This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
Lawmakers Push for Federal Trial of Boston Suspect
Bostonians, Assured That Danger Is Past, Begin Farewells to Victims
(about 2 hours later)
With the surviving suspect of the Boston Marathon bombing in the hospital — a breathing tube down his throat and unable to speak — several lawmakers said Sunday that he should be tried in federal court, a move that would allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty.
MEDFORD, Mass. — Boston began to say goodbye on Sunday to those it lost last week. Its leaders — religious as well as political — fanned out, in front of naves and cameras, to do what they could to reassure grieving parishioners and constituents that the danger had passed. Or that for those who are gone, “life,” as Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley put it, “is not ended, merely changed.”
Even as a special team of interrogators made their way to the city to question the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston suggested that the suspect’s injuries were such that he might not be able to communicate for some time.
Memories were not the only thing etched for some mourners.
“We don’t know if we will ever be able to question the individual,” he said in an interview with ABC News.
As Melanie Fitzemeyer, who baby-sat for Krystle Campbell two decades ago, walked to Ms. Campbell’s wake along with hundreds of others at a brick-and-frame funeral home on Main Street here, she took off her jacket and rolled up her sleeve. Incised on her arm was a two-line tattoo she had gotten the night before, at a parlor owned by one of Ms. Campbell’s cousins.
The authorities said Sunday that they believed that Mr. Tsarnaev had tried to kill himself, based on the gunshot wound to his neck.
“Boston Strong,” the top line read in black letters scored into the length of her forearm, the surrounding skin still pink and tender.
The injury “had the appearance of a close range, self-inflicted style,” a senior law enforcement official said. “He’s not in good shape.”
“1983 Krystle 2013,” read the bottom.
The wound, and the fact that the suspect is sedated, have prevented him from speaking. Law enforcement officials and forensic experts can typically determine how far a weapon was from the body when it was fired based on the appearance of the wound.
Ms. Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager, died after Monday’s bombing from wounds sustained near the finish line of the race she tried to see every year. Ms. Fitzemeyer, 39, knew her longer than most, and remembering her as an exuberant child. “She liked to paint and color and make things.”
Mr. Tsarnaev was brought to the hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, late Friday night after a standoff with the police in the Watertown neighborhood, where he was found hiding in a boat. Hospital officials would only say that he remains in serious but stable condition.
Ms. Campbell will be buried on Monday, and the wake here on Sunday was the first time anyone was able to say goodbye so intimately to any of the victims. Dozens came from Harvard — where her mother and brother work, as Krystle once did — while 50 leather-and-denim clad motorcycle club members stood across the street. Some told photographers to move down the street.
The Boston police commissioner, Edward Davis, speaking to CBS News, said that the authorities believed that Mr. Tsarnaev, along with his older brother Tamerlan, 26, were planning more attacks. “We have reason to believe, based upon the evidence that was found at that scene — the explosions, the explosive ordnance that was unexploded and the firepower that they had — that they were going to attack other individuals,” he said.
“We’re just trying to keep the nonsense away,” explained one biker, after he and two friends blocked a cameraman.
Gov. Deval Patrick, speaking to NBC News, said that while there is much work to be done by investigators, “there isn’t any basis for concern about another imminent threat.”
Other bikers waited quietly, they said, in case a rumored picket by the Westboro Baptist Church materialized. “We’re just here to create a respectful barrier for the family,” said Tony Rossetti, a Middlesex County sheriffs deputy who is the president of the Boston chapter of the Enforcers Motorcycle Club, where he is known as Preacher.
One unanswered question is whether others helped plan and carry out the attack, which federal officials said was still under investigation. Mr. Menino said he believed the brothers were not affiliated with a larger network. “All of the information that I have, they acted alone, these two individuals, the brothers,” he said.
Reassurance seemed to be the message from top city and state officials on the Sunday news shows.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, traveling in the Middle East, said government investigators had not determined the motivation behind the bombings and were investigating whether terrorist organizations had played a role in the attack.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino said that what he knew suggested that the two brothers suspected of carrying out the attack had operated by themselves. “All of the information that I have, they acted alone,” he said on “This Week” on ABC.
“We don’t know all the facts,” he said before landing in Jerusalem on Sunday to begin a week of negotiations in the region.
