The Boston Marathon Bombing Part II

 

Other arrests, detentions, and prosecutions

People detained and released

On April 15, several people who were near the scene of the blast were taken into custody and questioned about the bombing, including a Saudi man whom police stopped as he was walking away from the explosion; they detained him when some of his responses made them uncomfortable. Law enforcement searched his residence in a Boston suburb, and the man was found to have no connection to the attack. An unnamed U.S. official said, "he was just at the wrong place at the wrong time".

On the night of April 18, two men who were riding in a taxi in the vicinity of the shootout were arrested and released shortly thereafter when police determined that they were not involved in the Marathon attacks. Another man was arrested several blocks from the site of the shootout and was forced to strip naked by police who feared that he might have concealed explosives. He was released that evening after a brief investigation determined that he was an innocent bystander.

Ibragim Todashev

On May 22, the FBI interrogated Ibragim Todashev in Orlando, Florida, who was a Chechen from Boston. During the interrogation, he was shot and killed by an FBI agent who claimed that Todashev attacked him. The New York Times quoted an unnamed law enforcement official as saying that Todashev had confessed to a triple homicide, and had implicated Tsarnaev as well. Todashev's father claimed his son was innocent and that federal investigators were biased against Chechens and made up their case against him.

Dias Kadyrbayev, Azamat Tazhayakov, and Robel Phillipos

Personal backgrounds

Robel Phillipos (19) was a U.S. citizen of Ethiopian descent living in Cambridge who was arrested and faced with charges of knowingly making false statements to police. He graduated from high school in 2011 with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.[232] Dias Kadyrbayev (19) and Azamat Tazhayakov (20) were natives of Kazakhstan living in the U.S. They were Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's roommates in an off-campus housing complex in New Bedford, Massachusetts where Tsarnaev had sometimes stayed.

Phillipos, Kadyrbayev, Tazhayakov, and Tsarnaev entered the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in the fall of 2011 and knew each other well. After seeing photos of Tsarnaev on television, they traveled to his dorm room where Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov retrieved a backpack and laptop belonging to Tsarnaev, while Phillipos acted as lookout. The backpack was discarded, but police recovered it and its contents in a nearby New Bedford landfill on April 26. During interviews, the men initially denied visiting the dorm room but later admitted their actions.

Arrests and legal proceedings

Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov were arrested by police at the off-campus housing complex during the night of April 18–19. An unidentified girlfriend of one of the men was also arrested, but all three were soon released.

Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov were re-arrested in New Bedford on April 20 and held on immigration-related violations. They appeared before a federal immigration judge on May 1 and were charged with overstaying their student visas. That same day, they were charged criminally with:

willfully conspir(ing) with each other to commit an offense against the United States... by knowingly destroying, concealing, and covering up objects belonging to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, namely, a backpack containing fireworks and a laptop computer, with the intent to impede, obstruct, and influence the criminal investigation of the Marathon bombing.

Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov were indicted by a federal grand jury on August 8, 2013, on charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice for helping Dzhokhar Tsarnaev dispose of a laptop computer, fireworks, and a backpack after the bombing. Each faced up to 25 years in prison and deportation if convicted. Tazhayakov was convicted of obstruction of justice and conspiracy on July 21, 2014.

Kadyrbayev pleaded guilty to obstruction charges on August 22, 2014, but sentencing was delayed pending the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Yates v. United States. Kadyrbayev was sentenced to six years in prison in June 2015. He was deported to Kazakhstan in October 2018.

Tazhayakov pleaded not guilty and went to trial, arguing that "Kadyrbayev was the mastermind behind destroying the evidence and that Tazhayakov only 'attempted obstruction'." Jurors returned a guilty verdict, however, and he was sentenced to 42 months (3+1⁄2 years) in prison in June 2015. U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock gave a lighter sentence to Tazhayakov than to Kadyrbayev, who was viewed as more culpable. Tazhayakov was released in May 2016 and subsequently deported.

Phillipos was arrested and faced charges of knowingly making false statements to police. He was released on $100,000 bail and placed under house confinement with an ankle monitor. He was convicted on October 28, 2014 on two charges of lying about being in Tsarnaev's dorm room. He later acknowledged that he was in the room while two friends removed a backpack containing potential evidence relating to the bombing.

