12:04 A.M.Latest Word on Boylston Reopening
Following some mixed messages from Boston officials, the police department’s Twitter account is saying the street where the bombings occurred will open at 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning:
8:00 P.M.The City’s Conflicting Messages About Boylston Street
Updated 8:16 p.m.: Boston’s Back Bay is about to come back to life, maybe. Officials announced around 7:30 p.m. that the commercial district, including Boylston Street, would reopen early Wednesday morning. But 45 minutes later, the city posted a new message to Twitter saying that its earlier announcement was incorrect.
This message has now been deleted:
— SARAH WHEATON
7:27 P.M.Boat Owner Corrects Record on Discovering Suspect
For a moment, Dave Henneberry wondered if it was his own blood in his boat.
Mr. Henneberry, the Watertown, Mass., man who owns the boat in which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev managed to elude a daylong dragnet, described for the first time in an interview with WCVB-TV how he came across the bombing suspect. The discovery, he said, played out differently than has been reported.
“I know people say there was blood on the boat — he saw blood and went in,” he said. “Not true.”
When Watertown residents were told Friday that they could leave their homes, Mr. Henneberry went out to his boat, the Slip Away II. He climbed three steps up the ladder, and when he could see into the boat, he looked on the floor and saw “a good amount of blood.”
“And I said, wow, did I cut myself last time I was in the boat a couple of weeks ago and forget?” he said. “No, no.”
Then Mr. Henneberry saw the body — but not a face.
“Oh my God,” is what went through his head, Mr. Henneberry recounted in his distinct Boston brogue.
He jumped off the ladder, he said, and called 911.
Mr. Henneberry called himself an “incidental hero,” explaining: “I wasn’t out on the prowl. I was out to see my boat.”
His home is still an active crime scene, and an online fund-raiser to help replace the pleasure cruiser, which he called his “baby,” has raised more than $10,000.
— SARAH WHEATON
5:30 P.M.$20 Million Raised for Victims, Mayor Says
Mayor Thomas M. Menino said that One Fund Boston, created with the support of local businesses to help the victims of the twin bombings at the Boston Marathon, had raised $20 million in just a week.
“I have gotten many calls from around the world,” Mr. Menino said Tuesday afternoon about the outpouring from 50,000 individuals and businesses in response to the explosions that killed three people and injured more than 250 others. More than a dozen people lost all or part of an arm or leg, hospital officials have said.
“We will be there for them because that is what Boston is all about,” he said.
Heading up the distribution effort will be Kenneth R. Feinberg, a lawyer who has overseen compensation funds for victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the shootings at Virginia Tech and other disasters.
Mr. Feinberg said Tuesday afternoon that he would hold two town-hall-style meetings to hear from victims and begin a process that would allow them to apply for assistance next month.
As our colleague Abby Goodnough reports, many of the wounded, even those with health and disability insurance, face a lengthy period of rehabilitation and high medical costs.
Ms. Goodnough reports that Mr. Feinberg faces a daunting task in “deciding who will be eligible for payouts from a new compensation fund and how much each person wounded in the bombings and family of the dead deserves.”
At the same time, friends and relatives have set up dozens of smaller funds for individual victims, including Jeff Bauman.
5:00 P.M.Defense Lawyers on the Tsarnaev Case
On Tuesday, The Boston Herald quoted several prominent defense lawyers, who told the newspaper that the case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who is charged with the use of a weapon of mass destruction and the malicious destruction of property — federal counts that could lead to his execution — was anything but a slam-dunk for prosecutors.
Tamar R. Birckhead, who represented Richard C. Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, told The Herald that the government’s criminal complaint was “circumstantial.”
“You have to ask, is that proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he knowingly carried explosives in that knapsack and with the intent to bring about mass destruction?” Ms. Birckhead said. “And that’s how a defense attorney could analyze it and ask a jury to think about it. The burden of the U.S. government is to prove each element of each of these charges beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
Geoffrey Fieger, who represented Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the advocate of assisted suicides, told The Herald that a competent defense lawyer should have little trouble exploiting flaws in what is known so far about the government’s evidence.
“This case is ripe for somebody who’s got the courage to stand up and talk about the system and the railroading of criminal defendants,” Mr. Fieger said. “Nothing about the outcome is assured.”
Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, said that despite what has been presented to the public as clear evidence against Mr. Tsarnaev, the prosecutors will carry a heavy burden not only of proving the charges beyond a reasonable doubt but also of establishing that he knowingly planted a bomb. A fundamental principle of criminal law, Mr. Sullivan said, is “the confluence of a guilty mind and a guilty act.”
