Tag: Boston Marathon Bombings

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Calling the Bluff Music

Reaching the Finish Line: My Reflections on the Boston Marathon Bombings

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Imagine nearing the finish line of a marathon after running 26.2 miles. Your heart is pumping. Your adrenaline is rushing. You’re flooded with euphoria and determined to make it to the end no matter what.

Just as you’re about to complete your journey, the impact from a sporadic explosion knocks you off your feet. Another one follows seconds after, knocking limbs from your body and leaving you covered in massive amounts of blood. The pain that you’re experiencing is indescribable.

By placing your feet in these shoes, you’re becoming one of many who participated in the world-renowned Boston Marathon on April 15th.

More than 260 people were injured from the explosions that took place in Boston’s Copley Square just before 3 p.m. The bombings, which occurred within 12 seconds of each other, also left three people dead: 8-year-old Martin Richard, 23-year-old Boston University graduate student Lingzi Lu, and 29-year-old Krystle Campbell.

I was at the Memphis Flyer headquarters working on some assignments when a co-worker asked me if I had heard about the explosion. I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know what he was talking about. However, I didn’t anticipate it to be as horrid as it was once I looked it up online.

An avid “jogger,” I run more than 20 miles a week (not day). It’s a hobby that I picked up in 2007, and I’ve stuck with it ever since.

Over the last year, I’ve began to participate in 5k runs for recreation but nothing remotely close to a marathon—not even a half-marathon. But I do know that I enjoy running. It’s an outlet for me to clear my mind and release any frustrations. Plus it’s good cardiovascular exercise.

Out of all things, it’s not something that I associate with life-threatening injury or death. But since the bombings on April 15th, it’s safe to presume that those will be things that come up when running competitions are mentioned moving forward.

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The two men responsible for the bombings, bloodshed, and heartache during the 117th annual Boston Marathon are 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and his brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev (who was identified as the brains behind the attacks and also a supporter of radical Islam). The two brothers are Muslim and ethnic Chechens from Russia. They had been living in the U.S. for a decade at the time of the bombings.

Surveillance cameras revealed that each brother wore a dark backpack, which held bombs composed of kitchen pressure cookers packed with shrapnel, on the day of the bombings. The backacks were placed on the ground near the marathon’s finish line. They used a remote control device to detonate the two bombs inside of them.

But the bloodshed didn’t stop there.

The brothers shot 26-year-old Sean Collier, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus officer, multiple times to possibly rob him for his gun in hope of expanding their arsenal. Shortly after that, they car-jacked a man for his Mercedes Benz SUV.

While steering the stolen SUV through Watertown, Massachusetts, about 20 minutes away from Boston, the two began to notice that they were being followed by city police and engaged in a gunfight with the officers.

Tamerlan was killed during the shootout, which took place early Friday, April 19th, while Dzhokhar managed to escape with multiple gunshot wounds. He was later found bleeding inside of a boat in the backyard of Watertown resident, David Henneberry.

When police apprehended Dzhokhar, he was in critical condition with gunshot wounds to the head, neck, legs, and hand, and he had suffered massive blood loss, according to an F.B.I. affidavit.

Despite the injuries documented in the affidavit, reports show he’s also suffering from a gunshot wound to the throat, which may be self-inflicted. As of today, he’s said to be in fair condition at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

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Dzhokhar’s been charged with using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death. He could receive the death penalty if convicted for his role in the bombings.

Witnessing the coverage on the event over the last week—the memorials, the articles, the blogs, the news coverage, and even from doing my own research to write this post—it’s really sunk in how unfortunate the entire occurrence is. Those people in attendance at the Boston Marathon that day weren’t expecting to lose limbs, hearing, or even their life. They were there to run for a good cause.

On the contrary, because of the occurrence, a husband and father (Tamerlan) is now dead, leaving behind his widow to raise their daughter alone. And a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth college student (Dzhokar) will possibly never live life again as a free man. In no means am I justifying what they did or sympathetic for them. I just feel that this situation is unfortunate for EVERYONE involved.