Phillipos faced a maximum sentence of eight years' imprisonment on each count. In June 2015, U.S. District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock sentenced him to three years in prison. Phillipos filed an appeal, but his sentence was upheld in court on February 28, 2017.

Phillipos was released from prison in Philadelphia on February 26, 2018 and began serving a three-year probationary period.

Khairullozhon Matanov

A federal indictment was unsealed against Khairullozhon Matanov on May 30, 2014, charging him with "one count of destroying, altering, and falsifying records, documents, and tangible objects in a federal investigation, specifically information on his computer, and three counts of making materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements in a federal terrorism investigation". Matanov bought dinner for the two Tsarnaev brothers 40 minutes after the bombing. After the Tsarnaev brothers' photos were released to the public, Matanov viewed the photos on the CNN and FBI websites before attempting to reach Dzhokhar, and then tried to give away his cell phone and delete hundreds of documents from his computer. Prosecutors said that Matanov attempted to mislead investigators about the nature of his relationship with the brothers and to conceal that he shared their philosophy of violence.

Matanov was originally from Kyrgyzstan. He came to the U.S. in 2010 on a student visa, and later claimed asylum. He attended Quincy College for two years before dropping out to become a taxicab driver. He was living in Quincy, Massachusetts, at the time of his arrest, and was a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

In March 2015, Matanov pleaded guilty to all four counts. In June 2015, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Victims

Deaths

Three people were killed as a direct result of the bombings. Krystle Marie Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Medford, Massachusetts, was killed by the first bomb. Lü Lingzi (Chinese: 吕令子), a 23-year-old Chinese national and Boston University statistics graduate student from Shenyang, Liaoning, and 8-year-old Martin William Richard from the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, were both killed by the second bomb.

Sean Allen Collier, 27 years old, was shot and killed by the bombers as he sat in his patrol car on April 18, at about 10:48 p.m. He was an MIT police officer, and had been with the Somerville Auxiliary Police Department from 2006 to 2009. He died from multiple gunshot wounds.

Boston Police Department officer Dennis Simmonds died on April 10, 2014, from injuries that he received during the Watertown shootout a year before.

Injuries

According to the Boston Public Health Commission, 264 civilians were treated at 27 local hospitals. Eleven days later, 29 remained hospitalized, one in critical condition. Many victims had lower leg injuries and shrapnel wounds, which indicated that the devices were low to the ground. At least 16 civilians lost limbs, at the scene or by surgical amputation, and three lost more than one limb.

Doctors described removing "ball-bearing type" metallic beads a little larger than BBs and small carpenter-type nails about 0.5 to 1 inch (1 to 3 cm) long. Similar objects were found at the scene. The New York Times cited doctors as saying that the bombs mainly injured legs, ankles, and feet because they were low to the ground, instead of fatally injuring abdomens, chests, shoulders, and heads. Some victims had perforated eardrums.

MBTA police officer Richard H. Donohue Jr. (33) was critically wounded during a firefight with the bombers just after midnight on April 19. He lost almost all of his blood, and his heart stopped for 45 minutes, during which time he was kept alive by cardiopulmonary resuscitation.[citation needed] The Boston Globe reported that Donohue may have been accidentally shot by a fellow officer.

Marc Fucarile lost his right leg and received severe burns and shrapnel wounds. He was the last victim released from hospital care on July 24, 2013. Courtney Kelleigh, who ran for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, had hypothermia with no permanent damage.

Reactions

Law enforcement, local and national politicians, and various heads of state reacted quickly to the bombing, generally condemning the act and expressing sympathies for the victims. Spontaneous, improvised temporary memorials appeared at the sites of the deaths in Boston and Cambridge. Over the next few years, permanent memorials were constructed and dedicated at these locations.

Aid to victims

The One Fund Boston was established by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston mayor Thomas Menino to make monetary distributions to bombing victims. The Boston Strong concert at the TD Garden in Boston on May 30, 2013, benefited the One Fund, which ultimately received more than $69.8 million in donations. A week after the bombing, crowd funding websites received more than 23,000 pledges promising more than $2 million for the victims, their families, and others affected by the bombing. The Israel Trauma Coalition for Response and Preparedness sent six psychologists and specialists from Israel to help Boston emergency responders, government administrators, and community people develop post-terrorist attack recovery strategies.

Local reactions

Numerous sporting events, concerts, and other public entertainment were postponed or canceled in the days following the bombing. The MBTA public transit system was under heavy National Guard and police presence and it was shut down a second time April 19 during the manhunt.

