Beth Bourgault wasn’t in favor of sentencing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon that killed three people and seriously wounded and maimed hundreds of others, including herself and her husband.
“I wanted him to receive life in prison, maximum security, and solitary confinement for a good, long time,” she said. “I wanted him to have a long life so he could live it that way. To me, that was better than a death sentence.”
So when she heard two weeks ago that a U.S. Appeals Court judge overturned that death sentence, she wasn’t surprised.
“It was disappointing,” she said. “But I wasn’t surprised.”
Five years ago, when the sentence was announced, Bourgault, 65, said authorities prepared her and other victims about an appeal.
“It’s been a fast five years,” she said. “It’s out of your mind. Then, when I heard about this …”
Bourgault and her husband, Michael, were standing at the finish line in 2013 waiting for some friends to come in. She was an athletic woman who loved to run.
“Half-marathons, 5Ks, 10Ks, I ran them,” she said. At some point, she’d entertained the thought of running the whole race.
But she was standing 10 feet behind the spot where the first of two bombs with shrapnel loaded into pressure cookers, planted by Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, exploded. The shrapnel ripped into her left calf, injuring nerves and muscles. The blast occurred so close to her right ear that it ruptured her eardrum. Despite several surgeries, she lost much of her hearing in that ear.
Her husband sustained burns, cuts and also suffered hearing loss.
In all, five people lost their lives at the hands of the Tsarnaevs. Three of them, 8-year-old Martin Richard, Krystle Campbell, 29, and Lu Lingzi, 23, were killed at the site of the explosions. Sean Collier, 27, an MIT police officer, was shot to death during the manhunt for the brothers, and a fifth, Boston Police Officer Dennis Simmonds, died one year later as a result of the shootout with the Tsarnaevs.
Bourgault’s fight to save her left leg proved successful, even though, she says, she’s in constant pain from it. Her running days are over. But she counts her blessings.
“I’m lucky to have my leg,” she said. “But I’m in pain. It’s a part of me now.”
She tried to return to running once the leg healed, but decided to stop because for every day she’d run, there would be two more with intense pain.
Her daughter, AmyBeth, has picked up the slack for her mother, running marathons for the Massachusetts General Hospital first responders who treated her mother the day of the bombing.
“That was taken away from me, and I’m angry about it,” Beth said. “But people have lost so much more. I can still walk. I enjoy my grandchild. But I have that reminder.”
Now that the case is back in the news, thanks to the court decision and U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s decision to seek the death penalty again, those reminders come flooding back.
“Here’s the weird thing,” she said. “When you hear of other cases, or read about them in the paper — when you hear of absolutely atrocious things that are done to people, your first reaction is that someone should put a bullet into someone’s head.
“But I was very close to this situation. Even though what he did was unspeakable and horrible, I wanted him to live another 70 years in solitary confinement.”
One thing did surprise her, though. When the decision to call for a new death-penalty phase of the trial was announced, “the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts told us, in a conference call, that it would be four or five weeks for that decision (whether to refile for the death penalty) to be made. We’d have time to prepare statements about our feelings. But what surprised me was that his boss (Barr) went forward with it and didn’t give anyone the opportunity to make impact statements. Our voices were not heard.”
And while Bourgault says her stomach has already started churning over this, “what bothers me even more are the families who lost loved ones. Those families have to go through this again. That’s just so unfair.
“Now we’re going to have years and years ahead of us,” she said. “This is just going to continue to go on. (Tsarnaev) will still be in prison for life, but the thing is, this is not going to go away. This is where my heart breaks.”