletproof vests strapped tight, guarded intersections and checked every driver's ID. Armored military-style trucks from police departments across New England sat in parking lots, ready to converge on a gunbattle. Black Hawk helicopters from the state National Guard circled overhead.
"It's been crazy," said Shah, who is 19 and lives in Watertown.
Crazy, indeed. Watertown had been the spot where police killed one of the suspected marathon bombers, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, after a frantic chase during which he and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, reportedly threw bombs from the car they had hijacked. By Friday night -- again, in Watertown -- authorities reported that Dzhokhar had been captured.
But the apparent ending to such an emotion-packed week was a striking counterpoint to a somber day in which very few people emerged from their homes.
"I've never seen the town look like this," said Kevin Mahoney, an attorney who went to his Cambridge office to catch up on paperwork. "It's surreal. If you dreamed this and woke up in the morning, you'd think it was a bizarre dream."
Was Mahoney worried that he might be caught in the middle of a gunbattle? "I like my odds," he said.
In downtown Boston, Michael Millette, a film production student at Emerson College, took a walk with fellow film student Jordan Hall. As the two passed a makeshift memorial to the marathon's dead and injured at the corner of Berkeley and Boylston streets, they stopped.
All week, the memorial had been clogged with mourners. Not today, though. Only a handful of people had come to leave flowers and notes.
"It's definitely pretty strange," Millette said, looking up and down the normally crowded streets, deserted now except for a car or two.
Millette said he was not worried about venturing out on Friday. His chief worry was about the future -- and whether another terrorist might try to copy the mayhem that the marathon bombers had created.
"Hopefully this is not an invitation for anyone else," he said.
"After this happens," added Hall, "it makes me wonder what life is going to be like after this."
At a nearby hotel, two Sacramento, Calif., firefighters who had flown to Boston to attend Friday's Red Sox baseball game against the Kansas City Royals found themselves with nothing to do except head to the bar.
"We're part of the Red Sox Nation," said Michael Haines, who sported a Red Sox hat and had come to Boston to celebrate his 40th birthday. "This is spooky."
Fellow Firefighter David Lara smiled and said he was hoping the weekend's games would not be canceled.
"We're praying for a double-header on Sunday," Lara said.
Back in Watertown, authorities left up a sign on Arsenal Street to remind residents of the townwide schedule for "curbside waste pickup." Another sign by the Target store announced a "public school art exhibit." On a utility pole, someone posted a sign for a "missing dog."
Such were the small reminders that ordinary life was still possible. A mile away, at a Sunoco gas station and convenience store, you could find another reminder.
Kyja Robinson pulled up to buy a lottery ticket.
"I might as well play the lottery," said Robinson, an MIT lab assistant. "It's tense. You go from one emotion to another. But you have to live your life."
With her lottery tickets in hand, Robinson got back into her car.
"I'm living," she said.
Symbol of Freedom and Instrument of Death
April 28, 2013
Op-Ed column
WILLIAM WEIMER had an odd hunch when he heard that the FBI had released the names of two brothers suspected in the Boston marathon bombings.
Weimer is a vice president at Phantom Fireworks Co. in Youngstown, Ohio. When he walked into his office the following morning, he asked his customer service department to check a name in the company's computerized sales records: Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Weimer's instincts were correct. Sure enough, Tsarnaev, the oldest of the brothers alleged to have carried out the Boston bombings, had been a Phantom customer. Law enforcement authorities now believe Tsarnaev was able to obtain at least some of the black powder used in the Boston bombs from an entirely legal purchase of fireworks designed to celebrate the Fourth of July.
That ironic revelation may turn out to be a mere footnote in a much larger investigation. But once again in Boston, we are reminded that suspected terrorists have used a common piece of American life to take American lives.
"It's frustrating," Weimer said when I phoned him. "We sold a legal product in a legal way to a customer who was not known to us as dangerous."
In his frustration, Weimer raises a provocative point: A legal product. A legal sale. A customer not known to be dangerous. How do you stop that?
“If I could answer that question, I'd run for president," he said. "I don't know. It's frightening."
In Boston, the terror weapons were fireworks, nails, pressure cookers and batteries used to pilot remote-control hobby airplanes -- all ordinary items. On 9/11, investigators believe that several hijackers subdued the pilots and crews of commercial jetliners by wielding Leatherman utility knives that are as common in carpenters' toolboxes as hammers and screwdrivers. Other hijackers are believed to have used ordinary box cutters that are found in most warehouses, not to mention many household garages.
As with the 9/11 attacks, the discovery that seemingly ordinary small-scale fireworks and other household items became integral pieces of a terrorist plot has prompted a question: If America really wants to stop terrorists, should it ban fireworks? How about pressure cookers and nails? How about box cutters and utility knives?
Merely raising such questions reveals a fundamental problem at the heart of this debate and a poignant question for the nation's battle against terrorism. If America bans fireworks and pressure cookers, where does it stop?
In 1995, after a bomb made from farm fertilizer destroyed a federal office building in Oklahoma City, some critics raised the question of whether to ban fertilizer. The concern was entirely understandable. Not only was fertilizer used in the Oklahoma City attack, but it was also the basic explosive fuel in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. If the stuff was so lethal, why not ban it?
Almost as soon as the question was raised, however, the implications became apparent. How could America ban -- or even severely limit -- something that was as essential to farming as plows and tractors? America's food supply depends on fertilizer. Do we starve ourselves to beat back terrorism?
