Aftermath: The Boston Marathon Bombings (2013-2016)
It was cold and raining as I headed for the bus to return once again to the finish line of the Boston Marathon. On the previous afternoon, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been found guilty of all 30 counts against him for his role in the Boston Marathon bombings, and I felt the need to be back where it began, hoping to conclude a project I had begun nearly two years earlier, when the two bombs exploded near the Marathon finish line on April 15, 2013.
The weather matched my mood. Following the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial had been difficult, and it brought back a flood of memories. Soon the sentencing phase of the trial would begin and the jury would decide on the matter of life or death. It was hard not to be reflective by all that had happened.
As I made my way toward Boylston Street, I photographed passengers on the “T” reading newspapers with headlines that screamed “Guilty,” recently erected banners announcing the upcoming 2015 Marathon, and the faded letters of the finish line still visible on Boylston Street, which soon would be getting a fresh coat of paint. I kept my eyes open for any remnants of the tragedy’s aftermath, maybe a Boston Strong bracelet hanging on a fencepost, or a tattered ribbon tied to a tree. A ripped and faded, blue and yellow knitted covering wrapped around a lamppost was all that I noticed as I passed the Forum Restaurant, where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had placed the second of the two bombs on the sidewalk, killing Lingzi Lu, eight-year- old Martin Richard and injuring so many others. I ran into one of the owners of the Forum, and we chatted about his experience on the day the bombs exploded. He voiced his sadness as movers carried the last of the restaurant’s tables and chairs onto a moving van. The Forum, which had played such a central role in helping care for the bombing victims that day, had recently closed its doors, succumbing to the neighborhood’s skyrocketing rents.
When the attacks occurred, I had been out of town, a rare occurrence for me on race day. I usually cover the Boston Marathon, either at the finish line or photographing along the course, so I had a good sense of what the scene must have been like. Once the bombs exploded, however, the chaos would have been impossible for anyone to imagine.
My instinct as a photographer is almost always to make sense of events through the process of shooting them, so three days after the bombings I made my way down to the makeshift memorial sites that had begun to spring up around Boylston Street.
As I photographed, a continuous stream of people arrived and in silence laid their offerings and mementos at the metal barriers cordoning off the crime scene. I was moved by sadness. Memories of planes flying into towers came to mind. Yet the Marathon attacks felt somehow different than the destruction on September 11th, which was an attack against us as a nation. The Marathon bombings felt to me more like an assault on my community, my home. I planned to return to the memorial sites early the next day to continue shooting, but that was not to be.
The next morning, at 5:50am on April 19th, I was awoken from a sound sleep by a friend calling from New York: “What the hell is going on over there in Watertown? Turn on the TV.”
After a late night shootout, the police were searching for one of the escaped suspects of the bombings, and they thought he might be hiding in Watertown, just a few blocks from my house. We were in lockdown. We were not to leave our homes.
For the next 13 hours of confinement I photographed my lockdown experience, and when a New Hampshire State Police SWAT team, dressed in flack jackets and armed with assault weapons rang my bell, it felt as if the war on terror had literally landed at my front door.
With the lifting of the lockdown and the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, four days of tension were finally relieved. Now there was time to more fully consider the unprecedented drama that we had all just experienced.
Because it would be impossible to cover the many dimensions of this story, I made a decision to focus on what had personal meaning to me. From the makeshift memorial sites that I photographed three days after the bombings to the building of the permanent sites more than two years later, I followed the unfolding story as best I could.
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