Boston Strong Read online

  [18]

  WAR IN WATERTOWN

  Watertown Police Officer Joe Reynolds was on routine patrol around 12:40 a.m. when he got the call that a stolen Mercedes was headed his way — Cambridge police had called Watertown, notifying them that there had been a carjacking around midnight.

  Police were tracking the vehicle through GPS, and it was on its way to Watertown.

  It wasn’t a highly unusual call for the Watertown night shift cops. The bedroom community borders Boston and is a safe town, but occasionally bad guys from Boston make their escapes through Watertown’s leafy side streets, thrusting the local cops into action.

  Reynolds spotted the stolen SUV, riding along closely to a green Honda Civic. He didn’t know the accused marathon bombers were behind the wheels of both vehicles. He also didn’t know the drivers were connected to Sean Collier’s shooting. Joe Reynolds thought it was just another simple carjacking and that he might have to chase a couple of punks through some yards.

  As he drove along Dexter Avenue, radio broadcasts called out the house numbers as the stolen SUV drove along the street.

  “I see that car. Do you want me to stop it?” Reynolds radioed.

  “Hold on, Joe. Let’s get you some backup before you do it,” Sergeant John MacLellan replied.

  Reynolds was driving toward the SUV, coming from the opposite direction on Dexter Avenue. As he passed the vehicle, he focused solely on the stolen SUV and paid no attention to the Civic.

  After the cop passed the vehicle, he made a U-turn and got behind the SUV. MacLellan was a few blocks away at a 7-Eleven convenience store on Auburn Street. He sped toward Dexter Avenue.

  “Give me a minute to get closer, Joe,” MacLellan radioed. He closed the gap.

  “Okay, Joe. Now light ’em up,” MacLellan said.

  Reynolds flicked on his blues and tried to stop the SUV as it turned onto Laurel Street. The vehicle drove about three-quarters of the way down Laurel Street and stopped. Reynolds stayed in his car for a few moments, waiting for backup.

  Suddenly, out of the darkness, Tamerlan Tsarnaev emerged from the SUV and started walking toward Reynolds’s cruiser. He was shooting a gun.

  Reynolds threw the cruiser in reverse and floored it, flying backwards toward Dexter Avenue and MacLellan.

  MacLellan came around the corner on the left side of the road. Suddenly, thunder erupted in the night.

  “Shots fired!” Reynolds shouted into the radio.

  Reynolds was ducking as he drove furiously in reverse away from the crazed shooter. MacLellan came flying around the corner, just missing Reynolds’s cruiser, and drove down the middle of the street toward Tamerlan Tsarnaev. A round came right through the center of MacLellan’s windshield, and glass exploded into the interior of the car. He felt the sting of glass cutting his face. The bullet whizzed right past his head, singing the tiny hairs and skin on his ear. The bullet buried itself into the driver’s seat headrest right behind him. MacLellan, a twenty-four-year veteran cop and father of one daughter, had no time to react. He continued down the street and stopped on the left side of the road and jumped out. Tamerlan kept firing as MacLellan took cover behind his cruiser. Bullets pinged off the vehicle while MacLellan tried to reach inside to grab the patrol rifle between the two seats. He was under heavy fire and was a sitting duck. The officer’s training had never prepared him for this. This wasn’t police work — this was combat.

  He then made an unconventional, snap decision — he slammed the car into drive and let it roll down the street, hoping it would distract the shooter. MacLellan ran alongside the vehicle, maintaining his cover. It was trash day, so residents had their barrels out. The cruiser banged into barrels, knocking them over, as it rambled down the street.

  MacLellan saw his chance and ducked out of the line of fire, sprinting into a driveway and taking refuge behind a tree. Reynolds ran over to the sergeant and joined him behind the tree, which felt like a giant sequoia to the two terrified cops — but in reality it was a thin oak barely big enough to provide cover for one person, never mind two.

  As the vehicle continued to roll down the street, one of the Tsarnaev brothers lobbed a pipe bomb into the middle of the road. It exploded with a thunderous boom that blew out the windows of the stolen SUV.

