The below
is an excerpt from Boston Strong by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge. This month,
we are offering the Boston Strong ebook for $1.99 on all platforms in conjunction with the 1/13
theatrical release of the feature film Patriots Day. Here’s to you, Boston.
Boston police detective Sergeant Danny Keeler
had spent much of the early afternoon walking up and down Boylston Street
popping in and out of various bars and restaurants, including Abe & Louie’s
and McGreevy’s, to monitor crowd control.
“What’s your head count?” he’d ask the doorman.
“Make sure you keep it at 50 and below. If we come back and it’s like that, you
won’t have any problems with us.”
Keeler was walking alone across Gloucester
Street when he heard and saw the first explosion. His initial reaction was
similar to others who had witnessed the blast.
“I thought a transformer had let loose,” Keeler
recalls.
Just over a year earlier, the Back Bay section
of Boston had been plunged into darkness when a 115,000-volt transformer
exploded at a garage on Scotia Street, close to the finish line.
Keeler immediately began running toward the smoke
and noise emanating from Marathon Sports. The area was still choked with
people. If it was a transformer explosion, someone was likely hurt. His time in
the U.S. Marines and his years on the police force had trained Keeler to be
instinctive. He had also been trained to run in the direction of trouble—not
away from it.
“In 13 years in homicide, I’ve been involved in
a lot of shootings. I’ve seen a lot of chaos,” Keeler says. “But I firmly
believe that God put me there that day.”
He had reached Fairfield Street when suddenly he
heard another devastating blast—this time coming from behind him. He turned
around immediately and could see another large cloud of smoke, followed by the
sound of ear-piercing screams.
This ain’t no transformer fire, he thought to himself. We’re
getting bombed.
Since he was closer to the second explosion,
Keeler decided to double back down Boylston Street to the scene at Forum. There
was panic everywhere. People were turning over tables outside restaurants and
running in every direction. Keeler tried to wade through the waves of fleeing
spectators, but it was impossible. He jumped off the sidewalk and approached
the middle of the street when he got his first glimpse of true devastation.
“I saw a leg lying on the street. It was on fire.”
The charred body part looked like a log that had
been tossed atop a fire pit.
Keeler grabbed his radio. “This is Delta 984.
I’ve got multiple bombs at the finish line. I need some help down here.”
He requested that Ring Road, adjacent to
Boylston Street, be closed off immediately.
“Ring Road’s gonna be our evac route. I need you
to shut it down at Huntington [Avenue] for MOP [Mobile Operations], I want that
clear. I need the lanes cut clear for the fire department.”
Keeler’s first thought was to get the victims
away from the scene and to the hospital as quickly as possible.
Three officers ran up to Keeler looking for
guidance—looking for orders.
“Danny, what do you need from me?” asked Boston
Police Captain Frank Armstrong.
“I need you to keep these lanes clear [near the
bombing scene],” Keeler told him. “Don’t have the fire department come in here
and drop their trucks anywhere. Keep these lanes clear.”
Keeler ordered the others to gain control of the
bombing scenes in front of Forum and Marathon Sports. Meanwhile, other Boston
police officers at and around the finish line began calling into dispatch
asking for additional help.
“The only one I want to hear from is 984,” the
police dispatcher ordered. “984’s got the channel.”
At that moment, Detective Sergeant Danny Keeler
took command of the biggest crime scene in the history of the city.
Keeler’s boss, police commissioner Ed Davis, had
watched the marathon for about an hour with Governor Deval Patrick and other
VIPs before heading back to his house in Hyde Park, where he dropped off his
wife and joined a conference call with Vice President Joe Biden and top cops
from other big cities to discuss a controversial gun bill making its way
through Congress. Both Davis and Mayor Tom Menino were at the forefront of a
national gun reform package backed by Biden and President Barack Obama. Davis
took the call in his bedroom. It lasted 45 minutes.