And while federal authorities say that Mr. Tsarnaev has already acknowledged playing a role in the bombings, Mr. Sullivan went through several possible defense scenarios, among them challenging the government’s contention that the backpack seen in a surveillance video being carried by the man identified by the authorities as Mr. Tsarnaev was the same backpack that contained explosives.
But the most fertile ground for defense, he said, might be whether Mr. Tsarnaev was aware of what he was doing — if, indeed, he is the same man who placed the backpack bomb on the ground near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
“What if the older brother said, ‘Let’s do a prank and fill these backpacks with fireworks and set them off,’ even if it was being done for political reasons,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And Tsarnaev says that after what happened, ‘I was terrified, so I ran.’ ”
A more traditional defense in such cases, he said, is what lawyers call a “slow plea,” meaning that during the course of a trial, the defense is less intent on contesting prosecutors’ evidence than on mitigating the culpability of the client — for instance, by seeking to establish that the younger Tsarnaev was the soldier rather than the general in the bombing plot.
Mr. Sullivan said that was often the difference between a death sentence and life in prison.
— TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
4:31 P.M.Bomb Survivor Says She Will Run Marathon Next Year
Adrianne Haslet-Davis is one survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing whose story has appeared in multiple media outlets in recent days: a professional dancer from Washington State who lost her left foot in the blast, and has vowed not only to dance again but to run in next year’s marathon.
In an interview with The Boston Herald, Ms. Haslet-Davis, 32, recounted the moment she awoke after the amputation of her foot with her mother, Chauni Haslet, sitting at her bedside.
“My foot feels numb, like it’s asleep,” Adrianne said, through a fog of pain medication. “My foot feels like it’s falling off the bed.”
At that moment, Chauni Haslet, who had flown in from Seattle, gave her daughter the news she believed already had been conveyed by doctors.
“Adrianne,” her mother whispered, “dear, your left foot … it’s gone.”
Doctors at Boston Medical Center amputated a portion of her left leg below the knee after she and her husband, Adam Davis, were injured by one of the bomb blasts as they stood outside a restaurant on Boylston Street.
Her husband, who had recently returned from a military deployment in Afghanistan, was sprayed with shrapnel but managed to fashion a tourniquet from his belt and fasten it to Ms. Haslet-Davis’s leg in the moments after the explosion. She told The Herald that when she realized that her foot was mangled and “practically detached,” she “started screaming my head off.”
In those first minutes after the blast, before first responders reached them, Ms. Haslet-Davis said she was convinced that she would die and began to say goodbye to her husband. In the week since the bombing, according to The Herald, she has not only survived but become determined to reclaim her life.
“I told my husband I loved him and I was so sorry all this had to happen,” she said. “If this was going to be the last time we saw each other, I wanted him to know how much I loved him. Then I told him we’d make it through this, that I wasn’t ready to leave him yet.”
Adrianne Haslet-Davis greeted me yesterday with: “I’ve been better, but I’m doing OK.” When asked about the dark moments, she bellowed, “Hell, yeah, I’ve had plenty. I’ve thrown my walker across the room and haven’t used it yet. But I realized you have to be selfish about the things that matter the most. My husband. The job I love. Dancing is my life. Yeah, having my foot blown off, that really sucks. But I can’t wallow in woe is me.
“I can’t let some (expletive) come along and steal my whole life. So, I’ll dance again. And next year, though I’ve never been a runner, yes, I plan to run the marathon.”
Ms. Haslet-Davis also spoke to an ABC affiliate in Seattle about her memories of the attack.
“I remember the impact of the air and the bomb hitting my chest and pulling me back,” she said. “I didn’t feel heat from it. I just felt air and then I fell to the ground, and we almost fell on top of each other like a pretzel.”
“We sat up and then I said, ‘Wait, my foot hurts,’ and then he held up my foot and then we both just screamed bloody murder.”
“It’s very sad, and I absolutely want to dance again,” she told the Seattle ABC station. “I just want people to know that you can come out of a situation that might seem like the end of the world, and come out stronger.”
3:23 P.M.Suspect Is Upgraded to Fair Condition
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s medical condition has been upgraded to fair, according to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which announced the news on Tuesday afternoon.
2:47 P.M.Statement From Suspect’s Wife
A lawyer for Katherine Russell, the wife of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, released a statement on Tuesday saying that reports about her husband and her brother-in-law’s involvement in the Boston Marathon bombing came as “an absolute shock.”
The lawyer, Amato A. DeLuca, also said that Ms. Russell, who grew up in North Kingstown, R.I., and met Mr. Tsarnaev when she was a college student at Suffolk University, was “doing everything she can to assist with the investigation.”