And if America banned fertilizer, why not gasoline too? After all, gasoline was also used to ignite the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombs. And if we ban gasoline, what's next? Matches?
For Weimer, the use of the fireworks by terrorist bombers was especially galling. Phantom's prime sales period is the month or two leading up to the Fourth of July. Most of Phantom's fireworks are designed to celebrate the nation's birth -- not to contribute to the deaths of innocent people. The exploding colors are generally red, white and blue.
"We're in the patriotic business," he said. "The basic premise in America for using fireworks is to celebrate freedom, to celebrate democracy. To think that these low-life characters would use this product against Americans is depressing. It's distressing. It gets us angry."
In part, I phoned William Weimer for his perspective on whether to limit fireworks and other pieces of American life to stop terror. But another reason had to do with his experience. The Boston attack was not his first experience with terrorism. The so-called Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, also purchased fireworks at a Phantom store in his unsuccessful attempt to set off a car bomb in the tourist epicenter of Manhattan in 2010.
After the attempted attack on Times Square, which ended when a bomb, loaded with fire crackers, failed to detonate, Phantom helped the FBI track down Shahzad in Connecticut. Not only did Phantom keep records of Shahzad's purchase, but it also had video of his store.
Such record keeping is a hallmark of Phantom's 68 stores in 15 states where fireworks can be legally sold. When a customer buys fireworks, the Phantom sales clerk asks to see a drivers' license. The license information is then entered into a computer along with the type of fireworks that are purchased. Even a cash purchase is recorded with a name and home address of the customer.
When Weimer found the connection to Tsarnaev, he quickly notified the FBI. Tsarnaev had driven Feb. 6 to the Phantom store in Seabrook, N.H. -- about one hour from Boston -- and paid $199 in cash for the "Lock and Load" mortar kit which features 24 shells that shoot into the sky and explode in a variety of colorful starbursts. As part of a two-for-one sales incentive, Tsarnaev was given an extra 24 shells for free.
Weimer said the 48 shells could produce about 1.5 pounds of black powder. But he added that he does not believe that amount of explosive powder was enough for the two pressure-cooker bombs that blew up at the Boston Marathon finish line and other bombs that authorities say Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, had when police caught up to them several days later.
Did the Tsarnaev brothers obtain other explosives for their bombs? That kind of analysis will take time and the work of FBI bomb technicians. After that, America will be left to wrestle with the deeper questions of how to prevent terrorism in a society with as much openness and freedom as America's.
For now, William Weimer wonders about the future. As with most of America, he has no easy solution.
"I have two grandsons who are going to be born in the next two weeks," he said. "I have to be honest with you. What will their lives be like? What rules will we have?"
America has been asking that question for a long time. We still don't know the answers.
Where Do We Bury the Reviled?
May 12, 2013
Op-Ed column
ON BOYLSTON Street in Boston, where the bombs exploded on that marathon Monday almost a month ago, the shattered windows have been replaced. There's even a new sapling to replace the one that was shredded in the blast.
But this is only the beginning of a much longer journey as Boston comes to grips with the fact that it has now joined the small list of American cities that call themselves terrorist targets. As New York and New Jersey already know more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, one of the difficult issues concerns the terrorists themselves - and where to bury them.
Last week Boston seemed to solve the dilemma that had gripped the city for days. It finally found a grave for one of the suspected marathon bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. It was no easy decision.
Tsarnaev, 26, died after a shootout with police four days after he and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, reportedly strolled down the Boylston Street sidewalk near the finish line of the Boston Marathon and detonated two homemade bombs. Three people died and more than 260 people were injured. More than a dozen of the wounded had amputations of their hands, feet or legs.
But as Boston tended to its own wounded and dead, it faced the question of what to do with Tamerlan's body. After being held for almost two weeks at a morgue, Tamerlan's remains were reportedly claimed by a relative and delivered to a funeral home in Worcester, some 40 miles from Boston.
Not surprisingly, that funeral home could not find a cemetery to take Tamerlan's body. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said - correctly - that finding graves for suspected terrorists was not part of his job description. Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino went one step further and issued a ban on all cemeteries within city limits from burying Tamerlan.
"It would be disrespectful to our residents," the mayor's spokeswoman said.
Safety concerns
Across the Charles River, in Cambridge, where Tamerlan lived with his American-born wife and 3-year-old daughter, and not far from the street in neighboring Watertown where he died and his brother was apprehended, the city manager cited potential public safety concerns in banning any burial.
On Thursday, authorities announced that Tamerlan's body had been laid to rest but would not say where. It turned out that the burial took place in a Muslim cemetery in Virginia. While somewhat morbid, this trip to the grave for Tamerlan's remains reflects a deeper uneasiness about what to do with the legacy of any terrorist.
In Boston, as the debate raged all week about whether a Boston cemetery or one somewhere in America should accept Tamerlan, city officials looked to history for a guide. But history did not offer a clear solution.
Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President John F. Kennedy, got his own grave in Fort Worth, Texas, though cemetery workers are reportedly banned from telling visitors where it is. The so-called "Boston Strangler," Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to 13 murders in the Boston area before he was stabbed to death in prison in 1973, was buried in Peabody, Mass. - his grave clearly marked. The same is true of former Catholic priest John Geoghan, who was beaten to death in prison in 2003 after he was accused of molesting 130 children. Geoghan was laid to rest in a Brookline, Mass., cemetery that includes the graves of several Boston mayors.