The Boston Marathon bombings are yet another occurrence that conveys how extremely significant it is for us to cherish every day we’re alive and be appreciative for everything within our lives. Any one of us could take our last breaths in a matter of seconds.

Only God knows if a life-changing tragedy will occur, and more so, when it’s our time to leave earth. My prayers and condolences go out to all those affected by the Boston Marathon bombings. I understand there’s no restart button for us to push, to go back in time, and do things differently. I just hope that all of the survivors can push forward as strong and positively as possible. I could never place myself in your shoes. However, I do want you to know that you’re not the only ones hurting from this catastrophic event. People across the globe—family, friends and concerned citizens—are feeling the effects of this devastating mishap as well.

Stating that, I hope everyone takes something from this unfortunate occurrence, which will inevitably become another piece of history. If nothing else, it reminds us that we can’t take life for granted. It may sound cliché, but it’s true. Just ask those who were in attendance during the Boston Marathon.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Menino, launched One Fund Boston, a way to support those affected by the Boston Marathon bombings. The fund has currently raised more than $23 million.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Against my better judgment, I woke up my wife, Melody, at 3 a.m. last week to tell her all hell had broken loose in Boston and that she probably ought to get up and watch the breaking news.

We had already witnessed the terrorist bombs detonating at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and

maiming 170, but the resulting manhunt was nearly as shocking. My guess was that the bombers were homegrown knuckleheads of the Tim McVeigh variety. Melody thought it was the work of Muslim extremists, so it turns out we were both sort of right. After the release of the suspects’ photographs, within three hours, the police had the two Chechen-American brothers identified and trapped. And when the citywide lockdown was lifted, the surviving brother was located and taken alive. It was a stunning success for the Boston Police Department, the FBI, the ATF, and all the other agencies that helped track down these miscreants. But it was an extraordinary and historic failure for both print and electronic journalism.

The post-marathon manhunt made for gripping reality television, only you couldn’t change the channel. When the networks joined the cable news channels in wall-to-wall coverage, there was no escaping the unfolding saga. In fact, you could take a nap, and afterward, the same people would be speculating about the same things. It was like watching an endless episode of Dragnet, except nobody had the facts, ma’am.

From CNN, to Fox News, to The Boston Globe, so many falsehoods were presented as fact and so many baseless rumors floated as the truth, it’s understandable why a good-sized portion of the populace doesn’t trust the news “industry” anymore. The medium now has more face-men than real journalists, and a woman with an attractive cleavage is valued more highly than one with a journalism degree.

For days, all the networks’ top stars were based on a Beantown corner, acting like they knew something. Not to demean the seriousness of the event, but the 24-hour, nonstop coverage of the search for the terrorists in Boston knocked all the rest of the news off the airwaves. No doubt, if someone from Waco called a news outlet and claimed credit for the massive explosion in West, Texas, for al-Qaeda, every news anchor in the business would be sitting in front of a bombed-out fertilizer factory in Texas talking about how they caught us unawares.

The “Boston Journalistic Massacre” began, predictably, when the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post printed a front-page picture of a Moroccan-American man, falsely accusing him of being the bomber. As happens after most violent events, the first lie reported was that the hunted person was a black man. The Post claimed twice in one week that the suspects were “dark-skinned males.” After CNN repeated the lie, an innocent man from Bangladesh was assaulted.

Next, Fox News and The Boston Globe reported arrests were made when there were none. The network cameras focused on a man lying prostrate in the street, while police officers trained their guns on him — wrong guy. They reported on a mysterious person on a rooftop overlooking the bomb site — just a bystander. And in one of the most bizarre scenes of the entire week, a man was forced to strip naked in the middle of the street and was frog-marched to a squad car, private parts pixilated for the cameras, without comment or explanation from the chattering “experts.” When the manhunt moved to Watertown, the bad information shifted into overdrive. First, someone coincidentally robbed a 7-Eleven while the Tsarnaev brothers happened to be there. Then the robbery became a carjacking, and, within the hour, NBC’s Brian Williams was seated in front of the Town Diner. When the network cut into a local feed and an announcer was heard saying, “I don’t know shit,” a red-faced Williams had to apologize for the incidental profanity and remind everyone that tensions were high. At least that guy was honest.