  “Sarge, we’re too close!” Reynolds yelled.

  The two cops ran around the side of a house as another bomb came roaring up the street. This one landed even closer to them.

  “Oh shit, this is gonna hurt,” MacLellan said, bracing himself for the worst. But the device was a dud.

  They ran behind the house. Reynolds hopped a fence.

  “Sarge! Come on! Jump!” he shouted.

  MacLellan decided to stay in the yard and went back to the tree. He stood behind the tree, looking at the pipe bomb that didn’t detonate. He thought about running over and grabbing it and tossing it back at the attackers, but he quickly changed his mind.

  Maybe it’s a triggered device and they’ll detonate it as soon as I get close, he thought.

  Just then, a third bomb tumbled down the street with a terrifying tink, tink, tink!

  This one did go off, and it was even louder than the first. MacLellan felt the compressions. His eyeballs rattled, and he felt his brain bouncing off the insides of his skull. He put his hands up to his eyes to make them stop moving.

  Just then, Officer Miguel Colon showed up on the scene with a spotlight and shone it down the street. It was immediately shot out. Colon quickly took cover with Reynolds.

  “Sarge! Get back here! Take cover!” Colon yelled to MacLellan.

  Radios roared with reports of shots fired and explosions in the street.

  “They’re throwing bombs at us!” MacLellan screamed into his walkie-talkie. “We’ve got them pinned down! We need help!”

  Inside an apartment at 62 Laurel Street, twenty-three-year-old Andrew Kitzenberg heard the shootout and started taking pictures with his iPhone. He live-tweeted the mayhem unfolding right outside his window, starting with this post at 12:55 a.m.: “Shoot out outside my room in Watertown. 62 Laurel St.”

  Sergeant Jeff Pugliese, a thirty-four-year veteran of the department who had survived a heart attack a few years earlier, had wrapped up his shift at midnight and should have been fast asleep at home. But a report he had written earlier in his shift got deleted accidentally, so he stayed late to rewrite it. He was on his way home in his family minivan when he heard the report of the carjacking on his scanner.

  Pugliese figured it was a routine stolen vehicle but decided to swing by and help out, thinking the culprits would not recognize the van. On his way to the scene, he heard the mayhem erupt. A lifelong Watertown resident, he knew the neighborhood well, so he took a quick turn onto School Street to get a better position on the shooters. He was running through backyards toward Laurel Street when another pressure cooker bomb went off. This one was in the middle of the street and was louder than the others, which were pipe bombs. A plume of fire erupted from the bomb and lit up the street, briefly turning darkness into daylight. Pugliese had seen video of such a thing from news reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he never imagined that he would see something like this in his hometown.

  The shrapnel packed into the bomb shot straight up into the air and rained down from the sky on top of the crouching cops. The bomb landed on its side, and the pavement blunted some of the shrapnel explosion. The device was just feet away from MacLellan.

  Pugliese was still running when a resident came out his back door and darted across his own backyard. Pugliese didn’t know if the guy was one of the terrorists, but he saw he didn’t have a gun. The man hopped a fence and sprinted away. Pugliese called it in over the radio and continued running toward his cornered comrades.

  He got closer and came to a spot where he had a clear view of the two brothers behind the SUV. Pugliese started firing. The Tsarnaevs were covered, so he tried to skip bullets off the pavement under the car to strike them. Officials bel
ieve Pugliese hit at least one of the brothers.

  Tamerlan emerged from his cover and charged toward Pugliese like a mad bull. He had a gun in his hand, and Pugliese had little cover — he was standing at the side of a house with nothing but two cars parked in a driveway between him and the brothers.

  They were about fifteen feet away from each other, and both fired repeatedly. Bullets screamed past Pugliese’s head, embedding themselves into the house. Pugliese returned fire, striking Tamerlan as many as seven or eight times. But — incredibly — Tsarnaev didn’t go down. Bullets were going right through the Chechen boxer, but he kept coming. Tamerlan was closing on Pugliese when he suddenly stopped. He had either run out of bullets or his gun jammed. He looked at Pugliese and threw the useless gun at the cop.