But terrorists are different. Murder by terrorism is not just the taking of an innocent life; it's an attack on the life and values of a country. In some ways, this explains why the burial of Tamerlan Tsarnaev became so controversial.
In those painful days after the Twin Towers collapsed and America's focus of mourning became a 16-acre patch of rubble known as Ground Zero, the remains of almost 2,800 victims were mixed with the remains of 10 hijackers - five on each of the two jetliners that smashed into the Twin Towers.
As construction crews, firefighters, cops and others combed the rubble, they found more than 20,000 body parts, some only the size of a fingernail. But remains of only 1,600 victims were eventually identified. None of the hijackers remains were identified. And roughly 9,000 body parts still remain unidentified - the five hijackers and roughly 1,200 victims.
Authorities faced a painful dilemma: What to do with those 9,000 body parts?
For now, the plan is to place the unidentified remains in a vault inside the still-unfinished 9/11 museum at Ground Zero, which is scheduled to open next April. But as many victims' relatives correctly point out and few public officials dare to concede, those remains of victims likely are mixed with the remains of the hijackers.
Boston should consider itself lucky. It had one alleged terrorist, one grave - somewhere.
At Ground Zero, the terrorists' remains will never disappear. They're mixed with the innocent, preserved in a museum.
Bomb Survivor Struggles to Find Peace
May 13, 2013
Playing on in Boston
BOSTON - In a music room not far from Fenway Park, a young man from Oakland watched several classmates sing together one afternoon last week, their voices rising and falling in improvised melodies.
The young man seemed lost in the moment, nodding gently to the beat and smiling now and then at the harmonies. For the first time in days, he said later, his thoughts did not wander to another part of town - to a piece of sidewalk near the finish line of the Boston Marathon where two bombs exploded a month ago and he collapsed in a shower of glass and chaos.
"I'm finally seeing the progression from bad to good," Tim Sorbanelli said.
A terrorist's bomb inevitably leaves behind a wide array of victims. There are, of course, the tragic stories of those who lost lives or limbs. But then there are those who don't make the official casualty lists.
They were close enough to be cut by the shrapnel spray and to feel the blast concussion in their chests. They sleep fitfully and wonder how they survived. They were not wounded badly enough to be rushed to a hospital or to make the TV news, but they are scarred nevertheless.
Sorbanelli is that kind of casualty.
He is 20 years old, two years out of Indian Hills High School and now a film score and percussion student at Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music. On the day of the marathon, he earned about $250 as a street musician - busking, as he calls it - for race finishers on Boylston Street.
He had just packed up his black Takamine guitar and stopped to watch the racers when the bombs exploded.
A chunk of glass shaped like an arrowhead slammed into his neck, an inch from his carotid artery. Glass pellets hit his head and back. After being knocked to the ground, he was trampled so badly by panicked bystanders that the muscles in his right leg were crushed and pulled. For the next week, he needed a cane to walk.
"My leg felt like spaghetti," Sorbanelli said.
He has told only a few of his Berklee classmates about the experience, in part, he said, because he is still trying to come to grips with what he went through.
An hour after the improvisational music class, Sorbanelli walked down Boylston Street, where the bombs had exploded. There were no police barriers blocking pedestrians now, no broken glass awaiting examination by FBI crime-scene teams.
The Starbucks was open again, with most of the sidewalk tables filled. Shoppers ducked into the Gucci boutique, the Crate & Barrel store and into the Atlantic Fish restaurant.
Men and women rushed to their offices as workers put the finishing touches on replacements for broken windows.
Sorbanelli stopped outside the Lord & Taylor department store and turned to look across Boylston Street, toward the site of the second explosion about 40 feet away.
"This is the exact spot I was standing," he said.
He brushed a hand through his red hair, which is dyed pink on top, and fell silent, his eyes cast to the sidewalk and the gray decorative brickwork around a mulberry sapling.
"Even now, I can feel the bricks around us moving with the blast shock wave," Sorbanelli said. "I can also feel that sinking feeling."
One of the most difficult challenges for victims of violent crimes, say police and experts in the effects of traumatic incidents, is trying to knit together an accurate narrative of what happened to them.
For the past month, Sorbanelli said, he has run through his movements that day, analyzing each one, checking his memory and reasoning. But that journey has not ended, he said.
That's why he is not afraid to return to the scene of the blast.
"In some ways, it's therapeutic," he said.
In other ways, however, it's still deeply painful.
"I can still look across the street and see the blood," he said.
It was almost 2:30 p.m. on marathon day, April 15, when Sorbanelli packed up his guitar. He had run through his repertoire of cover songs by Death Cab for Cutie, the Postal Service and his own, slower version of "Hey Ya!" by OutKast that he had performed on many Saturdays during six-hour busking gigs at Boston Common. After only two hours, he'd had his best payoff ever from passers-by tossing dollar bills and loose change into his guitar case.
"Normally I make about $100," he said. "On that day, I made around $250."
The elite runners already passed by. From his spot on the Boylston Street sidewalk just east of Copley Square, Sorbanelli noticed that the swarms of marathoners had become a slower, back-of-the-pack throng of ordinary joggers.
But rather than head for his dorm, Sorbanelli figured he would take in the race for a while.
