Michele R. McPhee - Mayhem: Unanswered Questions about the Tsarnaev Brothers, the US Government and the Boston Marathon Bombing

When two bombs were detonated on Boylston Street, 550 feet away from the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, a familiar sense of dread came over me. There was no cell phone service. Loved ones were unreachable. At 2:49 PM , the area just yards from where Id had coffee earlier that day was a war zone: body parts, pools of blood, broken glass inexplicable mayhem. Tragically, it was not the first time I had been on hand for a terrorist attack on American soil.

When Al Qaeda fanatics hijacked two planes from Bostons Logan Airport and flew them into Manhattans World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001, I was the police bureau chief for the New York Daily News, working out of One Police Plaza, and on the scene at Ground Zero when the towers collapsed.

I began investigating the marathon bombings for ABC News almost immediately after they occurred, continued writing exclusive cover stories for Boston and Newsweek magazines, and have not stopped since, even after leaving Boston to work on the scripted side of television in Los Angeles. I was there as crime scene detectives and federal agents collected evidence on blood-splattered Boylston Street and when the FBI released photographs of the suspects referred to as Black Hat and White Hat four days later. Just hours after that release, I raced to Cambridge, where those same suspects were believed to have murdered an MIT police officer and then carjacked a getaway vehicle. The carjacking victim escaped but left his cell phone behind in his Mercedes SUV. Police used its GPS to track it to Watertown, my next stop. Reporters ringed the streets, then dove behind cars when a wild battle involving explosives and sustained gunfire erupted between the suspected bombers and police.

After the bullets stopped flying at 1:01 AM on April 19, investigators recovered more than two hundred spent rounds from the streets and nearby homes. One suspect was dead. The other was on the run. The FBI had publicly identified them as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, twenty-six, and his brother, Dzhokhar, nineteen, two Russian immigrants who had been living in a subsidized apartment in Cambridge. I remained in the paralyzed city of Watertown for the next sixteen hours as SWAT teams searched door-to-door, telling terrified residents to stay put. One family had the surreal experience of a bullet piercing their television set while they watched news of the insanity occurring outside their house. Just after 6:00 PM a Watertown man went out for a smoke and found drops of blood that led to his boat, the Slip Away II, dry-docked in his yard. When he pulled back the tarp covering the vessel, he saw a bleeding man in the bottom of the boat and scrambled for his phone. Within minutes cops ringed the boat, and after one of them believed he saw movement, they opened fire. The first shot was followed by a twelve-second barrage into the side of the boat and flash-bang grenades whose hum could be heard blocks away. Then came the cease-fire order. Dzhokhar was captured alive barely alive. Grateful residents of Watertown lined the streets to cheer the police officers as they later pulled out of the city. I know a lot of cops who got free drinks that night.

Since then I have attended every arraignment and court appearance of the accused bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and four other men charged in the attacks, his college friends who were imprisoned for lying to investigators in a terrorism case.

The very same homeland security flaws that I investigated as a Daily News reporter were partly to blame for the success of the Boston attacks. In a congressional hearing weeks after the deadly bombings in 2013, former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis told federal lawmakers that the lack of information sharing between the FBI and Boston Police Department detectives assigned to work with the FBI on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, all of whom had top security clearance, hindered his officers from investigating allegations that counterterrorism counterparts in Russia had made about the Tsarnaev brothers. In other words, the FBI didnt share intelligence with their BPD partners on the task force not exactly the spirit of cooperation that experts had urged in the aftermath of 9/11. In fact, to this day the FBI has not answered congressional calls from both sides of the aisle to release details about the warnings the Russians sent, twice, in 2011 in the months before Tamerlan took an unusual trip back to his motherland, managing to get out of the United States, and back in, while on two terror watch lists.

Following 9/11, New York Police Department Commissioner Ray Kelly repeatedly warned me and other reporters who worked out of One Police Plaza that it was not if, but when the United States would be attacked by Islamic extremists again. The biggest threat, Kelly said, would be homegrown terrorists. He was right. Researchers with the George Washington University Program on Extremism released a report on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in America in 2015 that included startling numbers: More than 900 Americans were under investigation in the United States for connections to terrorism; 250 had traveled abroad to join the jihad; and 56 had been arrested for terrorism-related activities in 2015 alone.