  The wounded terrorist turned and ran down the driveway and up the middle of the street toward MacLellan. Pugliese gave chase. MacLellan didn’t see a gun but feared Tamerlan had another bomb. MacLellan was out of bullets but aimed his gun at the terrorist anyway.

  “Stop or I’ll blow your fucking head off!” he screamed.

  With all the chaos unfolding, he tried another trick: he pretended his gun was shooting, faking the recoil. Word spread quickly via police radios of the shootout and bomb-tossing going on in the normally quiet suburban neighborhood. Cops from Boston, Arlington, the MBTA, and the state police sped to the surreal scene and took up positions on the surrounding streets.

  As MacLellan stood in the street fake-firing his gun, Pugliese bolted out of the shadows and tackled Tamerlan to the ground. The Chechen’s hands were under his chest, but he wouldn’t give up without a fight. MacLellan hopped on the pile and the pair struggled desperately to handcuff the suspected bomber.

  Reynolds came running to help just as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hopped into the stolen Mercedes SUV. The vehicle sped toward the mass of bodies brawling on the pavement. Reynolds and MacLellan leaped out of the way but Pugliese continued to struggle with Tamerlan until the last second.

  Pugliese rolled off just as the SUV sped toward him and struck Tamerlan, pinning him underneath the carriage and dragging him several yards. Reynolds and MacLellan thought Pugliese was under the vehicle, too.

  The SUV went flying up the street and smashed into a cruiser, dislodging Tamerlan’s battered body. Pugliese looked at the other two cops, and all three breathed an exasperated sigh of relief, their hearts still pounding.

  Pugliese looked down at Tamerlan, who was still alive. The officer left nothing to chance. He pounced on Tamerlan again, and despite heavy wounds, the brother continued to fight back.

  The cops then heard a radio transmission of “officer down.”

  It was Sean Collier’s police academy friend, thirty-three-year-old Richard “Dic” Donohue, a cop now with the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority.

  One of dozens of officers who had arrived on the scene as backup, Donohue was struck in the leg by one of the three hundred bullets sprayed around the neighborhood during the shootout. It’s widely accepted that Donohue was the victim of friendly fire. The bullet severed Donohue’s femoral artery, and he appeared to be bleeding out. Two Harvard University cops and a Boston police officer were doing CPR. One of them tied tourniquets around Donohue’s leg to stem the gushing blood.

  Watertown firefighters Pat Menton and Jimmy Caruso rushed to the Dexter Street scene with an ambulance. Donohue looked bad. He was ghastly white and was drifting in and out of consciousness.

  The cops and firefighters loaded him into the ambulance. Menton worked on Donohue’s breathing while Caruso applied pressure, trying desperately to stem the blood loss.

  “We need a driver!” Menton yelled.

  Menton’s brother, a Watertown cop named Tim, had been in the firefight. Now he leaped into the driver’s seat and sped toward Mount Auburn Hospital. A state trooper rode in the back with the two firefighters, and all three worked to save the young cop’s life.

  Back on Laurel Street, Tamerlan lay cuffed and dying on the pavement. EMTs arrived and loaded him into an ambulance. Tamerlan spit at one of the EMTs. He looked another one in the eyes. The EMT described it as the most chilling look he had ever seen.

  Meanwhile, Dzhokhar had sped from the scene. He dumped the SUV on Spruce Street, which is actually a continuation of Laurel Street. Cops surrounded the SUV but kept at a safe distance, not knowing if he was inside or if the vehicle was booby-trapped with bombs.

  Watertown Police Chief Ed Deveau had spent Thursday night winding down at the Charles River Country Club after another long day. Several of his officers were deployed throughout Boston, backing up Boston police, helping patrol the city, and beefing up security for President Obama’s visit that day.

  Throughout the day Deveau, a lifelong Watertown resident and former high school basketball star, had been monitoring the manhunt through news reports and was aware that the FBI had released pictures of the two bombing suspects. He attended a board meeting at the country club and had dinner and a drink with a couple of friends before going home and hitting the sack around midnight. He was unaware when he went to bed that Sean Collier had been killed in nearby Cambridge.