He walked west on Boylston and stopped by the Lord & Taylor store. The crowd was five rows deep at that spot.
Sorbanelli remembers listening to the cheering, especially as a group of runners who were raising money for the victims of the Newtown, Conn., mass shooting passed by.
"I felt really great," he said. "My mind was wandering. I was watching the people around me. I was listening to their conversations. I was just taking in the atmosphere and the energy."
Then the first bomb went off.
Sorbanelli turned toward the sound -- a "confusing thud," he said. He thought it seemed like the hollow boom of a crate being dropped into a truck trailer. Or was it a car crash somewhere?
Gray smoke hung in the air and drifted slowly across Boylston Street. Sorbanelli watched as a line of police officers near him ran toward the smoke.
Thirteen seconds passed. Then the second bomb exploded.
"That's when I went down," Sorbanelli said.
As he has pieced the events together, what Sorbanelli remembers is a stream of snapshots.
A blast of air struck his chest. The sidewalk bricks rose. The street seemed to ripple and rock back and forth. The five rows of people between him and the street bounced into him. He fell to the sidewalk on his left side, atop his guitar.
For a moment, he worried that he had broken the instrument. He learned later that the guitar came through with only a minor crack.
Sorbanelli tried to get up but he was pushed down by people running over him. Someone kicked his right side. Someone else stepped on his hands. After a few seconds, he leaned forward and tried to stand and run.
"That's when I knew something was wrong with my leg," he said.
As he later discovered, the muscles in his right leg had essentially frayed.
"It was limp and useless," he said.
The crowd around him fled, and Sorbanelli found himself alone on the sidewalk. He turned back to the street and the blast scene.
A man held his hands to his bloody face. He noticed another man on the ground closer to the bomb blasts who, like him, was trying to get up. The man raised both arms above his head, signaling for someone to help him.
"One of the man's hands was missing," Sorbanelli said.
Sorbanelli reached for the small rolling cart he had used to transport his amplifier and pulled himself up. Then he turned to leave.
"I didn't look for any longer than I had to," he said.
At this point, Sorbanelli remembers feeling unexpectedly calm. He could barely lean on his leg. His hands were scraped. His head and chest ached.
But he knew he had to think of an escape plan.
A year earlier, after a citywide blackout, Sorbanelli made a list of "safe places" to seek shelter if another calamity struck Boston. One of those safe spots was the reflecting pool by Boston's Christian Science center, about 400 yards away.
Sorbanelli stumbled westward on Boylston, then turned into the Prudential Center mall and headed up the escalator. He felt something warm and wet on his neck.
"Blood," he remembers saying to himself.
He kept running, pushing his way out a set of glass doors and across Belvidere Street to the reflecting pool.
Sorbanelli reached for his neck. The glass shard was hanging from a piece of skin and cut the index finger on his right hand. He pulled his hand away, then reached again and pulled out the shard and tossed it into a bush.
Then he reached for his cellphone and dialed his mother in Oakland. His brother, 18, and sister, 15, were not yet home from school. His father, an IBM executive, was traveling in Texas.
"It was one of those moments that I remember," Pat Sorbanelli said. "Tim calls me every day, so it was not a surprise. But I could tell he had been running. He was out of breath."
Pat Sorbanelli later checked her cellphone. Her son had called her at 2:55 p.m. - five minutes after the bombs exploded.
Tim told his mother that a bomb had gone off, that he had been hit by flying glass but was OK and was sitting now by the reflecting pool.
Tim said he would go to a friend's house and hung up. He called back within the hour, and by that time Pat had heard the news reports that the bombing her son described was actually a terrorist attack.
"It really took several days to sink in," she said.
It's taken Tim Sorbanelli much longer to process what he experienced.
On the night of the bombing, he cleaned his cuts. He found a cane he had used on Halloween when he dressed up as a zombie.
The next day, he went to a student health clinic. His leg still hurt and the cuts on his neck and back still stung, but he was not injured badly enough to be admitted to a hospital.
After a week, Sorbanelli did not need the cane. The cut on his neck had healed. He took out his Rollerblades again. Last week, he rode his bike for the first time since the bombing.
As he walked down Boylston last week, Sorbanelli said the bombing is still vivid in his mind. It will take a while, he said, to find a place for those memories.
"I realize how fragile life is," he said. "That has humbled me to a new level."
On Sunday, he returned to his usual spot at the Boston Common for a three-hour performance. Except for a one-hour street performance near Fenway Park on the Saturday after the bombing to raise money for victims, Sorbanelli said Sunday's gig was really his first attempt to return to his pre-bombing routine. He took in only $62 in tips, but walked away after 6 p.m. with a feeling that he had reached a far more priceless milestone.
"It was phenomenal. It was fantastic," Sorbanelli said. "It was just really good to be back."
Grief Fades, but Strong Memories Remain
April 15, 2014
Boston Tries to Move on Year After Deadly Marathon Attack
BOSTON - The clock in Peabody Square that was frozen at the moment when the bombs broke this city's heart and stopped its showcase marathon road race a year ago is ticking again. But at the clock's base, blue, red and yellow ribbons flutter in the spring breeze in memory of the dead.
This is Boston now -- a wounded city, anguished over what has become known as the Boston Marathon bombing. Yet the city seems almost desperate to appear strong enough to move on.
It hasn't been easy.
