NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, April 8, 2015, 8:34 PM
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who along with his brother blew up the middle of Boylston St. two years ago, killing three people standing and cheering the end of the most famous road race in this world.
Finally this was the end of the 2013 Boston Marathon on Wednesday afternoon, with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who along with his brother blew up the middle of Boylston St. two years ago, and killed three people standing and cheering the end of the most famous road race in this world.
Later an MIT officer named Sean Collier would be shot to death by the Tsarnaev brothers as they were the ones trying to run on the day of the Boston Marathon, the biggest day of the year in that city. But before that they placed their dirty homemade bombs in the street among innocent people. One of them was an 8-year old named Martin Richard.
So justice, as much as we were going to get, was finally delivered for all the victims of that day, the first terrorist attack in this country since Sept. 11, 2001, for Krystle Campbell and Lingzi Lu and for Collier. But as Tsarnaev stood there in his black jacket, with a soul as black as night, and heard one guilty verdict after another, maybe the word “guilty” kept exploding inside his head the way his bombs exploded.
Pictured left to right: Martin Richard, 8, Krystle Campbell, 29, and Lingzi Lu were killed in the bombings near the finish line of the Bostom Marathon.
And when you began to hear of the guilty verdicts against him, the litany of them, 30 of them, you could not help thinking first of Martin Richard and his family, behind whom this Tsarnaev stood that day before he just walked away, white baseball cap turned backwards, and left death behind him.
Martin Richard died that day. His little sister had her left leg blown off. Her mother lost an eye to shrapnel. The eardrums of the father, Bill Richard, burst. Another Richard child, a son Henry, got away with cuts and bruises, along with holes in his heart and his childhood and his life.
An MIT officer named Sean Collier would be shot to death by the Tsarnaev brothers as they were the ones trying to run on the day of the Boston Marathon.
When it was over on Wednesday afternoon, Bill Richard hugged one of the prosecutors, Nadine Pellegrini, just because this was as much of an ending, for now, as they could have hoped for with Tsarnaev, because he and his brother decided to take their sick minds and pathetic, cockeyed ideology to a place and day that always feels like the capital of happy people in Boston.
As Tsarnaev stood there in his black jacket, with a soul as black as night, and heard one guilty verdict after another, maybe the word “guilty” kept exploding inside his head the way his bombs exploded.
The bombs made by the Tsarnaev brothers, the older one good and dead now, didn’t just kill three people at the finish line. Those bombs blew limbs off 17 other people and wounded 240 more people, blew those people up the way roadside bombs do in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the soldiers who go over to those places and risk their lives for this country know the risks of where they are and what they do. The people on Boylston St. were there to add more cheers to a day where the cheers begin 26 miles away in Hopkinton.
They were killed and wounded for the crime of doing that.
The Tsarnaev brothers blew up that day, and blew up the family of Bill and Denise Richard and took their 8-year old son from them. Once terror and death came out of the skies above New York City and blew up our buildings and killed nearly 3,000 of our own. This time it was three dead and a college cop later, and all those wounded. This time terror came right up off the sidewalk, across from the Boston Public Library.
So justice, as much as we were going to get, was finally delivered for all the victims of that day, the first terrorist attack in this country since Sept. 11, 2001.
“This was intentional,” a U.S. attorney named Aloke Chakravarty said in his summation the other day. “It was bloodthirsty.”
The defense tried to blame it on the older, dead brother, Tamerlan. The jury was having none of that, and that is why early on this afternoon, not so long before the 2015 Boston Marathon is run in that city, there came those guilty verdicts one after another, shots to the head, as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev begins the wait to find out whether he will receive the death penalty for what he and his brother did to innocent people on a brilliant, sun-splashed afternoon two years ago, or be sentenced to life without parole at some maximum-security prison, alone for 23 out of 24 hours every day.
Those bombs blew limbs off 17 other people and wounded 240 more people, blew those people up the way roadside bombs do in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One after another Tsarnaev heard these explosions of the law as he stood there in this courtroom, sometimes with his hands clasped in front of him. Count 1, for conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death. That was for the first bomb. Guilty. Then came Count 4, for the second bomb, the one that killed Lingzi Lu, 23, and 8-year old Martin Richard of Dorchester. Guilty.
On and on it went, for everything that began at the finish line and ended in a shootout with police in Watertown, Mass., that stopped the Tsarnaev brothers once and for all, one of them for good, before they could drive to New York City with more bombs and maybe kill more people, in their own perverted vision of being both persecuted and avenging Muslims, using their bombs to settle a score with America.
On and on it went, for everything that began at the finish line and ended in a shootout with police in Watertown, Mass., that stopped the Tsarnaev brothers once and for all, one of them for good, before they could drive to New York City with more bombs and maybe kill more people, in their own perverted vision of being both persecuted and avenging Muslims, using their bombs to settle a score with America.
Now the only question, in the sentencing phase of this process, is whether the jury decides to execute him, or let him live out the rest of his worthless life, and maybe a very long life, in prison. It is justice either way. Just not enough. It could never be enough, not for that young MIT cop, Collier, not for Krystle Campbell, not for Lingzi Lu.
And not for Martin Richard, who should have been back on Boylston St. for the next Boston Marathon 12 days from now, who should have been 10 years old.
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