In the days after the bombing, makeshift memorials began to spring up along the cordoned-off area surrounding Boylston Street. The largest was located on Arlington Street, the easternmost edge of the barricades, starting with flowers, tokens, and T-shirts. In June, the Makeshift Memorial located in Copley Square was taken down and the memorial objects located there were moved to the archives in West Roxbury for cleaning, fumigation, and archiving.

Five years after the bombing, The Boston Globe reported all of the items from the memorials were being housed in a climate controlled environment, free of charge, by the storage company, Iron Mountain in Northborough, Massachusetts. Some of the items are also being stored in Boston's city archives in West Roxbury.

Boston University established a scholarship in honor of Lü Lingzi, a student who died in the bombing.[300] University of Massachusetts Boston did the same in honor of alumna and bombing victim Krystle Campell.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology established a scholarship, and erected a large abstract environmental sculpture outdoors called the Sean Collier Memorial, both in memory of slain MIT Police officer Sean Collier. The open-arched monolithic stone enclosure was proposed, designed, funded, fabricated, and installed on campus in less than two years after the bombing, and formally unveiled on April 29, 2015.

One study conducted by the Institute for Public Service at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts, recorded the mental health and emotional response of various survivors, for three years following the bombing. In doing so, it reviewed the kinds of aid that were available in local hospitals and offered advice on how a person or community may be healed. This study also mentions that after recognizing the downgraded media coverage of people in the city being killed or injured on a daily basis, the city of Boston "applied for and received a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation to be part of their 100 resilient cities network and to develop a cross cutting resilience strategy".

However, there was rising anti-Muslim sentiment online and locally in the weeks following the bombing, causing distress in the local Muslim community and making some afraid to leave their homes.

Three stone pillars lit by abstract sculptural bronze lighting columns memorializing three victims were installed at the two separate bombing sites on August 19, 2019. Two bronze sidewalk bricks were installed to memorialize police officers killed in the aftermath, and cherry trees were planted nearby to bloom each April.

National reactions

President Barack Obama addressed the nation after the attack. He said that the perpetrators were still unknown, but that the government would "get to the bottom of this" and that those responsible "will feel the full weight of justice". He ordered flags to half-staff until April 20 on all federal buildings as "a mark of respect for the victims of the senseless acts of violence perpetrated on April 15, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts".

Moments of silence were held at various events across the country, including at the openings of the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and NYMEX on the day after the bombing. Numerous special events were held, including marathons and other runs. Islamic organizations in the United States condemned the attacks.

International reactions

The bombing was denounced and condolences were offered by many international leaders as well as leading figures from international sport. Security measures were increased worldwide in the wake of the attack.

In China, users posted condolence messages on Weibo in response to the death of Lü Lingzi. Chris Buckley of The New York Times said "Ms. Lu's death gave a melancholy face to the attraction that America and its colleges exert over many young Chinese." Laurie Burkitt of The Wall Street Journal said "Ms. Lu's death resonates with many in China" due to the one-child policy.

Organizers of the London Marathon, which was held six days after the Boston bombing, reviewed security arrangements for their event. Hundreds of extra police officers were drafted in to provide a greater presence on the streets, and a record 700,000 spectators lined the streets. Runners in London observed a 30-second silence in respect for the victims of Boston shortly before the race began, and many runners wore black ribbons on their vests. Organizers also pledged to donate US$3 to a fund for Boston Marathon victims for every person who finished the race.

Organizers of the 2013 Vancouver Sun Run, which was held on April 21, 2013, donated $10 from every late entry for the race to help victims of the bombing at the Boston Marathon. Jamie Pitblado, vice-president of promotions for The Vancouver Sun and The Province, said the money would go to One Fund Boston, an official charity that collected donations for the victims and their families. Sun Run organizers raised anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000. There were over 48,000 participants, many dressed in blue and yellow (Boston colors) with others wearing Boston Red Sox caps.

Petr Gandalovic, ambassador of the Czech Republic, released a statement after noticing much confusion on Facebook and Twitter between his nation and the Chechen Republic. "The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities – the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation."

Security was also stepped up in Singapore in response to online threats made on attacking several locations in the city-state and the Singapore Marathon in December. Two suspects were investigated and one was eventually arrested for making false bomb threats.