A year ago today, two brothers from nearby Watertown, Mass., reportedly influenced by radical Islamist theology and angry over the U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, allegedly set off two pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the marathon on Boylston Street.
Three spectators died, including 8-year-old Martin Richard, who lived only two blocks from the clock at Peabody Square in the city's Dorchester section and was holding an ice cream cone and waiting for his father to finish the marathon when he was pummeled with shrapnel. An additional 264 people were injured - with 16 of them losing one or both legs.
The shock of the attack and the heart-rending stories of so many who were injured and trying to recover has enveloped Boston.
But this week, the city is trying to find the right emotional balance between moving on and remembering. It's a task made all the more difficult because many Bostonians felt the impact of the attacks in deeply personal ways.
"It's like a loved one passing away," said Wendell Pullum, 56, a retired construction worker who visited the Peabody Square clock on Monday.
After the attack, the clock's caretaker left it at 2:49 - the moment the first bomb exploded. For many, the paralyzed hands encapsulated the emotional weight of the bombings. It was as if decades of joy and civic innocence had suddenly been frozen.
Now the ticking clock offers another symbol - that Boston is trying to pick up the pieces and redefine itself.
As he gazed at the clock on Monday, Pullum said he shared his city's uneasy mission. He, too, felt the need to pick up with life, despite his anger and anguish.
"The grief may end," he said. "But we don't forget."
Besides Martin Richard, Krystle Campbell, 29, a restaurant manager, and Lu Lingzi, 23, a Boston University graduate student from China, died in the blast. Three days later, Sean Collier, 27, a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was shot to death, allegedly by the suspected bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Hours after Collier was killed, police killed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, after he tried to elude them. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now 20, was wounded in the shootout with police but was later captured. Federal authorities say they plan to seek the death penalty when he goes on trial as part of a 30-count indictment over his role in the bombing.
Across Boston on Monday, many residents said they are still traumatized from the five days of terror that enveloped the city between the bombings and the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But while the memories are eerily present on almost every block near the marathon finish line, many said they were trying mightily to go on with their lives in as normal a fashion as possible.
A large blue-and-yellow banner hung over the door of a Boylston Street office building, proclaiming: "We are Boston. We are strong." Inside the Prudential Center Mall, shoppers stopped at stores to buy "Boston Strong" T-shirts. And at the Boston Public Library, visitors lined up to see the exhibition "Dear Boston," which featured letters and other messages sent to Boston by people from across the world.
"A city is as strong as its people," said one message that had been turned into a banner and hung over a pile of more than 500 pairs of running shoes that had been left near the marathon finish line to commemorate the dead.
Elsewhere, as the temperatures rose to almost 70 degrees, office workers lounged over lunches at outdoor cafés, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the city was commemorating the pain of a terrorist attack. On the sidewalks, college students on skateboards weaved among groups of runners who had shed their heavy sweat suits in favor of tank tops.
Watching the scene, Tom Driscoll, 65, a retired postal inspector who is a concierge at a Boylston Street office building, said the bombing united the city in ways even a Red Sox victory in the World Series had not.
"It brought us closer," Driscoll said. "The city is a lot more friendlier now. In the old days, the Irish would say 'hi' only to the Irish and the Italians only to Italians. Now everybody says 'hi' to everybody."
The front door of Driscoll's office building is only 15 yards from the spot on the sidewalk where the first bomb exploded. In the aftermath of the bombing, the spot was adorned with bouquets of flowers. Now there is no indication of what happened at that spot, and city officials say they are still assessing whether to place some kind of memorial there.
Driscoll did not mind, though. "People remember," he said. "Now they know it could happen to anybody."
Today, the city is marking the event with a memorial service at the Hynes Convention Center featuring Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh.
After the 90-minute memorial service, the group is scheduled to gather at the marathon finish line with relatives of those who died, some of the injured victims and first responders who came to their aid, for a flag raising and moment of silence.
Security for the flag raising and for next Monday's marathon has been elevated several levels, police say. For the first time, a SWAT team from the FBI will be on hand for the race.
But Boston police say they are still trying to retain the marathon's informal feel.
"The situation has been taken to another level," said Boston Police Superintendent Bernard O'Rourke as he walked along Boylston Street on Monday. "But we're still trying to keep this as a family-focused event."
O'Rourke said the police department plans to deploy a large contingent of uniformed officers on the streets near the marathon finish line. But he said an undisclosed number of undercover officers would mingle with the crowd.
Several blocks away, at the campus of the Berklee College of Music, where he is preparing to graduate next month, Tim Sorbanelli was steeling himself for the anniversary.
Sorbanelli, who grew up in Oakland, was a regular guitarist and singer among the street musicians at Copley Square, near the marathon finish line. But at last year's marathon, after finishing up several hours of performing, he picked up his guitar and portable amplifier and thought he would watch some of the runners finish.
Then the bombs hit.
Sorbanelli was sprayed with shrapnel and knocked to the ground. He was not hospitalized, but he was among the hundreds of spectators who suffered superficial cuts and bruises and have since had to cope with the emotional trauma of seeing so many people who lost limbs.
As he sat in a coffee shop on Monday, Sorbanelli said he is still plagued by nightmares from the bombing.
"I have an overwhelming sense of anxiety," said Sorbanelli, who sought help from counselors in the past year. "It's a feeling that the bombing could have been the moment in time when I died. And here I am a year later. It could have been me. I was 55 feet away."