As soon as he hung up with the vice president,
Davis’s phone rang. It was his second in command, Boston Police
Superintendent-in-Chief Dan Linskey.
“Hey, boss, I don’t know what we’ve got; there
are two explosions at the finish line.”
“What kind of explosions?” Davis asked.
“I don’t think they’re electrical in nature,” Linskey
replied.
Davis has had extensive international training
regarding the use of IEDs (improvised explosive devices), bombs, and other
methods of terrorist attacks. After the subway bombings in London in 2005,
which killed 52 people and injured more than 700 more, Davis spent time with
Scotland Yard officials and studied the attack—all the while thinking of the
uncanny similarities between that city’s mass transit system and Boston’s MBTA.
Immediately, the fact that there were two explosions had Davis concerned that
it could be a coordinated attack like so many he’d seen internationally. “I was
hoping it was a manhole explosion, but I didn’t like the sound of it,” Davis
later recalled.
“Are you there?” Davis asked Linskey.
“No, I’m in Kenmore Square. I’m racing up there
now. Making my way up there now.”
Davis could hear sirens in the background and
police radios blaring. He didn’t have his portable radio with him, so he asked
Linskey, “What are they saying on the radio?”
“It’s Danny Keeler. I can’t understand him,”
Linskey replied.
Davis knew the detective sergeant well. He also
knew Keeler was a Marine and was alarmed by the fact that something could
rattle the veteran cop. This had to be serious.
“Keeler’s calling for all the ambulances in the
city, and he says he’s got multiple amputations,” Linskey said.
It was then that Davis knew Boston had been
attacked. And knowing that such attacks often occur in threes, his attention
immediately turned toward protecting his officers and the public from a
possible third bomb. The bomb squad had been dispatched, and officers were
boldly checking each and every one of the hundreds of bags discarded on bloody
Boylston Street by terrified bystanders.
The commissioner’s next call was to Rick
DesLauriers, special agent in charge of Boston’s FBI office. He called for the
FBI’s bomb squad, also known as the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team (EOD), as
well as all SWAT units.
“All
right, I’m on my way,” said Des Lauriers, who was at the FBI’s headquarters at
One Center Plaza across from Boston City Hall.
“We are going to set up a command post at Ring Road; see me at Ring Road,”
Davis told him.
Davis ended the call, grabbed his service
weapon, and headed for the door of his home.
“What’s going on?” asked his wife.
“We may have been attacked,” he said in full
stride. “Turn on the TV and I’ll call you when I can.”
The tires on Davis’s vehicle screeched as he
pulled out of his driveway. He dialed Massachusetts State Police Colonel
Timothy Alben and asked him to send all available units, especially the bomb
squads and SWAT teams, to Boylston Street. The commissioner switched the radio
in his SUV to a special frequency used for mass-casualty events. He heard
multiple calls for ambulances. Radio chaos. Not quite panic, but as close to it
as he’d seen in his decorated career.
His next call was to Mayor Menino in the
hospital.
“Mr. Mayor, we’ve got a situation,” Davis told
him. “There were two explosions at the marathon finish line.”
“Jesus, does it sound like a bomb?” the mayor
asked.
“It’s not looking good, Mayor, but I’m not
certain until I get there,” Davis said. “They were reporting multiple
amputations, and that’s an indication that it was antipersonnel in nature. I’ll
get back to you as soon as I can.”
“Good luck,” the mayor said.
Menino had been informed of the situation before
the call from Ed Davis. Just before 3 p.m. that afternoon, one of the mayor’s
security officers came in and told him, “A bomb just blew up at the marathon.”
“Get more, get more information,” the mayor told
the cop. He then addressed his staff. “Let’s not get nervous. Everyone calm
down.”
After talking with Davis on the phone, Menino
sent his chief of staff, Mitchell Weiss, out to the command post near the
finish line to get a read on exactly what was going on.
