Boston Strong Page 19

  “It was a very touching occasion,” Patrick said. “It was incredibly moving to me…. The whole thing has been so intimate. I can’t think of another, a better word to describe how connected people either were or became.”

  After the White Sox game, Rand told ESPN Chicago that she was most excited to meet Coco Crisp, a member of the 2007 Red Sox World Series team. She also hailed Obama for following through on a promise he had made to her in her hospital room to meet up with her when she was in Chicago.

  “I just happened to be one of the people that [the president] came to see [in the hospital],” Rand said. “He was great. He came in our room like he was an old neighbor and an old friend and really talked to everybody in the room and was really compassionate about the terrible thing that happened. We mentioned we were coming to Chicago, and he said, ‘When you are out there, we want to make sure you have a really nice trip.’ So that’s how it happened. They followed through, and here we are.”

  After meeting with Mery, Karen, and others, President Obama and Governor Patrick had lunch with Mayor Menino in the basement cafeteria, where they dined on sandwiches.

  Heather Abbott got a surprise visit from the First Lady at the Brigham. As Heather lay in her bed, surrounded by friends, Michelle Obama popped her head into her room.

  “You are so brave,” she told Heather.

  “Thank you,” Heather replied.

  Michelle Obama then handed her a presidential challenge coin, which are traditionally given to wounded soldiers. After the deadly massacre at Fort Hood in 2009, President Obama had placed challenge coins on the memorials of the soldiers killed during the shooting rampage.

  There were no TV cameras. The Obamas specifically requested that the visits be personal and not staged PR appearances. Many of the survivors did snap their own pictures of the visits and posted them on their Facebook walls.

  At this same time, the investigation was about to get a jolt. The FBI had finally agreed to release the photos of Black Hat and White Hat. In late afternoon, the Bureau announced on its website that it would hold a news conference at 5 p.m.

  “Our collective law enforcement team has pursued thousands of leads and tips,” DesLauriers announced at the briefing. The agent said that on Wednesday, they had developed a single person of interest. During further investigation, a second suspect was also identified. The Feds then posted two charts side by side with four photos each of the suspects.

  “They appear to be associated. Suspect One is wearing a dark hat. Suspect Two is wearing a white hat,” DesLauriers pointed out. “Suspect Two set down a backpack at the site of the second explosion just in front of the Forum restaurant.”

  He urged patrons who had been at Forum to contact the FBI if they had not done so already.

  He also urged the media and the public to share and further publicize the photographs and video of the suspects found on the FBI website. Des­Lauriers stressed that the eight images being presented were the only ones that the public should deem credible. The FBI did not want a repeat of the New York Post fiasco.

  Sean Collier was one of millions of people to post the FBI images on his Facebook page immediately following the FBI briefing. He was back on his 3–11 shift and expected another slow evening. He had become friends with a young woman who also worked at MIT. She worked at a campus bar called The Thirsty Ear, dubbed “the Institution of the Institute,” over on Albany Street. Collier texted her at around 10:30 p.m.

  “Are you working tonight? I think I might come by after my shift.”

  [17]

  TRAITORS

  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev returned to UMass-Dartmouth just a few minutes after 4 p.m. on Thursday. The cloak of anonymity would shield him for another hour before the FBI released clear photos of him and his brother to the world. The FBI still did not have his name. He was only known as Suspect Two or White Hat, but anyone who knew him well would be able to identify him from the pictures.

  After the televised FBI news briefing, the campus was buzzing with students who chatted among themselves about how their friend and classmate looked like one of the bomb suspects. Even then, the talk was mostly in jest as no one could imagine that a sleepy-eyed stoner like Dzhokhar could be responsible for the first successful terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. They wanted to talk to Dzhokhar, but at that point — he was gone.

  A girl who followed his Twitter account tweeted him a photo of White Hat with the message: “lol, Is this you? I didn’t know you went to the marathon!!!”