Public Statement on Behalf of Katherine Russell:
Our firm is representing Katherine Russell and she has asked us to make a short statement. As you know from news reports, Katie married her husband in June of 2010. Since then, she has been living in Cambridge, raising her child and working long hours, caring for people in their homes who are unable to care for themselves. Katie grew up in Rhode Island and has always remained close to her parents and sisters here, as well as her extended family. She is fortunate to have the support of her loving family now, as they, too, struggle to come to terms with these events and the deep sorrow we all feel following the events of last week. Meanwhile, she is doing everything she can to assist with the investigation.The injuries and loss of life — to people who came to celebrate a race and a holiday — has caused profound distress and sorrow to Katie and her family. The reports of involvement by her husband and brother-in-law came as an absolute shock to them all. As a mother, a sister, a daughter, a wife, Katie deeply mourns the pain and loss to innocent victims — students, law enforcement, families and our community. In the aftermath of this tragedy, she, her daughter and her family are trying to come to terms with these events.
Thank you.
1:19 P.M.How to Recover Belongings From Bombing Site
Boston officials have announced three ways for people to recover any personal property left behind after the marathon bombing.
Items that were determined to have no value as evidence in the F.B.I. investigation will be turned over to the Boston Police Department, which will try to deliver them personally to their owners if they contain identifying information. Otherwise, items can be collected in the following ways, according to a statement on the city’s Web site:
1) Visit in person at One Schroder Plaza, Media Room — 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. beginning Tuesday 4/23 to Friday 4/26. Bring proper identification. Parking will be available on Tremont Street. Please follow direction of officers.
2) Email lostproperty.bpd@cityofboston.gov with name, phone number, email address and description of items lost (as detailed as possible). You will be contacted if the item is in possession of B.P.D.
3) Call the mayor’s hotline at 617-635-4500 with a description of lost items. You will receive a follow-up call from B.P.D.
1:19 P.M.Associated Press Twitter Account Is Hacked
Nurses who treated victims of the Boston Marathon bombing shared their memories with reporters from The Associated Press, who produced a video report that was posted to YouTube on Monday.
“My first thought is, you know, young woman, prime of her life, traumatic amputation, cardiac arrest, will she survive?” said Adam Barrett, a nurse in the intensive care unit of an unnamed Boston hospital. “And then you add on top of that, why? This was totally unnecessary.”
Sushrut Jangi, a physician working in the medical tent at the marathon, wrote a lyrical first-person account of the bombing and the rush to provide emergency care for the victims in the first frantic minutes afterward. His essay was published on Tuesday by The New England Journal of Medicine.
At the tent, I stood in a crowd of doctors, awaiting victims, feeling choked by the smoke drifting along Boylston. Through the haze, the stretchers arrived; when I saw the first of the wounded, I was overwhelmed with nausea. An injured woman — I couldn’t tell whether she was conscious — lay on the stretcher, her legs entirely blown off. Blood poured out of the arteries of her torso; I saw shredded arteries, veins, ragged tissue and muscle. Nothing had prepared me for the raw physicality of such unnatural violence. During residency I had seen misery, but until that moment I hadn’t understood how deeply a human being could suffer; I’d always been shielded from the severe anguish that is all too common in many parts of the world.
“Clear the aisles!” Andersen called. More victims followed: someone whose legs had been charred black, another man with a foot full of metal shrapnel, a third with white bone shining through the thigh. I watched in shock as the victims were rushed down the center aisle to ambulances at the far end of the tent. Many of us barely laid our hands on anyone. We had no trauma surgeons or supplies of blood products; tourniquets had already been applied; CPR had already been performed. Though some patients required bandages, sutures and dressings, many of us watched these passing victims in a kind of idle horror, with no idea how to help. When I asked Andersen what I could do, he glanced at me sadly, shook his head and threw up his hands.
We returned to the cots and worked on patients with minor injuries from the blast, following instructions that came over the microphone. Hearing “Perform a secondary survey,” we examined chests and backs for superficial wounds. Beside me, James Broadhurst, a family physician, rebandaged a woman with a calf injury. One older woman screamed at me, “Please, find my daughter! Did she survive?” Two sisters sat on a cot in tears; when I asked if I could help, they shook their heads. I drifted among the beds, ashamed that there was no other skill I could contribute. Nearly every physician I saw looked back at me with the same numb, futile expression. Eventually, the dehydrated and dazed patients who had filled the cots in the early afternoon were gone. My friend Jennifer was looking for one: “She might have been hyponatremic,” she said, “but I don’t know where she went.”
