I haven't been blogging here for a little while because I've been doing more on my writing blog and a few other people's blogs. I should tell you about that, but not today. Next week.
Almost 200 spectators at the Boston Marathon were injured on Monday. Three of them were killed. Many more- people who were there, people who were watching- were frightened. And who can blame them? And by them I mean us.
A number of national news outlets failed us. I hope
John King is remembered for the rest of his career for citing an anonymous source on Wednesday who claimed that they had video of a "dark-skinned male" from the nearby Lord and Taylor's. Horribly, the AP and the Boston Globe ran with the same story, and it was picked up by my social networks. (A friend sent me a tweet to give me the news that an arrest was imminent.) It was so bad that
the FBI sent out a scathing message, admonishing the media to check their sources before they ran with anything.
On Thursday they released video to the public, and I thought the quality was so awful I didn't bother passing it around. (No worries, plenty of other people did.) There were two men, and I'm not sure "dark-skinned" was an appropriate term. When I was falling asleep on Thursday night my oldest came in to tell me that there were gunshots at MIT.
When I woke up on Friday several cities and towns surrounding Boston as well as the Allston and Brighton sections of Boston were under a Shelter In Place order. The MBTA was also shutdown. Overnight, the suspects had been identified and located, an MIT officer had been killed, a transit police officer was injured and one of the suspects was killed. The hunt for the second suspect began, and we were glued to our screens.
In the evening, they told us we could leave our homes. I took my sons outside- they had been bouncing off the walls- and when I came back in 25 minutes later a section of Watertown was locked down again. My social networks exploded. He's in a boat. He's covered in blood. Shots fired. He must be dead. No he's alive. No he's dead. No he's alive. Because that kind of inane speculation is helpful when people are already on edge, right?
Finally, less than 24 hours after shots were fired at MIT, they caught the man. Man... barely a man. He's a 19 year old kid from Cambridge who is an ethnic Chechen, but at this point I'm not sure where he lived before he came here when he was a little boy. Despite the people insisting this was terrorism, as of this moment I have no idea of his motive.
There were impromptu parades in the streets- BostonStrong is the phrase intended to capture our spirit- while we were hearing that the suspect wasn't read his Miranda rights under a public safety exception. Some are postulating that he was set up and smell conspiracy because of the amount of force that came to bear upon one older teenager. I don't know, but I doubt it. We'd never done anything like this, in part because we'd never lived through anything like this.
I am of two minds.
First, I am so touched by all of the people who checked up on me and my family just because I live in Boston. I was nowhere near the Marathon, and I am nowhere near Watertown or Cambridge. Friends, family, people I've never met in person but know only through social media reached out. Incredible kindness.
But I am also disgusted. There were people who could not wait to jump on this and mock Boston for being a "blue" city in favor of gun control laws. Wouldn't everything have been better if we'd all been well-armed? Short answer: no. An armed and trained person still died in this, and another was injured. And the people who passed around the picture of the suspect on the grass with his torso exposed after he'd been captured made me turn away. I don't want to linger over him. I don't want to linger over any of it.
And let's not forget
the assaults on presumed-Muslims since the attack- and mind you, some of them occurred before there was any footage of anyone. Or that we
tackled a severely burned man to the ground because he was Arab. As much as we Bostonians are resilient, we can also be provincial.
Something very bad happened. I don't want to linger over the details, but some of the public and private pictures I saw are going to stay with me forever. Our media did a terrible job, and it's saying something when I take law enforcement's side over theirs. The self-appointed pundits on social media didn't help either. Can't we wait before passing judgment? Can't we get the facts first?
That the suspect- and I'm going to use that word until we see a conviction-
won't be read his Miranda rights makes me groan. I am dreading that someone will conclude that this was terrorism and use that as an excuse to throw this kid into a gulag in Eastern Europe or try him in a military court. No. I want him tried in the light of day, and I want all of the evidence fully vetted. If we are going to get justice for what happened, we need to do it right.
More than anything, I want this to be over, and I believe it can be. I want things to return to normal, which is funny because I felt like I didn't have a normal before this. I want to walk down Boylston Street with my sons. I want to visit the main branch of my beloved
Boston Public Library. I want to take my kids to the Boston Common and not see SWAT teams. And those things will happen.
Just not soon enough.
Deb in the City