Russian reaction

The Russian government said that special attention would be paid to security at upcoming international sports events in Russia, including the 2014 Winter Olympics. According to the Russian embassy in the U.S., President Vladimir Putin condemned the bombing as a "barbaric crime" and "stressed that the Russian Federation will be ready, if necessary, to assist in the U.S. authorities' investigation". He urged closer cooperation of security services with Western partners but other Russian authorities and mass media blamed the U.S. authorities for negligence as they warned the U.S. of the Tsarnaevs. Moreover Russian authorities and mass media since the spring of 2014 blame the United States for politically motivated false information about the lack of response from Russian authorities after subsequent U.S. requests. As proof a letter from the Russian FSB was shown to the members of an official U.S. Congressional delegation to Moscow during their visit. This letter with information about Tsarnaev (including his biography details, connections and phone number) had been sent from the FSB to the FBI and CIA during March 2011.

Republican U.S. Senators Saxby Chambliss and Richard Burr reported that Russian authorities had separately asked both the FBI (at least twice: during March and November 2011) and the CIA (September 2011) to look carefully into Tamerlan Tsarnaev and provide more information about him back to Russia. FSB secretly recorded phone conversations between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother (they vaguely and indirectly discussed jihad) and sent these to the FBI as evidence of possible extremist links within the family. However, while Russia offered US intelligence services warnings that Tsarnaev planned to link up with extremist groups abroad, an FBI investigation yielded no evidence to support those claims at the time. In addition, subsequent U.S. requests for additional information about Tsarnaev went unanswered by the Russians.

Chechen reactions

On April 19, 2013, the press-secretary of the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, issued a statement that, inter alia, read: "The Boston bombing suspects have nothing to do with Chechnya". On the same day, Kadyrov was reported by The Guardian to have written on Instagram:

Any attempt to make a link between Chechnya and the Tsarnaevs, if they are guilty, is in vain. They grew up in the U.S., their views and beliefs were formed there. The roots of evil must be searched for in America. The whole world must battle with terrorism. We know this better than anyone. We wish recover [sic] to all the victims and share Americans' feeling of sorrow.

Akhmed Zakayev, head of the secular wing of the Chechen separatist movement, now in exile in London, condemned the bombing as "terrorist" and expressed condolences to the families of the victims. Zakayev denied that the bombers were in any way representative of the Chechen people, saying that "the Chechen people never had and can not have any hostile feelings toward the United States and its citizens".

The Mujahideen of the Caucasus Emirate Province of Dagestan, the Caucasian Islamist organization in both Chechnya and Dagestan, denied any link to the bombing or the Tsarnaev brothers and stated that it was at war with Russia, not the United States. It also said that it had sworn off violence against civilians since 2012.

During the manhunt for the perpetrators of the bombing, Governor Deval Patrick said "we are asking people to shelter in place". The request was highly effective; most people stayed home, causing Boston, Watertown, and Cambridge to come to a virtual standstill. According to Time magazine, "media described residents complying with a 'lockdown order,' but in reality the governor's security measure was a request". Scott Silliman, emeritus director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke Law School, said that the shelter-in-place request was voluntary.

The shelter-in-place directive was criticized by some commentators. Michael Cohen of The Observer said that Americans have little experience with daily terrorism compared to some countries and "are more primed to ... assume the absolute worst". Cohen wrote that it was not the first time dangerous murderers have been on the loose in a large American city (citing Christopher Dorner in 2013 and the Beltway sniper attacks in 2002), but noted that "lockdown" measures were not used in those cases. Former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul criticized what he described as a "military-style takeover of parts of Boston" during the investigation and wrote that "this unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself".

Haaretz's Chemi Salev wrote that "in terms of cost-benefit analysis, from the evil terrorist's point of view, the Boylston Street bombings and their aftermath can only be viewed as a resounding triumph" since the "relatively amateurish" terrorists managed to intimidate a vast number of people and got a maximum amount of publicity. Responding to Salev in The New York Times, Ross Douthat commented that the massive manhunt operation might deter other amateur terrorists, but not hard-core terrorists such as Mohammed Atta. Douthat argued that out-of-the-ordinary measures can only be used when terrorism itself is out-of-the-ordinary: if attacks started to occur more often, people would not be as willing to comply with shelter-in-place commands, yet once a terrorist has been hunted with such an operation, it is hard to justify why such measures should not be taken the next time.

