Boston jurors hear victims' painful testimony on bombing
BOSTON — Gripping trial testimony about injuries in the Boston Marathon bombing resumed Monday when prosecutors called to the witness stand a double amputee whose husband also lost a leg in the attack on April 15, 2013.
Jurors also heard from a doctor and a paramedic who spoke emotionally about the people they could not save.
Jessica Kensky, a nurse, entered the courtroom with assistance from a court security officer, who pushed her wheelchair up a ramp to the witness stand. She wore a skirt, showing the bottom of her two amputated legs. Accompanying her was Rescue, her service dog.
Kensky told the jury that on the Monday of the 2013 Boston Marathon, she had the day off and went to the gym with her husband, Patrick.
"I ran for the last time with two legs," she said. Later they went to the finish line, where she recalled the sun on her face and feeling happy.
Then the first bomb exploded.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 21, is on trial for 30 charges in connection with two blasts that killed three people and injured more than 260. He is also charged in the death of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer days after the bombings.
Seventeen of the counts carry the death penalty.
Kensky recalled how she and Patrick were knocked off their feet by the explosion.
"It felt like a rocket," she said. Patrick's foot was dangling by a thread. Their eardrums were blown, but she could tell people were screaming. Recalling her nurse's training, she was making a tourniquet for Patrick when men began shouting at her.
"Ma'am, you're on fire! You're on fire!" they cried. They began cutting off her clothing and extinguished the fire. Both her legs were severely torn apart by shrapnel. She was carried on a stretcher to a medical tent, which she compared to a battlefield hospital.
"This was a war zone," she said.
She was rushed to a hospital, where she found "terror, just sheer terror." She described sounds in the emergency room as "very animalistic screams."
Surgeons amputated her left leg and tried to clean out dirt and shrapnel from her right leg, but at least 30 BBs are still in it. She was left with excruciating burn wounds that lasted for months. The pain was "absolutely horrendous," she said.
She had her right leg amputated in January 2015 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where she and Patrick are still full-time patients.
"These are war wounds," she said. "I was really not wanting to live," she said, before her arrival at Walter Reed.
About 25 victims and family members watched the court proceedings from a section of the gallery reserved for them.
Tsarnaev is accused of conspiring with his brother, Tamerlan, who was killed four days after the blasts as the brothers fled police. Hours after his brother's death, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found wounded and hiding in a boat in a backyard in Watertown, about 10 miles west of Boston.
If the jury convicts Tsarnaev, the trial will move to a second phase to determine his punishment. The only options are life in prison or the death penalty.
Boston University graduate student Danling Zhou was second to take the stand Monday. She recalled hanging out with her friend Lingzi Lu on the day of the attacks. They were both from China, liked math projects and cooked together. On this day off from school, they were enjoying the sunshine in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood.
They had gone shopping and had lunch and were walking down Boylston Street when they heard the first bomb go off.
Zhou thought maybe it was construction, not a bomb. She looked up the street and saw "panic and smoke at the finish line." Lu was scared, Zhou said, and she tried to calm her down.
"She was asking me, 'What's happening? What should we do?'" Zhou recalled.
Then the next bomb went off a few feet from where they were standing. She and Lu were knocked off their feet and landed on a fence in a cloud of smoke, their legs tangled together, their ears unable to hear anything. Zhou's abdomen was slashed open. She held her insides in and hoped she would survive.
She looked over at Lu, who had a wound on a leg, and she soon started screaming.
They got separated in the chaos. Helpers kept arriving, then leaving to help others. She needed urgent care but thought she should conserve her energy.
"I shouldn't waste my energy just yelling," Zhou said. "If I'm yelling, then I'll bleed faster, and that will cause more problems."
Zhou had two abdominal surgeries to clean and close her wound. At the hospital, she pleaded with staff to find her missing friend.
"Every time I wake up, I ask them whether or not they find her," Zhou said. Finally, a man had some information.
"He said, 'She passed away. You don't know that?'" she said. "They were trying to protect me, so they didn't tell me."
Paramedic Matthew Patterson was out with his girlfriend at a restaurant on Boylston Street when the bombs went off. He immediately got to work.
"I instructed everyone to get down and get back," said Patterson, the third witness Monday.
He stepped through a window out into the street and quickly came upon a girl covered in soot. She had lost a leg and her hair was singed. Her appearance was so affected that he mistook her for a boy. He grabbed a man's belt, applied a tourniquet, then moved on to help others.
"The scene was more or less in utter chaos," Patterson said. "It was hard to tell who was walking wounded and who was there to help."
James Bath, a general practitioner on his day off, was walking near the marathon when he heard the explosions. He saw runners start racing in the opposite direction from the finish line. He came upon a man whose clothing was tattered and who appeared to be in shock.
"He said, 'All of my friends are dead. I need to get out of here,'" Bath said.