The danger has passed, Gov. Deval Patrick said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “The immediate threat, I think all of law enforcement feels, is over, based on the information we have,” he said. “And that is a good thing, and you can feel the relief at home here.”
Representatives Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, and Rep. Peter T. King, Republican of New York and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, sent a letter to the directors of three of the nation’s leading intelligence-gathering agencies calling the FBI’s handling of the case “an intelligence failure.”
Yet the investigation continued, with officials struggling to learn whether the brothers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died after a shootout with the police in Watertown, Mass., early Friday morning, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who was captured that night in Watertown and now lies grievously wounded in a Boston hospital bed, had help or were operating in league with anyone.
They said Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the fifth man suspected of committing terrorism while under investigation by the bureau. Agents had questioned him in 2011, and last year he left on a six-and-a-half month trip overseas, primarily to Russia.
At the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Cardinal O’Malley said some of the more than 170 wounded in the bombings had prayed there one week ago. He named the four victims — three who died at the finish line and the police officer killed three nights later in a fatal encounter with the Tsarnaev brothers, officials say — and said they would live in eternity.
Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan who is chairman of the Intelligence Committee and a former F.B.I. agent, strongly defended the bureau’s work. He said he believed that the older brother had traveled to Russia under an alias.
“We must be a people of reconciliation, not revenge,” the cardinal said. “The crimes of the two young men must not be the justification for prejudice against Muslims and against immigrants. The Gospel is the antidote to the ‘eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth’ mentality.”
“They had information from a foreign intelligence service that they were concerned about his possible radicalization,” he said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.”
Cardinal O’Malley, who has criticized the Democratic Party for the abortion-rights stance of many of its elected officials, said more than one million abortions annually “is one indication of how human life has been devalued.” But he also criticized lawmakers in Congress — by implication, most of them Republicans — by saying that a failure to “enact laws that control access to automatic weapons is emblematic of the pathology of our violent culture.”
“The F.B.I. did their due diligence and did a very thorough job of trying to run that down, and then asked some more help from that intelligence service to try to get further clarification, and unfortunately that intelligence service stopped cooperating,” he said, without naming the agency involved.
“I hope that the events of this past week have taught us how high the stakes are,” the cardinal said at the end of his homily. “We must build a civilization of love, or there will be no civilization at all.”
“We believe he may actually have traveled on an alias to get back to his home country,” Mr. Rogers said. “When he comes back he has a renewed interest in that radicalization process.”
His words resonated with Maureen Quaranto, a nurse practitioner. She was working as a volunteer in a medical tent at the marathon when the bombs went off. On Sunday, she drove from her home in Plymouth, Mass., and then lingered after the service, tears in her eyes.
“That six and a half months becomes incredibly important,” Mr. Rogers said of Mr. Tsarnaev’s overseas travels. “That’s probably where he got that final radicalization to push him to acts of violence.”
“It just gives you time to reflect,” she said. “Jesus said to forgive him.”
The investigation, Mr. Hagel said, was seeking to uncover “what these two brothers were up to — why, what motivated them, were they associated with foreign governments or nonstate actors or global terrorist organizations.”
Mayor Menino and Governor Patrick called on everyone in the state to come together for a moment of silence at 2:50 p.m. Monday — precisely one week after the bombings. That will be followed by the ringing of bells across Boston and the commonwealth.
As prosecutors worked to complete the criminal complaint against Mr. Tsarnaev that will detail the charges, hundreds of police detectives and F.B.I. agents — including members of the Joint Terrorist Task Force in Boston, along with nearly 250 agents from 24 of the F.B.I.’s 56 field offices — continued to work on the investigation, officials said.
On Monday night, students and faculty and staff members will gather on the campus of Brown University in honor of Lingzi Lu, the Chinese graduate student who was killed in the bombing.
Their efforts included analyzing records from the brothers’ phones and computers, searching their browsing histories to find associates and witnesses and extremist group affiliations. The agents also scoured the brothers’ credit card records and other material seized from their apartment and car for evidence of bomb components, the backpacks used or anything other evidence that could tie them to the bombings on Monday or the shootings later in the week.
“We will remember her and everything good that a bright, ambitious, and engaging student represents in our community, and, hopefully, speak about the values that make our community strong, even under such terrible circumstances,” Robert A. Brown, president of the university, wrote to the university.
Many local and national lawmakers said that the federal courts would be the best place to hold a trial, rather than a military tribunal.