The scene back on Boylston Street resembled a
war zone. Firefighter Phillip Skrabut, of Engine 17, District 7 in Dorchester,
was assigned to work between Dartmouth and Exeter streets, near the finish line
at Boylston Street. He was about 500 feet behind the finish line walking toward
the grandstands when the first bomb went off.
“I saw the blast and then saw a crowd of people
fall to the ground,” Skrabut wrote in a report.
When he heard the second explosion, he ran up
the sidewalk under the grandstand toward Exeter Street, then crossed the street
to the bombing site. Police and marathon volunteers were already tearing the barriers
away, so Skrabut jumped onto the sidewalk, where he found at least a dozen
severely injured people on the ground.
“I went to the closest victim to me,” he said.
He came across a high school student, Sydney Corcoran, of Lowell, who had been
watching the marathon with her mother, Celeste, and father, Kevin. The
raven-haired teenager was lying on the ground, conscious and crying. She had a
massive shrapnel wound to her right thigh with arterial bleeding.
Another firefighter handed Skrabut an orange scarf,
which he tied above the wound as a tourniquet. He also applied direct pressure
to try to stop the bleeding. A spectator who said he was a Marine came over and
asked how he could help.
“I had him place his hands where mine were and
told him to squeeze as hard as he could,” Skrabut wrote. “If not for him, I
would have had to stay and hold pressure on her leg,” Skrabut wrote. “His
actions no doubt kept her from bleeding to death.”
He then moved to another victim, a middle-aged
man who was conscious and was trying to get up. He appeared to have a broken
right leg and multiple shrapnel wounds to the face and body, but no
life-threatening injuries. “Calm down, sir, and try to breathe normally,”
Skrabut told him.
“Lay still until help arrives.”
He then turned to a woman in her late twenties
or early thirties. She had a severely deformed lower left leg with a blast
wound and an open leg fracture. Her right foot was twisted inward, and her
ankle joint was exposed. It was a horrific injury. He grabbed her left leg
above and below the wounds and held her. A marathon runner arrived.
“I believe he had a medical background because
he immediately took control of patient care, calling off her injuries very
systematically and calmly,” Skrabut wrote.
It was the firefighter who then began taking
directions from the civilian. The marathoner asked him for gauze, so Skrabut
gave him a roll from his medical pouch.
“Straighten her left leg and wrap the wound,”
the marathoner told Skrabut. He then did the same with her right ankle and
foot. The marathoner then instructed the firefighter to lift her legs, and he
wrapped her hips and legs together so she could be moved. She was put on a
backboard, and Boston EMS came over with a stretcher and took her away.
The firefighter never got the name of the
marathoner.
“But I am grateful for him to say the least,” he
said.
Just before the bomb blasts, firefighter Doug
Menard, a veteran of the Iraq war, was on roving patrol on the block bordered
by Dartmouth, Boylston, and Exeter streets. He was on Exeter Street just past
Marathon Sports heading toward Dartmouth Street when the first bomb went off.
He was about 15 seconds away from the scene when the explosion occurred.
“The blast was enough to feel like someone
kicked out the back of my knees, however I was able to catch my balance,”
Menard wrote in a report. “I turned immediately and saw a rush of running
wounded coming toward me through the smoke. I seemed to be the closest person
to ground zero who didn’t have a scratch on me.”
Before
he processed what was happening, he heard the second boom!
“D110 at the finish line. Multiple wounded.
Secondary devices. Watch out,” Menard barked through the radio. He saw roughly
20 people with severe lower leg wounds on the pavement. As he surveyed the
scene, he mentally “black tagged” one female—Krystle Campbell—who appeared
“gray” and “didn’t look like she was going to make it.”
Campbell was a 29-year-old golden-haired native
of Medford. She had been a top employee of celebrity chef Jasper White in his
Summer Shack restaurants, sometimes working 70 to 80 hours per week managing
the catering side of the business, which was quite extensive. She was the
all-American girl who loved her friends and family. Krystle had taken care of
her sick grandmother for nearly two years, and on the day of the marathon she
was just a few weeks shy of her 30th birthday.