12:35 P.M.8-Year-Old Bombing Victim Is Buried
After a private funeral, relatives buried Martin Richard, 8, the youngest victim killed in the Boston Marathon bombing.
As our colleague Jess Bidgood reports, the service was held with Martin’s immediate family on Tuesday morning.
“The outpouring of love and support over the last week has been tremendous,” Martin’s parents, Bill and Denise, said in a statement distributed by a spokesman for the family. “This
has been the most difficult week of our lives, and we appreciate that our friends and family have given us space to grieve and heal.”
The family said they planned to hold a public memorial for Martin in the coming weeks.
12:35 P.M.City Allows Some Visits to Boylston Street Area
Residents and businesses in the Copley Square area will be allowed to return in incremental stages throughout the day on Tuesday, although Boylston Street will remain closed to vehicle traffic, according to the city government.
City officials have not said when the neighborhood will reopen to the public, and businesses are likely to remain closed because deliveries and personal vehicles are still not being permitted in the area. However, those who live and work in Copley Square, the site of last week’s bombing, will be escorted into the area by city employees, who will help with damage claims.
More than 400 businesses have been unable to reopen since Boylston Street, one of the area’s main thoroughfares, was deemed a closed crime scene, according to a report in The Boston Globe.
The Charlesmark Hotel is tallying six-figure losses and waiting to clean a lobby still stained by blood.
A few doors down, Sugar Heaven needs to dispose of $20,000 worth of melted chocolate, sanitize candy bins and collect phones, purses and other baggage.
And at Marathon Sports, Colin Peddie, the president of the running shop, said the task of repairing windows and cleaning carpets would be the easiest part of reopening the popular store, where employees just days ago were wrapping tourniquets around injured spectators.
“We still have to get together as a company and discuss what happened and come to grips with it,” Peddie said. “Everyone handles those emotions differently. We have to make sure we’re listening to each other and start to rebuild.”
According to the Globe report, hundreds of area businesses have signed up with the city to receive updates on the reopening of Boylston Street. Local officials said on Monday that access to the area would follow a staggered schedule, with residents and business owners escorted to their properties at specific times from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The economic impact of the bombing has yet to be determined, but business leaders interviewed by The Globe said they feared that it could be significant. For many retailers in the area, the day of the marathon is among the busiest of the year.
“I have never seen such a large group of retail employers being affected for this long of a period in Massachusetts. The economic losses are hard to measure but certainly were in the hundreds of millions regionwide,” said Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts.
“For the directly affected Copley and Newbury Street region, which is so dependent upon retail and restaurants, the collective lost business and wages must already be in the tens of millions. Some of this will never be recovered.”
— TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
12:26 P.M.Arrested Kazakh Students May Have Known Suspects
Two students from Kazakhstan who were arrested on Saturday on immigration violations in New Bedford, Mass., may have known the two bombing suspects, according to a report in The Boston Globe, which quoted a statement from Kazakh officials.
The two men are accused of violating the terms of their student visas, the report said. Officials have not released the names of the two men because they are being held on civil immigration violations and not criminal charges.
Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry said U.S. immigration officials discovered the students while investigating the Tsarnaev brothers’ “possible links and contacts,” particularly those who studied with them. The students — two men — are being held in Boston, according to the ministry and a U.S. official.
“During the investigation, it was revealed that two students from Kazakhstan had violated the U.S. visa regime in the course of their studies. They were consequently arrested until the full clarification of the circumstances is achieved,” the ministry said in a statement.
The New Bedford Standard-Times reported that the students were arrested at an apartment complex on Saturday by “agents wearing F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security jackets,” the day after they and one other person were taken in for questioning and subsequently released. It described those questioned on Friday as “two college-aged males and one college-aged female.”
The Standard-Times reported that earlier on Saturday, two young women left the apartment complex in a van with diplomatic plates, which may have belonged to the consulate of Kazakhstan.
Earlier Saturday afternoon, a silver mini-van with consulate license plates arrived at the Carriage Drive apartment along with the F.B.I. and Homeland Security, and stayed a half an hour longer than the agents. The van left with two women, neither of whom appeared to be restrained. One was carrying a pink backpack as she exited the apartment and ran into the van, which sped away as the women told reporters they did not wish to comment.
A police officer, Lt. Robert Richard, told The Standard-Times that the authorities believed that the arrested students were friends or classmates of one of the bombing suspects, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, where he was a student. A gardener interviewed at the apartment complex agreed.