The best reporting of the night was done by a bystander named Andrew Kitzenberg, who spoke with MSNBC by Skype while a gunfight was raging beneath his apartment window. Kitzenberg accurately reported the shoot-out, which killed one brother, and the reckless escape of the other. Misinformation poured in about explosive devices at MIT and the murder of a campus policeman who was “responding to a disturbance,” when actually, he was shot while sitting in his car. When the quarantine was finally lifted and the second suspect was located, it was at first by “a neighbor” who saw something unusual about a ladder and a boat, but it turned out to be the homeowner, who’d gone out to his backyard for a smoke.

My intention is not to criticize the police — obviously whatever they did worked — so who’s to criticize? It’s just that I’ve never seen the total lockdown of a major city before. In the drama’s denouement, when it appeared as if every law enforcement vehicle in a tri-state area had converged on the scene, it occurred to me that if I had criminal inclinations, it would be the ideal time to rob a bank. Maybe it’s just me, but 9,000 law enforcement officers in pursuit of a wounded teenager seemed a bit like overkill. Someone said it was necessary to have a show of force after a terrorist act. Probably so, but there weren’t that many cops out looking for Lee Harvey Oswald. And the Israelis, who deal with suicide bombers on a daily basis, merely clean up and open for business the next day. An argument could be made that, with every camera focused upon them and the entirety of the American news media reacting to their every blood-drenched move, the terrorists succeeded in their goals. One deranged fanatic managed to lock down millions of people while he ran free. Major League Baseball and hockey games were canceled. All municipal transit was halted. They got their man, but now we know what martial law looks like.

Randy Haspel writes the Born-Again Hippies blog, where a version of this column first appeared.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: To Catch a Terrorist

The only way to stop a bad guy with a bomb is a good guy with a bomb, right? Probably not. How about good guys with guns? Yes, probably, at some point, near the endgame. But the most effective way to stop a bad guy with a bomb — or, at worst, catch him after he’s done his dirty work — is with good guys who have computers and surveillance data.

I recently saw the film Zero Dark Thirty, about the search for Osama bin Laden. While, in the end, it took good guys with guns — and high-tech night-vision goggles and helicopters and small explosives — to capture the Saudi mass murderer in his Pakistani lair, determining where he was took years of monitoring cell phone calls, satellite surveillance, and on-the-ground spy work by the CIA and military intelligence agencies.

By the time you read this, the FBI may have rounded up a solid suspect in the case of the Boston Marathon bombings. The Taliban have disavowed any involvement, which, whether true or not, has led to speculation that the bombings were the work of a domestic terrorist (or terrorists). And the fact that the bombings occurred on Patriots’ Day, widely seen by some American antigovernment activists as symbolic of federal oppression, heightened that speculation.

On Patriots’ Day in 1993, after a 52-day siege, federal ATF agents and the FBI attacked the Waco, Texas, headquarters of the Branch Davidians. Leader David Koresh and 82 others inside died, some as a result of the assault; most from a fire the Davidians set during the attack. Two years later, the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building on Patriots’ Day was widely perceived as retribution for the Waco assault. Coincidentally or not, the Columbine school shooting in 1999 and the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 also occurred on or around Patriots’ Day.

But given the recent history of American mass murders, we shouldn’t be surprised if it’s yet another mentally unstable young American male living out some warped fantasy or video-game-inspired violence. In fact, as was noted by several websites on Tuesday, a recent episode of the show Family Guy featured a character setting off two bombs at the Boston Marathon in order to win the race. Inspiration? Horrific coincidence? Who knows?

The sad truth is that nothing can stop all the bad guys bent on mass destruction. All we can do is try to make it more difficult for them to pull it off. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected by this latest tragedy — and to those attempting to catch the bad guys. It appears to be a war with no endgame in sight.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com