Boston Marathon bombing trial hears survivors’ graphic evidence

The footage is clear. A young man wearing a white cap weaves his way through a crowded footpath along the Boston Marathon route.

The crowd in front of the Forum Restaurant are cheering as runners make their way to the finish line. The restaurant’s security camera catches the image of man, whom both prosecutors and the defence say is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two marathon bombers.

At 2.49pm on Monday, April 15th everyone on the video looks sharply to the left at something down Boylston Street. Everyone except the man in the white cap. He walks away quickly to the right.

Seconds later, there is a flash. A massive cloud of smoke engulfs the restaurant. When the smoke clears, shredded, burning bodies lie strewn, gravely injured and two dying on the street.

The Forum Restaurant video was the latest harrowing piece of evidence to be shown publicly for the first time in the death penalty trial of Tsarnaev (21), the Muslim American facing 30 counts in the killing of three people and injuring more than 260 people in the blasts.

Graphic evidence

On the second day of the trial, some of the most gravely injured victims in the worst attack on US soil since the September 11, 2001 attacks gave graphic and deeply emotional evidence of what happened.

Roseann Sdoia was standing next to a postbox just outside the Forum when she heard the first blast.

“I decided that I should run and I saw two flashes of white light exploding at my feet,” she told the jury at the trial in Boston.

She was standing beside the second of two home-made pressure cooker bombs detonated by Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan.

She was hit and registered that she had lost her right foot. She saw a foot in front of her that had a sock on it and had to think if she had put on socks that day. She didn’t. It was someone else’s foot.

“It was almost like I was starring in a horror movie as was everyone else around me,” she said. She is now wearing a prosthetic on her right leg.

William Richard told the court that he was climbing over the fence onto the marathon route after the first explosion when he was blown into the street by the second blast. He said that he ran back to where he was standing on the footpath with his wife and three children.

His daughter Jane, an Irish stepdancer, tried to stand but couldn’t. He then noticed her leg. “She didn’t have it,” he said. “It was blown off at the site.”

He tended to his daughter and son Henry, and saw that his wife, Denise, was hovering over the body of his eight-year-old son Martin, the youngest of the three victims of that day’s twin blasts. He left Denise to bring Henry and Jane to an ambulance.

Last time

“Given what I saw, it was at that time when I basically saw him alive barely for the last time.”

Asked by a prosecutor what condition he saw Martin in, he said: “I saw a little boy who had his body severely damaged by an explosion and I just knew from what I saw that there was no chance,” he said, speaking slowly in distressing testimony to a hushed courtroom.

“The colour of his skin and so on. I knew in my head that I needed to act quickly that we might not only lose Martin but we might lose Jane too.”

William Richard said he still suffers from a high-pitched ringing in his ears from the noise of the blast almost two years ago.

“I can still hear music; I can still hear the beautiful voices of my family,” he said.

Tsarnaev stared ahead during Richard’s testimony, never looking at the father of one of his victims.

The trial continues.