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The New Yorker
The Saudi Marathon Man
Posted by Amy Davidson
A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his
body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and
seventy-six people were injured and three were killed. But he was the
only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had
his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his
fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald,
with a “phalanx” of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the
one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors
watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours
(“I was scared”)
before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone
who’d plant a bomb—that he was a nice guy who liked sports. “Let me go
to school, dude,” the roommate said later in the day, covering his face
with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him
and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living
with a killer.
Why the search, the interrogation, the dogs, the bomb squad, and the injured man’s name tweeted out, attached to the word “suspect”? After the bombs went off, people were running in every direction—so was the young man. Many, like him, were hurt badly; many of them were saved by the unflinching kindness of strangers, who carried them or stopped the bleeding with their own hands and improvised tourniquets. “Exhausted runners who kept running to the nearest hospital to give blood,” President Obama said. “They helped one another, consoled one another,” Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said. In the midst of that, according to a CBS News report, a bystander saw the young man running, badly hurt, rushed to him, and then “tackled” him, bringing him down. People thought he looked suspicious.
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