Prosecution shows victims’ gruesome autopsies
PROSECUTORS rested their case on Monday, March 30 in the Boston Marathon bombing trial, after a morning full of grisly testimony from physicians who conducted autopsies on the youngest victims of the bombing attack on April 15, 2013.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 21, is charged in the attack that left three people dead and more than 260 critically injured at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. He is also charged in the fatal shooting of Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier while trying to flee the city. He faces 30 counts, including 17 that could carry the death penalty.
The ethnic Chechen brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan, attempted to flee on April 19, a few days after the marathon bombing. Tamerlan, 26, was killed in a gunfight with police that ended when his brother ran him over with a hijacked car. Then 19-year-old Dzhokhar was found hours later hiding in a boat parked behind a residence in Watertown, Mass.
FBI agents found evidence of possible bomb-making tools (including nails, BBs, wire, a fuse, and parts of pressure cookers that could be used as possible ingredients in a homemade bomb) in the Tsarnaev brothers’ shared Cambridge apartment. A receipt for a Smith & Wesson BB gun, the same kind found at the scene of the Watertown police shootout, was also discovered in Dzokhar’s dorm room at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
Prosecutors wrapped up their case Monday after hearing accounts of the physical toll the blasts took on the young victims, who were killed instantly in the pressure cooker bombings.
Jurors heard testimony from Boston medical examiner Katherine Lindstrom, who examined the body of 23-year-old Lingzi Li. Shrapnel from one of the homemade pressure cooker bombs set off by the Tsarnaev brothers punched through Li’s legs, causing her to bleed to death within minutes.
Photos of 29-year-old restaurant manager Krystle Campbell revealed mangled legs riddled with shrapnel and a badly burned back. Campbell lost a significant amount of blood in a short enough period of time that she was unable to survive, and likely died within a minute of the blasts, a doctor said.
Medical examiner Henry Nields also reported findings of a nail, a pellet, a piece of wood, and black plastic inside 8-year-old victim Martin Richard’s body. Several jurors wept as they viewed the photos of severe injuries in every area of the child’s body, as well as serious third-degree burns and internal organs ripped apart.
“The cause of death was blast injuries of torso and extremities,” said Nields. “Overall the injuries would have been painful.”
Physical evidence from Martin’s examination included a shredded shirt and a jagged shard of metal found inside. The metal, Nields explained, had sliced through the boy’s abdomen and exited through his spine, basically cutting Martin’s aorta in half.
And with that evidence, the government rested its case, said Assistant US Attorney William Weinreb.
In February, defense lawyers opened the trial with a blunt admission that Tsarnaev had done everything federal prosecutors accused him of. However, they contended that Dzhokhar did so out of a sense of “subservience to his older brother,” Tamerlan, rather than his own anger.
Aiming to avoid a death sentence, the defense hopes to persuade the jury to determine the younger Tsarnaev should instead spend the rest of his life in prison.
If found guilty, the trial will enter a penalty phase, when both sides will call another round of witnesses before the same jury determines whether Tsarnaev should be sentenced to death or to life in prison without parole.
(With reports from USA Today, NBC News, and Reuters)
(www.asianjournal.com)
(LA Midweek April 1-3, 2015 Sec. A pg.1)