After the bombing, Sorbanelli continued his street performing - but never near the finish line. Going back to the scene of so much carnage made him uneasy.
But today, he plans to return and find a spot on the sidewalk near the finish line to sing for a few hours - in memory of those who died.
"I just thought I'd bring some light to the one-year anniversary," he said. "I want to go back and do it right."
* * * *
'We Own the Finish Line'
April 16, 2014
A Year Later, Bombing Scene Is One of Unity
BOSTON - Greta Cosey pulled a blanket over her head and gazed down Boylston Street toward the place where she brushed close to death a year before. A wind-swept rain pelted her face. But she didn't mind.
"I needed to come back," she said.
Cosey, 28, was one of more than 1,000 people who visited the Boston Marathon's finish line on Tuesday to mark the first anniversary of the attack that killed three spectators and injured 264 others.
"I was here last year," Cosey, of Boston, said, leaning against a fence near the Uno restaurant on Boylston.
Last April 15, Cosey, a sales manager for an outdoor furniture manufacturer, came to Boylston Street to cheer two girlfriends who were running the 26.2-mile marathon.
She waved to her friends as they passed, then kept watching the torrent of runners. Four minutes later, a homemade pressure-cooker bomb that had been hidden in a backpack exploded on Cosey's left - half a block away. Twelve seconds later, a second homemade backpack bomb blew up, a block to her right.
"I was in the middle," Cosey said, adding that the memory of being so close to the blasts had traumatized her.
In a way, Cosey's words are a mantra of this city now -- remembering the horror of the past yet trying to move ahead, with this year's marathon on Monday and future versions of the race that Boston has held for more than a century.
That double-sided mission was on full display Tuesday.
At noon, relatives of the dead, hundreds of cops, firefighters and others who pulled the injured to safety and medical staffers who tended their wounds at hospitals gathered at the Hynes Convention Center to hear a series of somber reflections, pep-talk-style speeches and soaring musical performances.
"Something can go horrifically, terribly wrong in a matter of seconds," said Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a dancer who lost her left foot in the blast. She had been watching finishers with her husband, an Air Force major just back from Afghanistan.
"It's up to us to make every second count," she said, "because believe me, they do."
Haslet-Davis vowed to dance again - and she did.
When he spoke, Vice President Joe Biden praised her and other survivors. Then, with his voice rising, he added: "America will never, ever, ever stand down. We are Boston. We are America. We respond, we endure, we overcome and we own the finish line."
Moments later, more than 1,000 people, including Biden, huddled under umbrellas at the finish line on Boylston Street.
The crowd stood in silence while bells from the Old South Church a block away tolled a dozen times. Then they sang the national anthem as a flag was raised over the finish line.
This day of memory and mourning began earlier. Just after 8 a.m., relatives of the three spectators who perished at the marathon and a police officer who was fatally shot later in a confrontation with the alleged bombers visited the finish line.
After a prayer by Boston's Roman Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Sean O'Malley, the father of 8-year-old Martin Richard, who was killed while waiting for his father to finish the marathon, hugged relatives of 23-year-old Chinese graduate student Lingzi Lu. Moments later, the Richard and Lu families turned to hug the relatives of 29-year-old restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, who also died on Boylston, and 27-year-old Sean Collier, a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was shot to death, allegedly by the suspected bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The family visit was largely unscripted. But it set the tone for a day that combined personal expressions of grief with public pledges to carry on -- even by those who still conceded they were deep in grief.
For Tim Sorbanelli, 21, a street musician from Oakland in Bergen County, who is finishing up a degree at Boston's Berklee College of Music, this personal journey to break free of sadness involved a very public act. He returned to a spot near the marathon finish line to play his guitar and sing.
Wearing a blue T-shirt inscribed with "Boston Strong," Sorbanelli found a place on the sidewalk near the Old South Church. He began with an instrumental piece that he composed, then launched into an acoustic rendition of "I'm Shipping Up to Boston" a rousing romp by the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, whose music was featured in the Boston-focused film "The Departed."
Dozens of people pressed closer. Several police officers started to dance. And Sorbanelli, who has battled bouts of anxiety since last year when he was sprayed with bomb shrapnel, said he felt his year of sadness and fear start to lift.
Until Tuesday, Sorbanelli had never returned to play his guitar near the finish line. He always picked other spots in Boston, blocks away.
"As I started really playing, it became a lot easier," Sorbanelli said afterward. "Once I started playing and I saw people smiling, I knew it was right."
Several blocks away, Kevin Belanger of Haverhill, Mass., and David Zucker of the Charlestown section of Boston watched the crowd gather by the finish line for the flag-raising.
Like Sorbanelli, Belanger and Zucker also harbored painful memories of last year's marathon. Both were running the race and were a half-mile from the finish line when the bombs exploded.
They never finished. But they are returning this year - as runners.
"The world was shown a city that was strong," said Zucker, a 29-year-old attorney. "It's my time to be out there."
He said he hopes he can finish in under four hours.
Belanger, 51, a construction manager for the Federal Aviation Administration, nodded. But he said he did not care about his race time.
"We'll be back Monday," he said. "This time we're finishing. I don't care how long it takes."
