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On the morning of April 15, 2013, Lingzi Lu and her roommate, Jing Li, ate breakfast together in their Allston apartment. Lingzi had finished a major exam that weekend. She was thinking about going to the Boston Marathon; Jing had to study. Before nine o’clock, they said goodbye.
Lingzi was a Boston University graduate student and a gifted mathematician. Jing remembered their shared music, experiments in the kitchen, and Lingzi’s enthusiasm for American ice cream. Jing described her as a sister. By evening, Lingzi had not come home. Jing sent a message asking her to return early. There was no answer.
This is a story about the people responsible for a bombing, and how investigators found them. But it begins with a person who had every reason to expect an ordinary Monday.
The Boston Marathon was in its 117th year. Runners from around the world were approaching the finish line, cheered on by spectators along the streets. Among those spectators was Lingzi.
The men who attacked the crowd were brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Both were born in Kyrgyzstan and lived in Massachusetts. At the time of the bombing, Tamerlan was 26 and a legal permanent resident; Dzhokhar was 19 and a naturalized U.S. citizen.
There had been an earlier warning about Tamerlan. In 2011, a foreign government asked the FBI for information, saying it was concerned about his radicalization and possible travel to join underground groups. The FBI checked records and interviewed him and members of his family. It said it found no terrorism activity and passed that result back to the foreign government. That assessment did not identify an impending attack. It matters to the timeline, but it is not evidence that investigators knew what the brothers would do in April 2013.
The later federal indictment alleged that the brothers’ conspiracy was underway by February 2013 at the latest. On Marathon Monday, according to that indictment, they brought improvised explosives to Boylston Street and placed them among spectators cheering runners toward the finish line.
Then came two detonations, seconds apart. The marathon ended early. Three spectators were killed, and the FBI says more than 500 people were injured. The devices had been built to inflict devastating injuries in a crowded public place. These were not attacks on a military target or a government office. They were attacks on people watching a race.
The indictment was the prosecution’s account at that stage—not, by itself, a verdict. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would later be convicted of the charges arising from the attack.
In the immediate aftermath, responders faced the injured while investigators faced an enormous crime scene. FBI evidence teams, working with local and state police and federal partners, spent nine days processing twelve square blocks near the explosions. Technicians handled more than 3,500 pieces of evidence. Investigators also gathered photographs and video from the public through a digital tip line; the FBI says the digital material totaled more than 33 terabytes.
For Jing Li, that same aftermath unfolded as a search for her roommate. She texted Lingzi, called her, contacted friends and, the next morning, reported her missing. Jing and others checked hospitals. On Tuesday afternoon, she learned that Lingzi had died in the bombing. The delay between the explosions and that news is part of this crime’s aftermath too: while investigators assembled evidence, families and friends were still trying to find out who was safe.
Three days after the bombing, on April 18, the FBI released photos and video of two suspects. That was a major public step in the search, but an important distinction follows: the authorities had images of the men before they had confirmed names for them. In an October 2013 statement, federal and Massachusetts law-enforcement officials said the joint task force did not identify the brothers until shortly after Tamerlan’s death, when officers fingerprinted his body. They also said the brothers had not been under surveillance after the 2011 assessment closed.
The release of the images did not end the danger. That night, the brothers drove to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. There, they shot and killed MIT police officer Sean Collier and tried to take his service weapon.
After leaving MIT, the brothers carjacked a vehicle and kidnapped its driver. They took $800 from him and forced him to drive to a gas station. The driver escaped. The brothers continued in the stolen vehicle toward Watertown, west of Boston.
Police located them near Laurel Street and Dexter Avenue. A firefight followed. The brothers fired at officers and used additional improvised explosives. During the confrontation, Dzhokhar drove the carjacked vehicle toward officers and ran over Tamerlan as he escaped. Tamerlan died from injuries sustained at the scene.
Dzhokhar was still at large. He hid in a boat in a Watertown backyard, where he was discovered and taken into custody on April 19. The search that had begun at the marathon finish line had ended four days later, after another killing, a kidnapping and a violent confrontation with police.
The investigation did not rest on a single photograph or a single witness. At Dzhokhar’s federal trial, prosecutors presented more than a thousand exhibits and called more than a hundred witnesses. They included eyewitnesses, investigators, forensic specialists, victims and relatives of those killed. Fourteen people who had suffered amputations after the bombing testified.
A jury found Dzhokhar guilty on all 30 counts in the indictment. He was sentenced to death in June 2015. That is the trial outcome reported by the FBI; it should not be mistaken for a claim that every later legal question about his sentence is settled. Tamerlan was never tried. He had died during the Watertown confrontation.
There is another way to mark what happened after the arrests and the verdict. In 2015, MIT dedicated a memorial at the place where Sean Collier was killed. Its granite walls meet beneath a central vault, conceived as an open hand. At Boston University, Jing Li spoke about Lingzi not as a name in a casualty count, but as the roommate who baked cookies, played music and shared her life.
The evidence explains how investigators pursued the brothers. The verdict establishes what the jury concluded about Dzhokhar’s crimes. Neither can put Lingzi back at breakfast with Jing or return Sean to his colleagues. The final image of this case should not be the boat or the bombers. It should be the people whose ordinary days they took away.