Boston Marathon Bombings: One Month Later
It’s been exactly one month since two bombs exploded on Boylston Street as runners crossed the Boston Marathon finish line and bystanders ran for their lives. People were frantic when the blasts went off seconds apart. Business was shutdown as FBI cordoned off the typically bustling Boylston Street area for 10 days. The heart of Boston became a blood spattered crime scene, and the nation focused its attention on the site of what the UK Mirror called the second worst act of terror on U.S. soil since 9/11. Much information on the suspects – two ethnic Chechen brothers living in Cambridge who were radicalized to become demonstratively anti-Western culture – has come out in the past 30 days as the victims convalesced and the deceased were mourned. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, the elder of the brothers and the alleged mastermind of the bombings, was killed in an unprecedented gunfight in Watertown during the early-morning hours April 19. The town and much of the region was on state mandated lockdown until late that evening. A Watertown police officer gave a detailed account of the peaceful Armenian-populated suburb-turned-warzone on WBUR.com today. Now, in death, Tamerlan Tsarnaev has become connected to a mysterious Waltham triple murder from 2011. Authorities and Tsarnaev’s family struggled to find a place to bury Tamerlan Tsarnaev in early May. His body was eventually buried in a Virginia cemetery May 9, according to CBS and other media outlets. About 15 hours after Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed, younger brother Dzhokhar, 19, was found in a Watertown resident’s boat parked in a backyard. He was badly injured and immediately brought into police custody. He was initially unable to speak due to his injuries. Dzhokhar faces the death penalty. He has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property. He’s being held at Fort Devens, a federal medical center in Ayer, Mass., in a small cell with a steel door, according to the Huffington Post. The Marathon Monday bombs killed three people and injured 260 others. MIT Police Officer Sean Collier was ambushed and allegedly killed by the brothers April 18, the night they sought to flee the area to New York, where authorities believed another attack was planned. While the details were grisly on one side of this historic story, on the other, there were tales of triumph. Carlos Arredondo, a native of the parkway neighborhoods of Boston, was at the scene of the bombs helping people to safety. He’s been hailed a hero nationally ever since. Jeff Bauman lost both legs in the blasts, but he’s served as a point of pride for […]
One Week Later: Memorial Scenes from Boylston, Newbury Streets
South End Patch
VIDEO: One Week Later, Crowd Returns to Boylston Street to Honor Boston Bombing Victims
One week after thousands of people gathered on Boylston Street to cheer on runners as they crossed the finish line of the 117th annual Boston Marathon, several hundred people returned to the area to honor those who were killed and injured in the bombings that forever changed a Boston tradition. At 2:50 p.m.—the time when, one week prior, the first explosion went off, followed 10 seconds later by a second—the city of Boston and communities throughout Massachusetts held a moment of silence. With the Copley Square area still cordoned off as a crime scene, hundreds of visitors gathered behind fencing at the corner of Boylston and Berkeley streets where a makeshift memorial sprouted up in the week following the event. The memorial, which features thousands of tributes such as flags, T-shirts, running shoes, posters, cards, teddy bears and flowers, has been moved off the street to the sidewalk outside the Bank of America building, presumably in anticipation of Boylston Street being reopened to the public—though a date for that opening has not yet been announced. The crowd at Boylston and Berkeley offered more than a moment of silence on Monday, standing quietly for several minutes before and after the appropriated time. At around 2:49 p.m., the crowd began softly singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—just barely heard over the occasional honk and motorized splutter of the busy city. When the anthem concluded, the crowd went silent again for well over a minute. Some people bowed their heads, some cried or wiped away tears, some took photographs and video of the scene and some stared quietly down the deserted part of Boylston Street, perhaps imagining what it looked like on Monday last. As the crowd began to stir, with people beginning to head off to wherever they needed to be, a man waving a Boston hat with one hand and an American flag with the other began singing “God Bless America” and was soon joined by many others in the crowd. As the singing concluded, a loud cheer went up through the crowd, as people turned and waved to police officers on the other side of the barricade. The crowd began to disperse as, in the distance, church bells rang out and played “Amazing Grace.” South End Patch