As Menard stood near Krystle, a mother grabbed
his leg.
“She was covering her teenage daughter’s leg,”
Menard wrote. He looked down at the girl’s leg and saw it was severed just
below the knee. He found a cravat in his medical pouch and tied a tourniquet.
“The blood stopped and I moved on, even though
the girl and her mother pleaded for me to stay,” he wrote. Everyone needed
help.
A man next to them was on fire. He had smoke
rising from his shoulders and his clothes were ablaze. Menard patted out the
flames and checked him for wounds. He had deep cuts and shrapnel wounds to his
back. His tattered shirt kept smoking from the “hot shrapnel” in his back.
A Boston cop arrived to help and kept patting
out the smoking garments while Menard moved on to other wounded. He went back
to Krystle Campbell, where another woman, who turned out to be her friend Karen
Rand, was holding her hand. Karen and Krystle had come to the marathon to watch
Karen’s boyfriend finish the road race. Menard noted that Karen’s lower leg was
“blown apart.”
He didn’t have another cravat, but a runner
sprinted over and handed the firefighter his running belt. Menard and the
runner tied a tourniquet around her leg. A marathon volunteer handed him
multiple rolls of gauze, which could also be used for tourniquets. Despite
their efforts, Karen later lost the leg.
An EMT asked Menard to help cut off a patient’s
clothing. As he assisted the medic, someone yelled for help inside Marathon
Sports. He ran through the shattered front window of the store and found five
injured people.
There were civilian doctors working on a woman
in the doorway. Menard grabbed a gauze roll and put a tourniquet on the woman’s
leg. The firefighter and a couple of civilians helped him drag the woman out of
the store and onto the sidewalk so that EMTs could take her to the hospital. He
then ran toward another firefighter who was working on a man with serious
injuries. Menard helped his fellow firefighter put the man on a backboard, and
they carried him to the medical tent in Copley Square.
Another Boston firefighter, Mike Foley, was busy
saving lives in front of Forum. After the second blast, he hopped the barricade
and came upon a man whose clothes were on fire. He also saw a woman and a
child—later identified as Lingzi Lu and eight-year-old Martin Richard—lying on
the ground. They were dead. Foley saw a severed foot on the ground next to the
curb and felt nauseous. “The ground was dark—scorched from the explosion and
covered with blood and tissue,” he recalls.
He came across a man with amputations, who was
trying to sit up. Foley grabbed a strap from an EMT and fashioned a tourniquet
to the man’s right thigh. He waved over a cop.
“Run to the engine and grab me a Stokes basket,”
he hollered. A Stokes basket is a metal and plastic stretcher used to move
patients. They lifted the man onto the basket and slid him into a waiting
ambulance.
Foley ran back to the scene and helped an EMT
load another severely injured patient onto a backboard, then carried him to an
ambulance that had more room. He rushed back and helped EMTs load yet another
patient into a police van. He gave another survivor oxygen and helped place her
into the same police van.
He then helped direct trucks and ambulances to
and from the scene before he was ordered to head back to Engine 33’s
headquarters on Boylston Street to “take cover from a possible third device.”
Firefighter Adalberto Rodriguez thanked God that
he had made the decision earlier that day to carry his medical bag. Patrolling
the area between Hereford and Fairfield streets, he was keeping an eye out for
dehydrated runners and spectators in need of assistance. He’d helped a few
dehydrated folks that morning, as well as a couple of people with “flu-like
symptoms,” but it was an otherwise uneventful day. That would soon change as he
would be thrust into the chaos and tasked with helping rescue one of the most
vulnerable of the marathon-day victims.
After the blasts, Rodriguez sprinted toward
Forum, where he saw people tearing down metal partitions to get to the wounded.