Bath approached the site where the second bomb had gone off. The air was filled with smoke. The stench was one he recognized from his medical experience: burning tissue and blood.
"It looked like people had been dropped like puzzle pieces right on the sidewalk," he said.
He went straight to Lu, a Boston University graduate student who had a lacerated pelvis. She was writhing on the ground, not responding to anyone but still breathing. He tried to apply a tourniquet but quickly realized there was barely any blood left to stem. Her femoral artery had been drained and she was dying from heavy blood loss. She began the kind of breathing that happens in the throes of death, Bath said.
Seeing that he couldn't save her, Bath asked others to stay with Lu and perform CPR. He moved on, hoping he could help someone else.
Lu was one of three killed in the marathon attacks.
The trial's focus turned in the afternoon to surveillance video that captured movements of the Tsarnaev brothers. Tamerlan, 26, died in a confrontation with police four days after the blasts.
Anthony Imel, a digital evidence expert for the FBI, described how surveillance cameras along the marathon route showed the paths traveled by the brothers minutes before the bombs went off.
Jurors saw street-corner photos in which Dzhokhar, in a white cap, and Tamerlan in a black one turn onto Boylston Street and walk together toward the finish line. At one point, they're seen standing together, looking toward the race, before Tamerlan moves ahead to the finish line and Dzhokhar stays behind.
"In all of the images we've seen to this point, does the suspect have a backpack on his shoulder?" asked Assistant U.S. Attorney William Weinreb, referring to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
"Yes," Imel said on the witness stand. A silent video then shows Tsarnaev standing in the crowd, seeming to watch the race. He leans down for a moment. At that point, Weinreb paused the video.
"After that momentary dip and then back up, do we ever see the backpack on his shoulder again?" he asked Imel, who said he has watched the video hundreds of times.
"No," he said.
"Where is the backpack?"
"There is a backpack at his feet," Imel said.
Phone records then displayed on the jurors' screen. They show that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev opened a cellphone account one day earlier: April 14. He makes a 19-second call to his brother at 2:49, the minute when the first bomb went off near where Tamerlan had been standing at the finish line.
Video then shows Dzhokhar leaving the site where his backpack was left near a rail lined with children. He looks back for a moment. Smoke engulfs the area. More photos show Dzhokhar running as the crowd scatters.
Jurors saw video of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev entering a Whole Foods Market in Cambridge 23 minutes after the bombs went off. He is no longer wearing the white baseball cap.
In the video, he picks out and pays for a half-gallon of milk. One minute later, he runs back into the store to exchange the carton for a different one.
In opening statements, Weinreb had said Tsarnaev's relaxed shopping after the bombings was an indication that he had a clean conscience because he felt he had done a good deed by attacking Americans to avenge Muslims in Iraq.
One day after the bombings, Tsarnaev reportedly was at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, where he was a student at the time. He visited the gym, according to Gregory Homol, director of the university's fitness center. The jury saw surveillance video from the fitness center. It shows Tsarnaev going to the gym at 9:05 p.m. He leaves about an hour later, walking slowly and talking to another young man, according to the video.
The afternoon testimony made for some intense moments. One photo, shown to the gallery as well as jurors, showed William Richard's children next to the rail watching the race. Behind them is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, with the backpack at his feet.
Viewing the image was William Richard. He sat in the second row of the gallery, a few feet from the monitor depicting the last moments of life of his 8-year-old son, Richard, and the last time he would see his 6-year-old daughter, Jane, with two legs. She lost one as soon as the bomb went off. Richard watched intently, not looking away, seeming to study every detail.
Tsarnaev's defense team didn't cross-examine victim witnesses over the first three days of testimony, but they questioned Imel on what he said about tracking Tsarnaev's path.
Attorney Miriam Conrad raised doubts about some of the sequencing information provided by the FBI. She asked about the time stamps on images that show the Tsarnaevs moving through the crowd before the bombings.
"You don't know if the time stamp on that camera is accurate," she said, referring to a restaurant surveillance camera. Imel conceded that he could not vouch for the accuracy of the clock.
The prosecution ended the day with testimony that showcased Tsarnaev's Twitter use before and after the bombings. Prosecutors aim to use his social media activity to show his involvement and his motive, which they say was to avenge Muslim suffering at the hands of American soldiers.
Weinreb began by examining tweets sent immediately after the bombing from Tsarnaev's Twitter account, @J_tsar, and asking FBI Special Agent Stephen Kimball to explain how Twitter works.
Slightly more than two hours after the bombs went off, Tsarnaev tweeted: "Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people." The next day, at 10:43 p.m. on the day after the bombing, Tsarnaev told his followers: "I'm a stress free kind of guy."
Then they looked at his tweets from the month prior to the bombing. A few examples: "never underestimate the rebel with a cause"; "evil triumphs when good men do nothing"; "if you have the knowledge and the inspiration all that's left is to take action."