  Tsarnaev never responded to the tweet. Instead, he drove his green Honda Civic back to Cambridge where his brother, Tamerlan, was waiting. The noose was now tightening around their necks as people everywhere, from schoolchildren to grandparents, pushed their faces out on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. The pictures of the bomb suspects were shared and re-shared.

  “Somebody out there knows these individuals as friends, neighbors, co-workers, or family members of the suspects,” DesLauriers had told the nation in a 5 p.m. press conference. “Though it may be difficult, the nation is counting on those with information to come forward.”

  He called them “extremely dangerous.”

  “No one should approach them,” he said. “No one should attempt to apprehend them except law enforcement.”

  Sean Collier was sitting in his police cruiser parked at Main and Vassar streets, near Kendall Square in Cambridge. It was a popular cut-through for drivers looking to avoid a red light. Collier was on the watch for anyone taking an illegal turn through campus, but he was also on high alert, like every cop in the region, because of the at-large terrorists.

  His boss, MIT Police Chief John DiFava, pulled up next to Collier around 9:30 p.m. DiFava was the state police colonel from 1999 to 2001 and was put in charge of security at Logan International Airport in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

  He was known as a cop’s cop: he chased Irish mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger, headed the state police underwater recovery team for years, and was acknowledged as one of the best field tacticians of his era. He liked eager, honest young cops like Sean Collier.

  “What’re you up to?” DiFava asked.

  “Just trying to make sure everyone behaves,” Collier smiled.

  After a brief chat, DiFava drove away.

  The eyes of the world were now on Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The brothers had to get out of Cambridge, out of Massachusetts. America’s most wanted men decided to drive to Times Square in New York City for one final bloody crescendo. Tamerlan knew that he’d never see his wife or infant daughter again and resigned his younger brother to the idea that both were on the cusp of martyrdom — paradise awaiting.

  Their arsenal was low. They had five more pressure cooker bombs; a Ruger P95 9mm semiautomatic handgun, which is described as a rugged and reliable pistol; a BB gun; a hunting knife; and a machete. If they were bringing war to New York City, the Tsarnaevs would need more weapons.

  The brothers drove through Cambridge and spotted Collier’s squad car. The hooded men crept up from behind as the officer kept his attention on the intersection in front of him. One brother went to the driver’s side of the vehicle while the other approached the passenger side. At that moment, Tamerlan opened the door and fired the Ruger at the unsuspecting officer — hitting him five times, including two bullets to the head.

  Sean Collier was killed instantly. Dhzokhar then reached into the vehicle and tried desperately to free Collier’s service weapon but failed because he did not know how to remove it from its holster. MIT had recently issued its officers new holsters equipped with three-way locks. Collier had told his family about it. The brothers struggled to steal the officer’s gun but soon abandoned their efforts.

  Calls flooded 911 dispatchers reporting the gunshots. There were early reports, which turned out to be wrong, that Collier’s shooting may have been tied to the robbery of a nearby convenience store. It took roughly thirteen minutes for EMTs to reach Collier.
<
br />   “That is confirmed, a gunshot wound. CPR in progress,” one EMT radioed. Collier was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital but was dead on arrival.

  News of the shooting spread quickly. Cops across the Boston area heard the horrifying radio transmissions that one of their own had been executed.

  “They just shot an MIT cop,” a friend told Danny Keeler by phone.

  “You’re shitting me,” Keeler responded.

  While some questioned whether the attack was random, Danny Keeler sensed right away that somehow White Hat and Black Hat were involved. He grabbed his jacket and his gun and headed out the door for Cambridge.

  Commissioner Davis got the call at his home shortly after 10:30 p.m.

  “It’s gotta be related to our guys,” Davis said.

  The commissioner was told that it appeared to be a simple armed robbery.

  He didn’t believe it. Davis began connecting the dots in his head as he, too, rushed out the door. He had his police badge but had forgotten to take his gun, which he’d placed in a safe at his home earlier that evening.

  Brendan Lynch, Sean Collier’s brother-in-law, arrived home in Dracut late that night after having a few beers with friends from work. His wife, Nicole — Sean’s sister — was already in bed. Brendan sat in his living room working on his iPad with the television on in the background. The eleven o’clock news on WCVB Channel 5 opened with breaking news from Cambridge. There had been a shooting at MIT. He ran into the bedroom and awoke Nicole.