He helped a man with shrapnel in his legs. Rodriguez cut the man’s pants off
and cleaned and wrapped his wounds. He was then directed to a little girl who’d
lost her left leg—it was Jane Richard. The stunned firefighter held pressure on
the arteries above the girl’s injury. He helped put her on a gurney, and the
girl was taken away in an ambulance. His attention turned to the girl’s father,
Bill Richard, who was holding his son Martin in his arms, wailing.
“Don’t let him die, don’t let him die!” the
father cried.
Rodriguez’s heart ached at the sound of Bill
Richard’s screams. He bent down and examined Martin’s injuries and was certain
the boy was already gone. Still, he tried to calm the anguished dad as best he
could, but Bill Richard was inconsolable.
Another boy suffering from severe leg
lacerations was lying next to Martin. Rodriguez assumed it was the boy’s
brother. But it wasn’t. It was 11-year-old Aaron Hern, a California boy who had
been standing next to Martin at the time of the explosion. The same shrapnel
that tore through Aaron’s leg had killed Martin. Tourniquets were tied around
Aaron’s leg, and the boy was led to an ambulance. Rodriguez moved on to another
victim.
His third patient was an adult male “with
shrapnel all over his entire body.” The man had severe injuries to his left
leg. Rodriguez quickly wrapped the man’s wounds to slow the bleeding and helped
get him into a police van.
He ran back to the scene and saw EMTs giving CPR
to a woman who lay motionless on the sidewalk. He later learned the woman was
BU graduate student Lingzi Lu. Several people were tying tourniquets around her
wounds, desperately trying to save the young Chinese woman. But Lu’s injuries
were far too severe. She was bleeding out rapidly. Seconds later, she was dead.
In death, she was smiling. Krystle Campbell
looked serene as she lay on a stretcher in the back room of the medical tent on
Boylston Street. Danny Keeler didn’t know who she was as the young woman had no
identification, driver’s license, or ATM card on her body. An attendant turned
Campbell onto her stomach briefly while Keeler inspected her injuries further.
Her skin was charred, and her back had been blown apart by scalding shrapnel.
Keeler thought about the anguish and anxiety felt by families across New
England—across the country—who had yet to hear from their loved ones at the
marathon. He thought about his own kids. Keeler looked down at the lifeless
body on the stretcher and silently grieved for her parents, whoever they were.
Keeler rounded up a group of detectives and
brought them over to the California Pizza Kitchen restaurant, located inside
the Prudential Center mall, to decompress for a moment after what they’d seen
and done during the past hour. Keeler would never admit it, but at that point, he
needed a break, too. He could not shake the image of Denise Richard leaning
down over her son Martin. Keeler’s eyes welled up again at the thought. Stay
focused, dude, he whispered to himself.
His mind then shifted again to his own family.
His cell phone had been lighting up. Keeler’s kids and his girlfriend, Carol,
had been watching the live coverage on television and he had yet to speak to
them. Keeler fished for his cell phone and called home.
“How bad is it?” Carol asked.
“It’s a mess,” Keeler responded. “We’re gonna be
down here for awhile.”
“How’re you doing?”
He paused before answering. Sadness quickly
turned to rage.
“We’re gonna get these motherfuckers!”
Danny Keeler had investigated over 200 murders
in the city of Boston, and now he had at least three more to solve: those of
two women who just a few hours earlier had been brimming with life, and that of
a little boy who would never have the chance to grow up. For years, Keeler had
been the shoulder to cry on and the man to call on those torturous nights when
grieving family members felt as if they couldn’t go on any longer. The crimes
that haunted him the most were those against children—children like the boy who
now lay under a white sheet in front of Forum.
