Commissioner: Menino Was Against Locking Down Boston After Bombings
Mayor Tom Menino was initially opposed to the decision to issue a shelter-in-place in the Boston area after the Boston Marathon bombing, former Boston Police commissioner Ed Davis said in an interview with WGBH’s Juliette Kayyem.
“The governor and the mayor went back and forth,’’ Davis said. “The mayor was not in support of shutting the city down. But the governor made the call.’’
At the time, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been killed in a firefight with police in Watertown, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had managed to escape the immediate area. Early on the morning of April 19th, 2013, a group consisting of Menino, Gov. Deval Patrick, Davis, Transportation Secretary Rich Davey, and FBI and other law enforcement representatives discussed how to go about trying to apprehend Tsarnaev.
Davey led the push to shut down the area’s transportation infrastructure, according to Davis. He argued a type of slippery slope argument—that if they shut down one key bus route in the Watertown neighborhood, people would be stranded in that entire area. If they shut down transportation in the wider Watertown area, even more people would be stranded in Cambridge and Boston. And so on.
“He said, ‘This is an all or nothing proposition,’’’ Davis said. “That really did set the stage for the debate.’’
The debate was also informed by a recent snowstorm, during which a state of emergency had been declared and transportation had been shut down across the area.
“I said to the governor, ‘We don’t know what we have here, and this is at least as dangerous as a snowstorm,’’’ Davis said.
A “big debate’’ ensued, Davis said. In the end, despite Menino’s opposition, officials decided to close the MBTA and issue a shelter-in-place for Watertown, Cambridge, Boston, Newton, Waltham, and Belmont on the morning of April 19th.
Police scoured the Watertown area for the day to no avail. The lockdown was lifted just after 6 p.m.
Tsarnaev was discovered not long after that when David Henneberry noticed something askew in the winterized boat in his yard. He found a pool of blood and a hiding Tsarnaev, and so called the police.
Patrick has previously defended the decision to shut down the city, and Davis told WGBH that he thought it worked.
“The bottom line was we got a very good search done that basically flushed him out of a certain area into the boat,’’ Davis said.
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