  “It’s Sean, it’s Sean!” Nicole screamed, shooting upright in her bed.

  “That’s ridiculous, they didn’t say anything about a police officer being involved,” Brendan told his wife, trying to calm her nerves.

  Still, Nicole could sense that something tragic had happened to her brother.

  She called her sister, Jen, and together they debated whether to call their mother.

  “We didn’t want to worry her unnecessarily,” Nicole says. “We tried to decide who should call Sean because we didn’t want him to get mad at us like last time.”

  Jen began tracking the story on Twitter. She tried getting in touch with a friend who was an EMT to see if he had heard anything come over the scanner. Twitter updates came streaming in. “First, we learned it was a shooting,” Nicole remembers. “Then it was a cop, and then it was an MIT cop.”

  Sean Collier’s mother, Kelley Rogers, had just retired for the evening after doing a few hours of work at home. Her phone rang close to 11 p.m. It was DiFava.

  “I’m sending some police officers to get you and bring you to Mass General,” he told her.

  The mother started screaming.

  DiFava did not tell her that Sean had been shot. Instead, he informed her that her son had been seriously injured.

  Kelley then called her daughter Jen with the news.

  “You need to get John [Jen’s husband], you need to get in your car and get to Mass General,” she said in tears. “Sean has been hurt and I think it’s going to be the last time you see him.”

  Both Jen and Nicole rushed from their homes to be with their brother. Nicole had to get a neighbor to watch her two children, who were sick at home with high fevers. As her husband drove, Nicole monitored the news on her smartphone. An update came across stating that the unidentified MIT police officer had been killed. Nicole called Jen with the news.

  “Then I called the person who was watching my kids just to say, ‘He was killed but I am still going in there,’” Nicole recalls. She continued to follow the news updates even when Brendan pleaded with her to put her phone away.

  “Don’t look at it,” he told her. She didn’t listen to him. She was glued to it.

  They arrived at Mass General and were stopped by police on the street near the entrance.

  “The MIT police officer is our brother,” Brendan told the cop.

  “Okay, just pull up as far as you can and just go in,” the officer replied. “Don’t worry about your vehicle.”

  There were more than a dozen armed police officers gathered outside the hospital. The family noticed the familiar markings of the MIT Police Department among that crowd.

  When Jen arrived, she and her husband, John, were met by a police officer at the entrance. He began moving and motioned for the couple to follow.

  “The officer was practically running through the hallways. My husband and I were struggling to keep up with him,” Jen recalls. “I remember thinking, This isn’t good. Then he just dropped me in this spot with all these people in the hallways, and I didn’t know where to go.”

  A staffer pointed to a small room. “Your mother is in there,” she said.

  Jen walked in to find a distraught Kelley Rogers. “Jenny, he died.”

  Jen’s husband tried to get a hold of Sean’s younger brother, Andy, in North Carolina. At this time, the family was approached by Collier’s partner, who had found the body slumped over in his squad car. The MIT cop broke down and wept.

  Nicole finally connected with Andy on his cell phone.

  “I picked up my phone and I said, ‘What’s going on?’” Andy said. He knew there was no way Nicole would be up that late, so he realized that something bad had happened — but not to Sean. “I immediately thought of my nieces and nephew.”

  “Andy, you need to come home,” Nicole said.

  “Wait, what’s going on?”

  “Sean’s been shot. He’s dead.”

  “No,” Andy cried.

  After learning about his brother’s murder, Andy went to Sean’s Facebook page and posted the following: “Sean I love you. You are a great brother and I never told you enough.”

  The family had to identify Sean Collier’s body through photos. They were forced to see the bullet hole in the young man’s forehead.

  Investigators still had not mentioned anything to the family about Sean Collier’s killers. As the sisters were saying their goodbyes to their loving brother, they heard rumblings in the hallway about police activity in Watertown.

