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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Police officers from across the country and other mourners turned out by the thousands Wednesday afternoon for a somber public memorial service at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to honor a campus officer who the authorities say was killed by two brothers who are also suspected of detonating two bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon last week.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — More than 10,000 people, many of them uniformed police or military officers, gathered Wednesday on a tightly secured athletic field at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to remember Sean A. Collier, the campus police officer who authorities say was gunned down by the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings.
Dozens of metal detectors were set up at the entrance to Briggs Field on the M.I.T. campus and the authorities shut down sections of Cambridge, including the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge, which connects Cambridge to Boston, and part of Memorial Drive, a major riverside thoroughfare.
Officer Collier’s brother, Rob Rogers, looked over the crowd, which included Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and took a breath.
The authorities say that the campus officer, Sean Collier, 27, was shot and killed during an encounter with Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers who are also accused of setting off the pair of bombs that killed three people and injured more than 260 others at the marathon.
“People ask me, if Sean were here, what would he think? Are you kidding me? He would love this,” Mr. Rogers said. “You’ve got sirens, flashing lights, formations, people saluting, bagpipes, taps, the American flag. He would have loved it.”
L. Rafael Reif, president of M.I.T., said at the memorial service that Officer Collier had gotten along so well with the school’s student body that he had gone on hiking trips and on swing dance outings with campus groups. “In just 15 months, he had built a life with us,” Dr. Reif said. “He touched people across our community with his deep kindness.”
Officer Collier, 27, was remembered as a curious and charismatic officer who had wanted to be a policeman since he was 7 years old. He took an active role in campus life, said M.I.T.’s president, L. Rafael Reif, asking students about their studies and joining the outdoors club, whose conditioning workouts — climbing 21 flights of stairs — he performed in full uniform.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose first wife and young daughter died in a car accident in 1972, also spoke at the ceremony, telling Officer Collier’s parents that he knew from experience how the family was suffering. The Tsarnaev brothers, he said, were “two twisted, perverted, cowardly knockoff jihadis.”
“In just 15 months, he built a life with us that was rich in friendship and shared adventure,” Dr. Reif said. “And he touched people across our community with his deep kindness and openhearted willingness to help, his humor and enthusiasm, his playful charm.”
Mr. Biden praised the nation’s ability to recover from such terror attacks, saying, “We have suffered. We are grieving,” before adding, “But we are not bending.”
The memorial’s speakers, which included Mr. Biden and Senator Warren, struggled to comprehend the circumstances around Officer Collier’s death. He is thought to have been sitting in his cruiser when the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, approached his car from behind and shot him, the authorities believe.
Hours earlier, in Boston on Wednesday, Boylston Street, the busy hub that forms the northern boundary of Copley Square, was reopened to the public as the city continued to seek a semblance of the ordinary, nine days after the bombings.
“It is so difficult to understand why such a senseless, brutal act was perpetrated on such a gentle, caring young man,” the M.I.T. police chief, John DiFava, said.
Along with the return of traffic to Boylston Street, the Copley Square Central Library was reopened, and Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority trains resumed service to the Copley Square station — a voice over the loudspeaker making a familiar, if no longer mundane, announcement: “Doors open on the right.”
During an emotional address, Mr. Biden drew on his own experience of losing a child, and reflected broadly — and colorfully — on what had motivated the bombers to commit their terrorism.
“It’s like, you’re back to normal,” said Mike Westberry, a 27-year-old university administrative assistant. “Down here, everything looks the same. It’s more difficult, I think, above ground,” he said, referring to the six blocks around Copley Square, where there is now a makeshift memorial of flowers, notes and other tokens that have been left by well-wishers.
“Why, whether it’s Al Qaeda,” asked Mr. Biden, “or two twisted, perverted, cowardly knockoff jihadis here in Boston, why do they do what they do?”
For Susan Christiansen, 69, Wednesday meant a morning walk down Boylston Street with her dog and three of her neighbors. They made sure a CVS drugstore was open, and then tried to recall from the surveillance video images they had seen in the media how the bombers had moved through the area before and after the April 15 attack.
“They do it to instill fear,” Mr. Biden said. He later said, “We have suffered, we are grieving, but we are not bending.”
“Gosh, those people with the bombs were walking the same way we were walking,” Ms. Christiansen said, before turning to one if her companions, Sonia Hauser, 50. “Don’t you feel, kind of, just wary?”