* * * *
'A City as Strong as Its People'
April 20, 2014
THE COLLECTION of running shoes sat in the middle of the floor of the Boston Public Library, more than 500 pairs, all of them lined up, row after row, heels to toes, as if 500 people were about to put them on. Nearby a sign proclaimed: "A city is as strong as its people."
This is just one of the memorials to the terrorist bombing that took the lives of three spectators at last year's Boston Marathon. There are many others at the library.
But the future of this memorial collection of running shoes -- and other exhibits -- is in doubt. Boston is still trying to figure out whether it will have a permanent home -- and why.
There will be many messages on Monday from Boston when the city hosts its annual marathon run -- its 118th. But one that the city is wrestling with now is how to balance the memory of last year's bombing with the understandable need to look ahead.
I covered last year's bombing and returned last week for the first anniversary. And what struck me was how this understated struggle kept emerging on the edges of so many conversations, especially since the anniversary of the bombing -- April 15 -- took place this year six days before the actual race.
"We will not forget about April 15," said Jack Fleming of the Boston Athletic Association, which sponsors the marathon. "But we have to get ready for the race."
Fleming was not trying to ignore what happened. As we talked one day last week on Boylston Street, as workers assembled bleachers at the marathon finish line nearby, he described how he and other race organizers were gently trying to separate the two events. But as Fleming noted, there is no set of guidelines for separating a painful past moment from another one that is supposed to be happy.
In a way, the tension in Boston between the past and the future is understandable. The legacy of last year's marathon is steeped in blood, with a soundtrack of ambulance and police sirens and the mournful tolling of bells. Not only did three spectators die -- one of them an 8-year-old boy -- but 264 others were injured. Sixteen of them lost portions of their legs. Two people lost both legs.
That's not an easy memory to forget. And yet, so much of the Boston Marathon's history has been framed by a sense of joy.
Boston's marathon is not just a race, although it is regarded as one of the world's most renowned and challenging marathons. It is also a celebration of the small towns that ring Boston and the city's diverse neighborhoods. The soundtrack is a constant wave of cheering as runners pass by what police say is at least a million spectators who line almost every inch of the 26.2-mile course.
As if that is not enough to strike a happy chord within Boston, there is this legacy, too: The race generates millions in tax dollars for the city.
With so much money at stake, you can understand some civic leaders don't want to emphasize the race's gory past. And yet, they can't ignore it either.
New York City has struggled with these issues ever since two commercial jetliners, hijacked by Islamic militants, crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on a Tuesday morning in September 2001. But if Boston is looking to New York and the 9/11 attacks for guidance on how to manage the memory of such a tragedy, it might come up empty-handed.
From the design of the Ground Zero memorial plaza, where almost 2,800 people perished when the Twin Towers collapsed, to the composition of the site's soon-to-open museum, almost every step has been a struggle. Protests are already being planned for the opening of the 9/11 Museum next month.
At the heart of New York's battles is a concept that seems simple, but it's really quite complicated. How should we remember a tragedy? Who controls that memory?
Then came the disagreements
In New York, the fight at Ground Zero began with arguments about whether to rebuild -- and how much to rebuild, especially the valuable commercial space. Then came the disagreements over the memorial design and how to arrange the names of the dead.
In between, there were debates over how to stage the annual memorial ceremony, whether to have a large U.S. flag flying over Ground Zero and discussions about whether to name the new 1,776-foot tower the "Freedom Tower."
Meanwhile, the 9/11 Museum is immersed in a long and divisive disagreement with victims' relatives over the decision to bring unidentified remains of the dead to the site. And last but not the least of the arguments, there is an on-going battle over the decision by the museum to charge an admission fee.
As I stood in the Boston Public Library last week and looked at the running shoes that were part of an exhibit called "Dear Boston," I thought of all the arguments that have rippled from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. I remembered how Ground Zero had been such a magnet for unity in the months after the 9/11 attacks but has now become so fractured by hurt feelings and disagreements over policy and money.
I studied the running shoes for several minutes, then went to the other parts of the "Dear Boston" exhibit. There were the makeshift memorial crosses to the dead -- the three killed at the marathon and a college police officer who had been shot to death, allegedly by the bombers as they tried to escape a few days later. There were T-shirts and hand-scrawled posters, even knitted rugs. There were also countless letters and notes.
All had been left at a variety of memorials that grew on Boston's streets and sidewalks in the days after last year's bombing. The running shoes collection, in fact, was much larger and covered a large patch of Boston's Copley Square.
Now the memorials have been taken down. The streets and Copley Square are back to the way they were before the bombing. And Boston is still trying to figure out what to do with the remains of these memorials that it now calls "Dear Boston."
Finding the right balance for that memory won't be easy. It may even be a marathon. As the sign said, "A city is as strong as its people." But it gains strength from its memory, too.
One Man's Journey After Boston Bombing
April 15, 2018
"The Boston bombing completely changed my perspective on life and how to treat being alive as being a gift."
Tim Sorbanelli
Tim Sorbanelli won't be walking the streets of Boston on Monday during that city's marathon. He'll be thousands of miles away, in the desert near Las Vegas. But a piece of Sorbanelli will be in Boston. In a way, he never left.
Five years ago, Sorbanelli, just 20 and only two years out of Indian Hills High School in Oakland, happened to be standing on a sidewalk on Boston's Boylston Street when two terrorist bombs exploded.