Henry Fernandes, who was tending to his garden at the time of the raid, said he had seen the tenants around the apartment complex, which is a popular area for UMass Dartmouth students to live.
“They looked like regular college kids,” he said. “Whenever you see a college-age kid around here, I just figure they are from UMass.”
11:47 A.M.Private Funeral Held for M.I.T. Officer
As The Boston Globe reports, a private funeral was held on Tuesday morning for Sean A. Collier, 26, a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was shot in his patrol car on Thursday night in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, not far from where the bombing suspects lived. Commissioner Edward Davis of the Boston Police Department described the shooting as an assassination.
Credit Cj Gunther/European Pressphoto Agency
The shooting focused the manhunt for the suspects in the Cambridge and Watertown area, leading to a gun battle on a residential street in Watertown. One of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, escaped from the scene but was captured on Friday evening while hiding in a boat.
On Wednesday, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will attend a memorial service for Officer Collier at M.I.T., which is expected to draw thousands of law enforcement agents from across the country.
11:33 A.M.Americans See Terrorist Attacks as Part of the Future
Americans were transfixed by the news coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing last week, and most say that occasional acts of terrorism will continue to be a part of life in this country, according to two new surveys.
Three-quarters of Americans consider occasional terrorist acts to be part of the nation’s future, up from nearly two-thirds a year ago, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Thursday through Sunday, while facts about the investigation and the pursuit of the suspects were still developing.
Americans were divided on whether the government could prevent attacks like the one in Boston, with 49 percent saying it could do more and 45 percent saying there was not much it could do. Still, 6 in 10 said the government had made the country safer from terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, while about a third said its actions had not had much of an effect. Republicans were more likely than Democrats or independents to say the government’s steps had increased security.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans said they followed news about the Boston attack very closely, expressing as much interest as they did for events like the 2002 sniper shootings in the Washington area, the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003 and the Wall Street bailout in 2008. In 2001, nearly 8 in 10 Americans said they were following news of the Sept. 11 attacks very closely.
While television was the source most widely turned to for information, nearly half of Americans said they followed the Boston news online or on a mobile device. And despite a number of factual missteps by news organizations during the week, 72 percent of Americans rated the news coverage as excellent or good.
A Washington Post poll released on Monday and conducted last Wednesday and Thursday, while the suspects were still at large, found that a majority of Americans were concerned that there would be more major terrorist attacks in the United States.
Nearly a third of Americans said they were worried about future attacks a great deal, up from about 2 in 10 in 2008. But most said they were not concerned about the possibility of an attack in their own community. Only 6 percent said they had changed their daily activities after the marathon bombing; after the Sept. 11 attacks, 53 percent said they had altered their daily lives.
The Post poll also found that two-thirds of Americans said terrorists would find a way to stage major attacks no matter what the federal government did.
Both polls were conducted by telephone nationwide using land lines and cellphones. The Pew poll was conducted among 1,002 adults and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points. The Post poll was conducted among 588 adults and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.
— ALLISON KOPICKI
11:03 A.M.Number of Injured Rises to 282
The number of people being treated for injuries related to last week’s twin bombings at the Boston Marathon has risen to 282 from an initial estimate of 170, according to a report in The Boston Globe. The increase comes as people have started seeking treatment for problems that many assumed would go away on their own, like hearing loss or minor shrapnel wounds, doctors told The Globe.
“One of the best examples is hearing issues,” said Nick Martin, a spokesman for the Boston Public Health Commission. “People might have first thought their hearing problems would be temporary.” Instead, hearing loss or continuous ringing or buzzing in their ears remained. Others sought delayed care for minor shrapnel wounds.
State health officials told The Globe that 48 people remained hospitalized in the greater Boston area on Tuesday, including two in critical condition: a 7-year-old girl at Boston Children’s Hospital and a man in his 60s at Boston Medical Center.
All of the injured who made it to hospitals survived, and the only wounded person connected to the attacks to arrive at a hospital and later die was one of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Nevertheless, doctors have cautioned that the survivors of the bombing face a long recovery, according to The Globe.
Still, many of the patients — among them 14 who had limbs amputated — are facing daunting recoveries. The 7-year-old girl remains in intensive care and had surgery last week for extensive leg injuries.
“She’ll recover, and I expect that within the next couple of days she’ll come off the critical list,” said Dr. David Mooney, director of the trauma program at Boston Children’s, who has been involved in her treatment. “She’s much better than she was; her improvement has been slow and steady.”
An earlier version of the 5:30 p.m. update misstated the day Kenneth Feinberg and Mayor Thomas Menino made statements. It was Tuesday afternoon, not Wednesday.