  Jen looked at Nicole. “How weird would it be if it was the marathon bombers?”

  Roughly twenty-five minutes after firing the shots that killed Sean Collier, the Tsarnaev brothers were looking to steal something else — this time a car. They pulled Dhokhar’s Green Honda Civic behind a late model Mercedes Benz ML 350 that was parked along a curb on Brighton Avenue. The driver, a twenty-six-year-old Chinese man, had stopped to answer a text when he heard a knock on his passenger side window. He lowered the window, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev stuck his long arm in, unlocked the door, and climbed inside.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Tamerlan said, waving the Ruger that killed Officer Collier. “You know about the marathon bombings?”

  The driver nodded yes.

  “I did that,” Tamerlan said matter-of-factly. “And I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.”

  He demanded money. The driver carried only forty-five dollars in cash, which Tamerlan begrudgingly took. He then ordered the driver to turn right onto Fordham Avenue, while Dhzokhar followed close behind in his Civic. The Mercedes traveled through Brighton, Watertown, and then back to Cambridge, where an army of police officers was now combing the streets for Sean Collier’s killers.

  In an exclusive interview with the Boston Globe, the driver — who was referred to only by the nickname Danny — spoke about the tense ninety minutes he was forced to chauffeur the most-wanted killer since Osama bin Laden around metro Boston.

  “Death is so close to me,” he told the Globe. “I don’t want to die. I have a lot of dreams that haven’t come true yet.”49

  Tamerlan ordered the driver to keep his eyes on the road. “Don’t look at me!” he shouted. “Do you remember my face?”

  The driver said no. His hands were clutching the wheel tightly in an effort to stop them from shaking. Tamerlan studied the driver, who was Asian — but was he Chinese American or something else? When the driver spoke, Tsarnaev had difficulty understanding him.

  “OK, that’s
why your English is not very good. OK, you’re Chinese. I’m a Muslim.”

  The driver smiled. He now saw a glimmer of hope to his desperate situation.

  “Chinese are very friendly to Muslims,” the driver announced. “We are so friendly to Muslims.”

  Tamerlan leafed through the driver’s wallet and found his ATM card. He asked for the ATM code and got it. When they arrived in East Watertown, the driver was ordered to pull over onto Fairfield Street, a quiet side street. When he did, Dzhokhar parked behind him and got out. The brothers spoke briefly on the street and began transferring their arsenal from the Honda Civic to the Mercedes. Tamerlan ordered the driver to move over to the passenger side and got behind the wheel. Dzhokhar climbed into the back seat behind the Chinese man.

  They stopped at a nearby Bank of America, where Dzhokhar retrieved some money with the driver’s ATM card. The brothers spoke openly in their native language about going to New York City. The driver could only pick up the word Manhattan in the conversation. The Tsarnaevs then asked him if his car could be driven to New York City. As he drove, Tamerlan fidgeted with the radio, going from station to station but avoiding any news. They returned to Fairfield Street where, once again, the brothers retrieved some items from the Honda Civic. Tamerlan slipped an Islamic prayer CD into the Mercedes’s stereo and then got back on the road. The driver got a text from his roommate and then a phone call.

  “If you say a single word in Chinese, I’ll kill you right now,” Tamerlan warned.

  “I’m sleeping in my friend’s home tonight,” the driver told his roommate. “I have to go.”

  Tamerlan nodded and smiled. “Good boy. Good job.”

  At this point, they needed gas. They spotted a Shell gas station at River Street and Memorial Drive in Cambridge. Dhzokhar tried to fill the tank using the driver’s credit card. The credit card reader was down.

  “Cash only,” he told his older brother, who then gave him a fifty dollar bill. Dhzokhar walked inside the Shell mini-mart. The Mercedes driver had a decision to make: stay in the car and be killed like the MIT police officer and all those innocent souls at the Boston Marathon, or try to make a run for it. There was only one option and it was clear. With lightning speed, the driver unbuckled his seatbelt, opened the passenger door, and sprinted. The driver kept running and did not look back. He heard no shots fired, he felt no pain. He was free.