Addressing the students present, Mr. Biden cited the diversity of M.I.T., as well as its intellectual firepower.
According to a former law enforcement source who had been briefed on the bombing investigation, the authorities recovered only one gun — a handgun — used by the Tsarnaev brothers, despite the pair engaging in what officials have described as a fierce shootout with the police as the brothers sought to escape capture on Friday.
“You are their worst nightmare,” Mr. Biden said. “All the things these perverted jihadis — self-made or organized — all the things they fear.”
The gun’s serial number was obliterated and so has not yet been traced, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Sitting on an adjacent field after the service, David Cohen-Tanugi, 26, a graduate student in the materials science department, said the service had given the university a rare, communal chance to process the fact that it, too, was involved in the events that unfolded in Boston last week. “M.I.T. has a reputation as a very functional place, where people don’t spend much time thinking about pomp and circumstance, and fuzzy feelings,” Mr. Cohen-Tanugi said. “This has struck a chord in the M.I.T. community that’s a very hard chord to strike.”
The source said that no gun had been recovered from the boat where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured while trying to hide after being wounded by the police.
Leaving the service, Mariah Murray, 21, a senior studying mechanical engineering, said Officer Collier’s death had led many students to reflect differently on campus security officers — a group with whom this playful campus is sometimes at odds. “We do things like hacks, pranks, exploring parts of campus that we’re not meant to be on, almost like it’s a game,” Ms. Murray said. “I don’t think we realized how much they protect us.”
Another law enforcement source who participated in the investigation said that the recovered handgun was a 9-millimeter Ruger. That source, too, said that only one gun had been found, and that no gun had been recovered from the boat.
The service offered thousands of police officers — from Canada, from neighboring states and from communities all over New England — a chance to say goodbye to one of their own.
In Makhachkala, Russia, on Wednesday, a team of officials from the American Embassy in Moscow, including F.B.I. agents, conducted a second day of questioning of the parents of the Tsarnaev brothers at the local office of the Russian Federal Security Service.
“Boston was under attack, and this poor kid was a victim of it,” said Detective Rick Corazzini, 59, of the Police Department in Lexington, Mass. “Everybody sort of did take this personally.”
An embassy official confirmed the questioning but provided no details about what the parents had told investigators, who arrived in Dagestan, where the parents now live.
This
article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
“The F.B.I. is receiving cooperation from the Russian government in its investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing,” the official said.
The portrait investigators have begun to piece together of the brothers suggests that they were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs but were not acting with known terrorist groups — and that they may have learned to build bombs simply by logging onto the online English-language magazine of the affiliate of Al Qaeda in Yemen, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
The investigation into the bombings is still in its earliest stages, and federal authorities are still in the process of corroborating some of the admissions that law enforcement officials said were made by the surviving suspect in the attacks, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19. But they said some of his statements suggested that the two brothers could represent the kind of emerging threat that federal authorities have long feared: angry and alienated young men, apparently self-trained and unaffiliated with any particular terrorist group, able to use the Internet to learn their lethal craft.
Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters after emerging from a two-hour classified briefing with F.B.I. and intelligence officials Tuesday evening that the suspects were most likely radicalized over the Internet, but that investigators were still searching for possible sources of inspiration or support overseas.
“The increasing signals are that these were individuals who were radicalized, especially the older brother, over a period of time — radicalized by Islamist fundamentalist terrorists, basically using Internet sources to gain not just the types of philosophical beliefs that radicalized them, but also learning components of how to do these sorts of things,” Mr. Rubio told reporters.
“This is a new element of terrorism that we have to face in our country,” Mr. Rubio said. “We need to be prepared for Boston-type attacks, not just 9/11-type attacks.”
Jess Bidgood reported from Cambridge, Mass., and Erica Goode and Timothy Williams from New York. Reporting was contributed by William K. Rashbaum and Michael Cooper from New York; Michael S. Schmidt and Eric Schmitt from Washington; Serge F. Kovaleski, Michael Schwirtz, Wendy Ruderman, John Eligon and Dina Kraft from Boston; Andrew Roth from Makhachkala, Russia; and David M. Herszenhorn in Moscow.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 24, 2013
Correction: April 24, 2013
An earlier version of this article, using information supplied by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, misstated the age of the slain campus officer, Sean Collier. He was 27, not 26.
An earlier version of this article, using information supplied by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, misstated the age of the slain campus officer, Sean Collier. He was 27, not 26.