  He wasn’t asleep for more than a few minutes when his cell phone buzzed on the nightstand next to his bed. It was Watertown Police Lieutenant Jamie O’Connor, who was the shift commander that night. Deveau knew immediately it was bad news. It was never good news when the officer in charge called you that late at night.

  “Oh shit,” the chief muttered.

  “Chief, they’re shooting at us and throwing bombs at us and I think it’s related to the MIT officer being killed!” a panicked O’Connor shouted into the phone. The chief could hear loud radio traffic in the background, and then he heard an explosion.

  “What the fuck?” Deveau shouted. “I’m on my way!”

  He got dressed quickly, ran out of the house, and sped toward the terrifying scene that was still unfolding at the corner of Dexter and Laurel streets. He realized on the way that, like Ed Davis, he had left his sidearm behind, but he did have a gun in the trunk of his cruiser.

  Deveau gripped the steering wheel tightly as he listened to the chaotic radio broadcasts from his men. When he arrived, uniformed cops from several departments were running around with guns drawn. Smoke filled the air. Deveau was in plain clothes and just wanted to find his guys to make sure none were hurt.

  He started to pick up bits of information. The Boston Marathon bombers had struck again. This time though, one was dead — the older one — while the younger one was on the run. The furious battle had involved three pipe bombs, two pressure cooker bombs, and hundreds of rounds fired. One cop was shot and was en route to the hospital. Three cruisers were totaled in the battle, and several homes were riddled with bullet holes. War had been waged right in the middle of a residential neighborhood, but — somehow — no civilians had gotten injured.

  One of the first officers Deveau spoke to was MacLellan. The cop was exhausted — and a little bit nervous.

  “So Chief, I violated policy,” MacLellan told him as they stood at the intersection of Dexter and Laurel.

  “What are you talking about?” the chief said.

  “I couldn’t get away from the SUV and the bullets kept bouncing off the cruiser, so I rolled the car down the street and it smashed into something and there is a lot of damage,” MacLellan said. Instead of focusing on the fact that he had survived, MacLellan was worried about destroying a department vehicle.

  The chief looked him square in the eyes.

  “John, are you kidding me? You’re fucking alive. I just want to hug you,” Deveau said.

  The two men embraced.

  When Commissioner Davis and Danny Keeler arrived at Laurel Street moments later, the acrid stench of gunpowder hung in the air. Davis surveyed the scene. He spotted hand grenades on the ground, surrounded by a litter of spent shell casings. The Watertown cops were walking around like zombies, dazed and confused, most with hearing loss from explosions that had blasted th
eir eardrums. Watertown Police Officer Dennis “D. J.” Simmonds, who also exchanged gunfire with the suspects that night, would continue to struggle with mental and physical injuries for the next year. Simmonds died days before the first anniversary of the marathon bombings from what officials described as a “medical emergency on the job.” He was only twenty-eight years old.

  “I’m sorry we let him [Dzhokhar Tsarnaev] get away,” another one of the cops told Davis the night of the shootout. The commissioner told the officer not to worry. These men have gone through hell, Davis thought to himself. They’ve just experienced mortal combat, something most cops will never see in the course of their careers.

  As Davis walked over to Chief Deveau, his friend of twenty years, he could hear the crunch of debris under his shoes. Normally, preserving the crime scene would be his top priority, but not on this night. We gotta get this guy, Davis thought. I don’t give a shit about evidence right now, we just gotta get this guy.

  The commissioner also needed a gun. Rushing out of his house, he had forgotten to retrieve his service weapon from his safe. An officer handed Davis a weapon, and he spent the next few minutes discussing the situation with Deveau.

  Davis then turned his attention to Keeler.

  “Watertown knows the terrain, but we have the resources.”

  They both focused their eyes on the stolen Mercedes SUV, still sitting on Spruce Street where the younger Tsarnaev had abandoned it.

  “The car was shot to hell from both sides,” Keeler recalls. “It got the shit shot out of it. How he ever made it out of the car is beyond me.”

  The Watertown cops told them that Suspect Two jumped out of the vehicle and fled to the left through a backyard.