His career up to this point had been one of both
triumph and frustrating disappointment. When Keeler joined the department in
1979, he stood out from his peers almost immediately. In August 1980,
Keeler—still just a rookie—ripped off his uniform and jumped 60 feet off the
Boston University Bridge into the Charles River to save a man who was
attempting suicide. Through Keeler’s quick actions, the man lived, and Keeler
was awarded the department’s Medal of Honor. He joined the Boston Police
homicide unit in 1992. At the time, the unit was overwhelmed by a
record-setting number of murders—most of them unsolved. Keeler got to work
right away. In November 1992, he walked into Carney Hall at Boston College and
arrested a night school student named Michael Finkley for the deadly shooting,
two years earlier, of Frederick “Peanut” Brinson on a busy Dorchester street in
broad daylight. Finkley was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Keeler
later captured the killer of 86-year-old Nordella Newson. The elderly woman had
been stabbed and strangled by a drug addict in an attempt to steal $500. Keeler
was working and closing the books on murder cases at breakneck speed. His
success earned him the nickname “Mr. Homicide” on the streets and inside the
courtrooms of Boston.
The Brinson and Newson murders were slam-dunk
cases, but others proved more difficult. First was the murder of nine-year-old
Jermaine Goffigan on Halloween in 1994. Goffigan was shot on his grandmother’s
front porch while counting candy. The murder rocked the city, and Keeler and
his partner, acting on a tip, made a swift arrest. The suspect, a teenager
named Donnell Johnson, was later convicted and would serve five years in
prison. The conviction was withdrawn and Johnson was released, however, when
new evidence made it clear that eyewitnesses had misidentified him. Two other
men pleaded guilty to killing Goffigan.
Johnson sued both Keeler and William Mahoney,
who had supervised the investigation, claiming that they had initially withheld
from prosecutors the alibi Johnson had given on the night of his arrest.
Despite calling the allegations against the two homicide detectives “deeply
troubling,” the judge threw out Johnson’s lawsuit. Mahoney was suspended
without pay for 30 days. No discipline was taken against Keeler.
In 1999, Keeler got an audiotaped confession
from an 18-year-old man who admitted to being present as his 14-year-old
pregnant girlfriend was buried alive on the grounds of the abandoned Boston
State Hospital. That man, Kyle Bryant, told Keeler that he had hid in the
bushes while his friend Lord Hampton stabbed, choked, and bashed the girl’s
head in with a rock. The victim, Chauntae Jones, was eight months pregnant with
Bryant’s child at the time. Hampton admitted to investigators that Bryant
wanted Jones killed out of fear that her family would accuse him of statutory
rape. “As I’m throwing dirt on her, he’s [Bryant] jumping up and down on her
and yelling, ‘Hurry up and die, bitch,’” Hampton told police. “She gasped all
the way through until she was completely buried.”
Yet the jury refused to convict Bryant because
it felt that prosecutors had not presented enough evidence. There was no blood,
no fingerprints to connect Bryant to the grisly murder. When the verdict was
announced, both Keeler and the family of Chauntae Jones were stunned and
outraged. The victim’s mother had to be restrained by five court officers while
her cousin vowed to kill Kyle Bryant one day. Danny Keeler understood their
explosive reaction.
“You
tell the disenfranchised people of this world like the Jones family the system
works,” Keeler told the Boston Herald. “We told them, ‘Don’t react
to the situation with violence. Wait, we’ve got him, he’s confessed.’ And now
this? They believed in us and we let them down. There wasn’t one person on that
jury who couldn’t say, ‘I’m holding out. I know he did it’? It was a total lack
of civic responsibility.”
Justice would finally catch up to Bryant, but
not before he killed again. He was convicted nine years later of fatally
shooting a man outside a Brockton bar in 2010.
Keeler
faced scrutiny himself when he arrested a man accused of decapitating his own
brother. The detective made the bold arrest while being videotaped by an ABC
News crew for the documentary Boston 24/7. William Leyden had
discovered his brother John’s headless body rolled up in a blanket and hidden
under a bed inside his East Boston apartment. Keeler pointed the guilty finger
at Leyden and provided ABC News with unprecedented access to the man’s arrest.
