What Really Happened at the Boston Marathon?

By Laura Fawaz, Contributing Reporter

On Monday, April 15th, the news-starting coming in of bombs that went off at a beloved tradition for Bostonians for over a century: the Boston City Marathon. 

No one knew then what was to come, though most people were either assuming that is was a terrorist attack, or hoping it wasn’t.  After three people were killed in this attack, and many with severe injuries, the search was on for the suspect(s).  Most Americas know that everywhere you go, you are being monitored; so the FBI quickly went to the surveillance cameras that lined Boylston street and near by businesses for clues.  When they came to their conclusion, they forgot one key aspect.  We now live in a world where surveillance comes not only from big brother government, but also from our own smart phones and through social media. 

By the end of the week, on Friday, April 19th, residents in the Massachusetts cities of Boston, Cambridge and Watertown were ordered by the police to stay inside their homes.  All businesses are public schools were closed for the day as the SWAT team patrolled the then deserted cities in search for just one person: a 19-year-old boy whom we now know as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.  He was being sought after as one of the two bombers in connection with the Boston Marathon Bombing.  He was not referred to as a suspect, but as one of the bombers.  He was on the run after the police killed his older brother, the other bomber, right in front of him.  This happened after the two brothers allegedly robbed a local 7/11. 

When 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed, an explosive was detonated, leaving a hole in the street.  We hoped to report to you how this happened and where the explosives came from, but there are conflicting eyewitness reports, with photos circulating the internet to collaborate each story.  Later in the evening of the 19th, after the lockdown order was lifted, a resident went outside of his Watertown home where he noticed a man in his boat.  The resident then called the police, which resulted in another shoot out with Tsarnaev.  There have been different reports on the condition of Tsarnaev when this shoot out began, though police did confirm shooting him in order to apprehend him and take him into custody.  Tsarnaev then entered the emergency room, still in police custody, in critical condition and unable to speak as he was injured by police in the throat.  He is currently unable to really tell his side of the story; there are conflicting reports on the severity of these wounds, if it is just while in recovery, or permanent.

This remaining “suspect” has been charged with federal crimes while in the hospital recovering. Tsarnaev had been in custody for more than 60 hours before being read his Miranda Rights.  This was a result of a decision from President Obama’s administration to utilize the “public safety exception,” which allows authorities to hold off on Miranda readings until they can be sure no imminent threat of further attacks remains.  Even though Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said last Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, “There isn’t any basis for concern about another imminent threat.”
And Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said authorities had no reason to believe any accomplices were at-large.  There is “no evidence of a broader plot involving more people,” he told ABC News.
The surviving suspect was not provided with a lawyer, is unable to speak, and all we know is what we have been told on TV, which keeps changing.  And the while, the world reacts with massive uncertainty about what really happened on this tragic day. 

While writing this article, my Facebook page was kept open to keep up with each and every post put out there by organizations, group, or just people doing research on their own on the event.  Many were commenting on and sharing detailed photos that leaked of a cover-up of the bombing from the FBI, across the globe via Facebook.  From this I found that every single post since the events unfolded last Friday, were of people who of course felt sorry for the victims, but knew that there was more to the story than we were being told.  Though the track record from our government led people to their own conclusion.  For example, according to Fox News, since September 11th, 2011, 17 out of 20 of the last “terror arrests” were actually framed by the FBI.  Again with the FBI’s track record, the best profile are those who come from divorced parents who are not around (overseas), lower class, loners who are not apart of a larger community of any kind, whether it’d be a church or a mosque.  The Tsarnaev brothers had no one who would be able to watch over them.

Before you say it, it’s not that all tragedies are staged, it’s that we have to look at what comes of it and then drawl our own conclusion.  As true journalist, we must make sure we have all of the facts and highly consider the source.  There are strong defenses in each side. If this event was staged, it requires thousands of people to be in on it.  Somebody would come forward, if not for the sake of honesty, then for the millions of dollars they would make from it.

There could also be people posting altered pictures to make it look like it was staged.  But one photo that we’ve seen all over the TV news, and in the newspapers is of a man being pulled away in a wheelchair with his legs having just been ripped off.  Most people, especially those in the medical field, have been questioning this photo.  The man seems to be in a very calm, good condition for supposedly just having his legs ruptured.

See the photo at: http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/are-you-just-a-believer-or-do-you-think/41807

In www.TheDailyBeast.com, Charles King wrote the article Every American Muslim’s Fear After The Boston Bombing, where he poses the question of how are the Tsarnaev brothers different from other mass murders such Adam Lanza?  Is it just because they are Muslim that it then becomes an act of international terrorism?  King poses the notion that the Tsarnaev brothers will forever be “the poster children for a particularly American fear, reflected in everything from blockbuster films to popular fiction: that the English-speaking, dark-haired young men with unpronounceable names, who wear baseball caps, win scholarships, and garner wrestling trophies, are also the ones who could blow you up.”

King continued with “it would not be surprising if this perverse band of brothers simply picked jihadism as their preferred way of telling the rest of the world to go to hell.  If that makes the Tsarnaev brothers international terrorists, then other American killers such as Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho, Washington snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, and Columbine murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold deserve the label as well.”

But in a moment of instant opinions, it’s easy to miss the key points: It doesn’t matter that the Tsarnaev brothers were Chechens, or Muslims, or may have recently visited relatives in Russia.  It’s the fact that it is not asked why do mass killers do what they do?  When someone commits suicide we immediately ask for the suicide note don’t we?  We’ve settled into a familiar pattern of first turning to religion, and then ethnicity, as a way of making sense of horrific things.  Neither one is very helpful here in the United States, because the major form of “ethnic violence” in America is not terrorism.  Rather, it is hate crimes; violence directed against ethnic, religious, or other minorities—not committed by them.  Individual killers rarely come from the devout God-fearing people, or from the untainted strands of their religion. 

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, more than 1,000 “hard-core hate groups” were active in the United States in 2012.  They inspired Wade Michael Page, the neo-Nazi who murdered six people in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, a conspiracy of active-duty U.S. soldiers who allegedly planned to take over Fort Stewart in Georgia, and a foiled plot by a “white power” high school student in Alabama to kill his black and gay classmates.  The obvious point gets lost in the bustle: ethnic, religious, and other minorities in the U.S. still have monumentally more to fear from the majority than the other way around. Though we’ve been programmed into looking at religion and ethnicity first so that it gives us a story that we find convincing.

Tsarnaev has been charged with a terrorism charge known as “use of a weapon of mass destruction,” and “malicious destruction of property resulting in death.”  He faces possible penalties including the death sentence.  Everything done thus far has not really answered anything it only added more questions. 

As a journalist, we cannot give our opinion, or tell you what to think.  All that is being said and done here is giving you the real facts and images, and asking you to answer our title, “What Really Happened At The Boston Marathon?”

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