The campus, which shut down Friday to honor Ms. Lu, will begin to return to normal on Monday, Mr. Brown said.
“I hope he’s brought to trial in federal court. He will get a fair trial,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “The public defender assigned to him should vigorously defend this young man because he or she will be helping America.”
Another memorial is expected on Thursday night on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus to honor Sean A. Collier, 26, the university police officer who was killed.
But Mr. Graham said that prosecutors should leave open the possibility that Mr. Tsarnaev should be treated as an “enemy combatant” in order to question him for a lengthy period without a lawyer and outside the criminal justice system, intensifying the debate over how to handle terrorism cases planned inside the United States.
“I am profoundly grateful for the service and supreme sacrifice of Officer Collier, who was an extraordinary young man, an excellent police officer, and a truly beloved member of our community,” Chancellor Eric Grimson wrote in an e-mail on Sunday.
Under a public safety exemption, Senator Graham said, Mr. Tsarnaev can be questioned without having Miranda rights read to him, but given his medical condition, that exception could end before he is able to speak.
The fourth victim, Martin Richard, 8, was mourned on Sunday in Dorchester at the church attended by his family.
“When the public safety exception expires, and it will here soon, this man, in my view, should be designated as a potential enemy combatant, and we should be allowed to question him for intelligence-gathering purposes to find out about future attacks and terrorist organizations that may exist that he has knowledge of,” he said. “And that evidence cannot be used against him in trial.”
There were signs that the Boston area was returning to normal.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, agreed that investigators should question Mr. Tsarnaev without the presence of a lawyer, but he said that there was no need to designate him an “enemy combatant” in order to do so.
Late Sunday afternoon, Mayor Menino briefed reporters about a five-phase plan to reopen the area where the attack occurred. It will involve decontamination, structural building assessments and debris removal.
“I think that the good news is we don’t need ‘enemy combatant’ to get all the information we need out of him. No. 1, the court, the one court that has ruled, has allowed a lot of flexibility in the public safety exception before you Mirandize somebody,” Senator Schumer said. “But second, at any time, what’s called a HIG, a High-Value Interrogation Group, composed of the F.B.I., C.I.A. and anyone else, can question him without a lawyer in a secured situation and find out whatever they need.”
Newbury Street, the busy retail thoroughfare that runs parallel to Boylston Street, where the blasts took place, was bustling on Sunday, with visitors clutching shopping bags and reclining in restaurants. But they were also drawn by the hundreds to gaze over the metal barriers cordoning off the six blocks around the marathon’s finish.
Mr. Schumer said that there was overwhelming evidence implicating the suspect and that prosecutors would not need a confession to convict.
“It’s been really eerie,” said Calla Gillies, a 24-year-old real-estate agent who lives inside the area, which she can gain access to with proof of residence. “We’re just still as scared because it’s empty. It feels like the marathon was yesterday.”
“Given the facts that I’ve seen, it would be appropriate to use the death penalty in this case, and I hope they would apply it in federal court,” he said. Massachusetts does not have the death penalty.
Jess
Bidgood and Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting from Boston.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, agreed that Mr. Tsarnaev should be tried in federal court.
She said that the High-Value Interrogation Group, which was created by President Obama to deal with terrorism suspects, was qualified to get the most urgent information from the suspect, and noted that “the Miranda right can be read at a later time.”
The interrogation group is a multiagency team of specialists led by the FBI. Its deployments are classified, and the Department of Justice declined to confirm its involvement in the Boston case.
Mr. Tsarnaev remained under heavy guard at the hospital, where a dozen of the victims of the Boston Marathon attacks a week ago were also recovering. In all, more than 50 people remained hospitalized in the region, according to The Associated Press.
Sean Collier, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology officer who was killed on Thursday night, was remembered at a vigil on Saturday night. Hundreds of mourners, joined by many law enforcement officers, gathered at the Wilmington Town Common to honor Mr. Collier.
His family issued a statement thanking the community for its support.
“We are heartbroken by the loss of our wonderful and caring son and brother, Sean Collier,” the family wrote. “Our only solace is that Sean died bravely doing what he committed his life to — serving and protecting others. We are thankful for the outpouring of support and condolences offered by so many people.”
Reporting was contributed by Willie Rashbaum and Ethan Bronner from New York; Thom Shanker from Jerusalem; and Brian Knowlton, Charlie Savage and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington.