Leyden was booked and released on $100,000 bail, but he lost his job at a print
shop as the cloud of guilt loomed over his head. Three years after the arrest,
a suspected serial killer named Eugene Mc Collom admitted to killing John
Leyden, whom he had befriended at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and burying
his head at a park in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Leyden’s sister, Mary Ellen
Dakin, had strong words for Detective Keeler, whom she blamed for inflicting
further damage on her grieving family. She blasted the Boston Police and the
“misguided influence” of Danny Keeler, and William Leyden called the detective
an “incompetent and self-serving cop.”
Mr. Homicide was now Mr. Controversy. One of the
reasons Keeler remained on the job was the fact that he was one of the most
instinctive detectives the department had ever seen. He also knew how to work a
crime scene as good as, if not better than, anyone.
Boylston Street was now the biggest crime scene
Keeler had ever encountered. He walked behind the bar at the California Pizza
Kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Jameson’s. He poured himself a shot, downed it,
and thought about what to do next. Keeler could feel the FBI beginning to close
ranks and take control of the crime scene, so he grabbed an ATF agent and
headed back to Boylston Street to develop what evidence they could.
Governor
Patrick would later tell the Boston Globe that the handoff
between Boston police and the FBI was “seamless.” “There wasn’t any fussing
about it,” he claimed.
In truth, it was a tug of war from the outset.
First, the FBI agent in charge had to be convinced it was an act of terrorism.
Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley, who
was also running for mayor, witnessed the bombings while he was campaigning at
the finish line. “Agent Rick DesLauriers seemed panicked when we first spoke,”
Conley recalls. “He kept asking me in an agitated way, ‘Is this terrorism? Do
you think this is terrorism?’”
Conley told DesLauiers that “of course” they
were dealing with terrorism—either foreign or domestic.
The scene had been commandeered by the FBI and
access was restricted, including to Boston police and other city investigators.
“Let’s develop it [the crime scene] now,” the
ATF agent told his FBI counterpart.
“We’re going to wait.”
“No, no. Let’s get the fucking lights down here
now and let’s start working on this now.”
The FBI agent refused to budge.
Word got back to Keeler. He returned to Boylston
Street and could not believe the bodies of Lingzi Lu and Martin Richard had not
been moved yet.
“Our guys were absolutely beside themselves that
Martin Richard was still left on that street,” Keeler says with a trace of
anger still present in his voice. “It was positively no reasonable explanation
other than the inexperience of the FBI to leave that kid there.”
Martin did not look like the photograph his
family would later release to the media. His face and body were covered in
soot. Some officers fresh to the scene thought he was African American at
first. Keeler and his men were furious. There were heated disputes, and some
officers stood nose to nose with the FBI agents. The Boston cops wouldn’t
budge, especially Boston Police Captain Frank Armstrong, a father of five, who
stood his ground and stood vigil over the boy’s body, while another officer
stayed with Lingzi Lu.
“Whoever this boy is,” Armstrong said to Keeler,
“I want to be able to tell his father that ‘Your son was never left alone.’”
Captain Armstrong stayed with the bodies of
Martin Richard and Lingzi Lu until they were finally removed at 2 a.m.
“We
stood there not so much as cops, or veterans, but as fathers,” Armstrong later
told the Boston Herald. “Every one of us there that night thought
but for the grace of God that could be my child coming in to watch the marathon
on a beautiful day.”
Earlier that same Monday night—just hours after
his bombs had blown apart so many lives—one of the Tsarnaev brothers wrote a
message of his own.
“Ain’t no love in the heart of the city,”
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev tweeted. “Stay safe people.”
He followed that Twitter message with another at
12:34 a.m. on Tuesday. “There are people that know the truth but remain silent
& there are people that speak the truth but we don’t hear them cuz they’re
the minority.”
The full Boston Strong ebook is available for $1.99 on all platforms this month.