Sorbanelli, then a student at Boston's renowned Berklee College of Music, had spent the day "busking"-- playing his black Takamine guitar and singing to the marathon's crowds on the city's sidewalks with a repertoire that included songs by Death Cab for Cutie, the Postal Service and his own, slower version of "Hey Ya!" by OutKast.
He had $250 in his pocket from tips that listeners left from his performance and was walking along Boylston Street to his dormitory when he stopped by the Lord & Taylor department store to watch the throngs of runners heading to the finish line a block away.
It was nearly 2:30 p.m. The marathon's elite runners had already passed by. Sorbanelli remembers noticing how the slower runners-- those in the race's middle of the pack-- seemed so happy, especially a group raising money for victims of the Newtown, Connecticut, mass shooting that had taken place less than four months earlier.
Then he heard the first blast-- a "confusing thud," he told me. He saw smoke. Then, the police running toward the sound and the smoke.
Thirteen seconds passed.
Then another thud-- this time directly across Boylston Street from the spot where Sorbanelli was standing.
"That's when I went down," he said.
Glass pellets riddled his head and back. A larger chunk of glass-- sharp and angular like an arrowhead-- tore into Sorbanelli's neck, missing his carotid artery by just an inch.
Sorbanelli couldn't get up. Panicked bystanders trampled him, their feet beating the muscles in his right leg to jelly. For days afterward, he needed a cane to walk.
Then for months, he battled an even more debilitating problem-- a deep and fearsome anxiety. For a while, he stopped "busking."
Sorbanelli's experience was never chronicled by doctors in an emergency room. His story never became part of the litany of narratives of brutal injuries and amputations from the terror attack that became known as the "Boston Marathon Bombing." He is, instead, part of the uncounted injured-- those whose wounds were not great enough to be treated at trauma centers but nevertheless still left scars behind.
I covered the April 15, 2013 marathon attack-- and the pain that rippled through Boston during the following week. A month later, I was back in Boston again, walking down Boylston Street with Sorbanelli and listening to him describe his journey toward healing.
Five years passed and I reached out for him again.
He lives in Las Vegas now and earns a living as a musician, performing as a drummer in three bands that regularly find gigs in the city's casinos and working as a substitute drummer with nine other bands. He also runs a home recording studio where he produces his original music. His most recent CD is called "Necessities and Vices." His stage name is "Tim Sorbs."
His bands' music is as varied as America's musical landscape itself-- Eighties rock for a group called "Holes and Hearts," country tunes for another band called "Huckleberry Hicks" and pop radio covers with yet another group called "Twenty Drunk Pilots." He works at least four nights a week, taking in an as much as $300 for each gig. Coupled with his work in the recording studio, he's achieved an unusual status-- as a musician who can actually earn enough to pay his bills.
It's a life that is geared to making random people happy, Sorbanelli says. But it's also a life in which he cannot escape America's random violence.
Last October, Sorbanelli was at his rental home about five miles from the center of Las Vegas when he heard the thump of police helicopters and the whining of sirens as ambulances rushed to what is now called the "Las Vegas Massacre"-- the mass shooting in which 58 people died.
In the following days, the crippling anxiety Sorbanelli experienced in Boston returned.
"I didn't go right to panic," Sorbanelli recalled. "It was really the next morning when all of the news had settled. I was driving around the strip and I just saw a similar scene to Boston, with everything closed. That's when the weight of all of it kind of hit me again. It sent me back to those places."
So often, as our nation now tries to come to grips with the rash of mass killings-- some by terrorists with a political agenda; others by deeply disturbed people-- we resort to merely compiling the list of dead and wounded. What we overlook are the casualties that are harder to define-- those like Tim Sorbanelli who find themselves thrust "back to those dark places" in their emotional souls.
Sorbanelli worked his way through the days of anxiety after the Las Vegas shooting. He read the media accounts of how the shooting was the worst in U.S. history and how it sparked even more debates about America's gun laws. In a way, he says, the experience reminded him of not only what he endured after the Boston bombing but how he changed afterward.
"The Boston bombing completely changed my perspective on life and how to treat being alive as being a gift," Sorbanelli said. "Just being alive was not something I was overly grateful for until that happened. So it really sent me in a direction of being my best self."
"It forced me to grow up fast," he added.
Sorbanelli learned that life and death-- and those "dark places" in between-- often come unannounced and in a way that can't be predicted by any timetable.
After graduating from the Berklee School of Music, Sorbanelli moved back to his family's home in Oakland, where he lives with his parents, a younger brother and younger sister. He played in a band, taught at a local "School of Rock" and pondered his future-- perhaps as a music teacher.
And then, he decided to take a risk.
"Everything for me had been predictable and laid out for me," Sorbanelli said. "I had that neat, packaged American plan of a life. Nothing had shaken me up before. But Boston made me not care about how my life was supposed to go because I realized the unpredictable nature of the world we live in."
Last May, he loaded his drum kit into a rented trailer with his bed and record collection. He hooked the trailer to his 2004 Honda Pilot, then headed west for Las Vegas.
"I knew absolutely no one. I had no job," he said. "I just had savings and a pocketful of dreams."
Tim Sorbanelli found his dreams in his music. But he also knows his nightmares are never far away. The Las Vegas strip and Boston's Boylston Street are now part of America's violent history that Sorbanelli could not escape.
"Every day there is a little bit with me," he said. "But now I use these experiences as fuel just to keep pushing."