Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is the convicted Boston Marathon bomber. I hope one day the terrorist rots in hell for what he did in 2013 to claim the lives of three people – including an eight-year-old boy – and injure hundreds more.
This story is not about him or his despicable deed. Nor is it about his dead brother and co-conspirator. Both sought to visit carnage on the race dominating the Massachusetts holiday of Patriots’ Day that commemorates the start of the Revolutionary War.
They acted by the simple expedient of placing two pressure-cooker bombs filled with nails and other metal debris to inflict maximum injury that exploded among the spectators watching the finish of the contest.
Three people were killed and nearly 300 others wounded. Seventeen people lost limbs in the blast with countless more left carrying the physical – and mental – scars to this day.
This is about the events immediately after the ethnic Chechens kicked the lid off hell and tried to scare, coerce, defeat, and humiliate the people of Boston in particular and wider America in general.
File/ A person who injured in an explosion near the finish line of the 117th Boston Marathon is taken away from the scene on a stretcher. (David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
First responders load injured people into an ambulance where two explosions occurred along the final stretch of the Boston Marathon on Boylston Street in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., on Monday, April 15, 2013. (Kelvin Ma/Bloomberg via Getty)
They failed on all counts. The reason is simple.
The United States is a land of freedom. It is peopled by some of the most generous and caring men and women on the planet who are happy to work together in common cause.
I spent a week in Boston witnessing those virtues after the bombing covering what followed for the Toronto Sun newspaper along with my colleagues.
An Australian working for a Canadian news outlet reporting on a terrorist attack in a major U.S. city.
I was privileged to watch as the city healed its soul and the entire population worked to help each other through the trauma of events.
It wasn’t easy.
Oh it was easy for me. I was alive and unscathed. The pain was being felt around Boston, with 27 local hospitals suffering from the start as the first responders came and went delivering the mounting casualties.
File/Ambulances line up on Huntington Avenue after multiple explosions went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 15, 2013. ( Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Then the dead were identified. The numbers of injured rose again.
Streets around Boston’s center were closed. People sent home. A general curfew was instigated and the commercial air space shut down over the city.
Soon police stood on every corner while the National Guard did its job providing security and comfort by its sheer presence on empty, echoing streets.
U..S military Humvees rolling down a deserted Boylston Street April 16, 2013, which is considered a crime scene after two explosions rocked the Boston Marathon on Monday. (JOHN MOTTERN/AFP via Getty Images)
File/Metro SWAT team arrive on the scene at the corner of Dartmouth and Stuart Streets, after two explosions went off near the finish line of the 117th Boston Marathon. (Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
After the initial shock the question was asked: who did this and why.
The FBI’s Computer Analysis and Response Team moved quickly, examining video of the bomb site along with the comings and goings immediately before and after the blast.
Analysts pinpointed two possible suspects. Then they called a press conference, released images to the world and soon after they gave the murderers’ names.
The hunt was on.
“Today, we are enlisting the public’s help to identify the two suspects,” Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston field office, told a packed news conference on that Thursday, some 72 hours after the terror attack.
DesLauriers described both men as “armed and extremely dangerous” and cautioned the public not to take any action on their own if either was seen.
But now they had pictures. The suspects could be seen. Faces could be recognized and the public urged to be cautious – but act as one to find and report on the whereabouts of the two terrorists.
File/FBI Special Agent Richard DesLauriers and other investigators release images taken from a security camera of persons of interest in the twin bombings at the Boston Marathon during a news conference on April 18, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
“We know the public will play a critical role in locating these two suspects,” DesLauriers said. “Somebody out there knows these individuals. No bit of information is too small for us to see.
“Though it may be difficult, the nation is counting on those with information to come forward.”
The public responded to that call. A tip was telephoned in.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was subsequently shot and killed after a car chase and shootout with police while Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was apprehended after being found hiding in a boat parked on a residential property in Watertown, Massachusetts.
With that the pressure went off. The city sought to get back to normal. In the days after the words words “Boston Strong” became a byword for its own resilience and that of its people.
Last year the Supreme Court on reinstated the death penalty for now-29-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
File/Police officers enter the memorial service for slain Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police officer Sean Collier on April 24, 2013 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Collier was shot by the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, after their identities were determined and a manhunt was launched. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The court’s move reversed a 2020 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and to reinstate the district court’s earlier ruling.
The 127th running of the Boston Marathon takes place Monday.