The National Lawyers Guild and some news outlets questioned the constitutionality of the door-to-door searches conducted by law enforcement officers looking for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

One Boston Day

On the second anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombings, Mayor Marty Walsh established April 15, the day of the bombings, as an official and permanent holiday called "One Boston Day", dedicated to conducting random acts of kindness and helping others out. Over the past eight years, some examples of acts of kindness being done have been donating blood to the American Red Cross, donating food to the Greater Boston Food Bank, opening free admission in places like the Museum of Science and Museum of Fine Arts, donating shoes to homeless shelters, and donating to military and veteran charities.

Conspiracy theories

A number of conspiracy theories arose in the immediate wake of the attacks and after more information about the Tsarnaev brothers came to light. This can be common in the aftermath of acts of domestic terrorism, especially the September 11th attacks. In the days following the attacks, some conspiracy theories arose on the internet claiming they were false flag attacks committed by the United States government. As more information about the backgrounds of the Tsarnaev Brothers came to light, further conspiracy theories were disseminated. One claim, made by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's defense attorney as well as some journalists, was that the FBI had tried to recruit Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an FBI informant in 2011. The FBI denied this claim in a press release, stating that "the Tsarnaev brothers were never sources for the FBI nor did the FBI attempt to recruit them as sources". The FBI is not required to release information on informants, and classified information on sources of intelligence constitutes an exception to the 25-year declassification window established by Executive Order 13526.

In 2011, a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev was murdered in Waltham, Massachusetts, along with two others. After the 2013 attacks, the investigation was reopened with Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a new suspect. The failure of the 2011 investigation to identify Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a major suspect led to claims among conspiracy theorists that the investigation of the 2011 Waltham triple murder had been suppressed by the FBI in order to maintain Tsarnaev's informant status. Theorists also cite the fact that the FBI has been criticized for an alleged practice under former director James Comey of encouraging confidential informants to attempt terrorist attacks. This alleged practice, combined with disputed claims of connections between the Tsarnaev brothers and intelligence services, have given rise to a conspiracy theory that the United States government had foreknowledge of the Tsarnaev brothers' plans to commit a terrorist attack, or that the attack was made at the direction of intelligence services. The Tsarnaev brother's uncle, Said-Hussein Tsarnaev, and other members of the Tsarnaev family have repeated this theory, as well as claiming neither brother actually committed the attacks. This claim also formed an element of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's legal defense. No evidence or further claims supporting this theory have been confirmed by any US government agencies.

Conflicting reports

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On the afternoon of the bombing, the New York Post reported that a suspect, a Saudi Arabian male, was under guard and being questioned at a Boston hospital. That evening, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said that there had not been an arrest. The Post did not retract its story about the suspect, leading to widespread reports by CBS News, CNN, and other media that a Middle Eastern suspect was in custody. The day after the bombing, a majority of outlets were reporting that the Saudi was a witness, not a suspect.

The New York Post on its April 18 front page showed two men, and said they were being sought by the authorities. The two men in question, a 17-year-old boy and his track coach, were not the ones being sought as suspects. The boy, from Revere, Massachusetts, turned himself over to the police immediately and was cleared after a 20-minute interview in which they advised him to deactivate his Facebook account. New York Post editor Col Allan stated, "We stand by our story. The image was emailed to law enforcement agencies yesterday afternoon seeking information about these men, as our story reported. We did not identify them as suspects." The two were implied to be possible suspects via crowdsourcing on the websites Reddit and 4chan.

Several other people were mistakenly identified as suspects. Two of those wrongly identified as suspects on Reddit were the 17-year-old track star noted above and Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student missing since March. Tripathi was found dead on April 23 in the Providence River.

On April 17, the FBI released the following statement:

Contrary to widespread reporting, no arrest has been made in connection with the Boston Marathon attack. Over the past day and a half, there have been a number of press reports based on information from unofficial sources that has been inaccurate. Since these stories often have unintended consequences, we ask the media, particularly at this early stage of the investigation, to exercise caution and attempt to verify information through appropriate official channels before reporting.

The decision to release the photos of the Tsarnaev brothers was made in part to limit damage done to those misidentified on the Internet and by the media, and to address concerns over maintaining control of the manhunt.

Film adaptation

A film about the bombing and the subsequent manhunt, Patriots Day, was released in December 2016. Another film, Stronger, chronicling the experience of survivor Jeff Bauman, was released in September 2017.