Ballroom Dancer Describes Losing Leg In Marathon Bombing
BOSTON (CBS/AP) — After the first bomb went off at the Boston Marathon, Adrianne Haslet-Davis somehow knew there was another one coming.
"I wrapped my arms around my husband and said, 'The next one's gonna hit, the next one's gonna hit,'" she recalled Wednesday at the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The next thing she knew, she was on the ground. Her husband, Adam, tied a tourniquet around her ravaged left leg, but he couldn't stop screaming.
"My first thought is, he's in shock and I have to save myself," she said.
The professional ballroom dancer crawled through broken glass, dragging her bloody leg along the pavement, shredding her forearms in the process. She made it into a restaurant.
Her husband walked in soon after, then collapsed on the stairs. An artery in his foot was spurting blood, his face grew pale, and his eyes began rolling back in his head, she said.
"I thought he was dying," she said.
He survived; she ended up losing her leg.
Her account — some of the rawest testimony heard to date in the case — came on the second day of the penalty phase of Tsarnaev's trial. The jury that convicted the 21-year-old former college student in the bombing is deciding whether should get the death penalty.
Three people were killed and more than 260 wounded when Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, detonated two pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the race on April 15, 2013. Tsarnaev was also convicted in the killing of an MIT police officer as the brothers attempted to flee.
Tsarnaev's lawyers say Tamerlan masterminded the attack and recruited his impressionable younger brother, then 19, to help him. They say his life should be spared.
But prosecutors, seeking to emphasize the brutality of the attack, have called a long list of victims and their families to describe the heartbreaking consequences.
Haslet-Davis sobbed and covered her face with her hand as she described the terrifying aftermath of the bombing. She said she thought her husband was dead and she would be next.
At the hospital, she instinctively told medical personnel what she did for a living as they looked at her leg.
"I just kept screaming that I was a ballroom dancer," she said.
She called her parents to say goodbye.
"I said, 'I've been in a terrorist attack and I don't think I have a foot left anymore, and I'm in really bad shape, and I really need to talk to you, and this might be it,'" she said.
Her husband wasn't in court Wednesday.
"He has bravely admitted himself into a mental facility at the VA hospital," she said.
As she left the witness stand, she gave a long, furious glare at Tsarnaev. His lawyers leaned in toward him as if to protect him.
Middle Finger Video
Also Wednesday, the defense tried to blunt the impact of a photo of Tsarnaev giving the finger to a security camera in his jail cell three months after the bombing.
His lawyers showed the jury video clips of him looking into the camera, apparently fixing his hair in the reflective glass, and then making a slightly angled, two-finger gesture similar to what teenagers often do playfully in selfies. Then he raised his middle finger at the camera.
A poll of 500 registered Massachusetts voters released Wednesday by Suffolk University found that 58 percent believed Tsarnaev should be sentenced to life in prison without parole, while 33 percent favored the death penalty.
The poll was conducted April 16-21 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
Collier's Family Testifies
Earlier in the day, family members said the mother of slain MIT police officer Sean Collier was so distraught by his death that she could not get out of bed for months.
Collier was gunned down three days after the bombing as Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, were trying to flee.
Collier's stepfather, Joseph Reynolds, described a close-knit, blended family that formed when he and Collier's mother married in 1993. Reynolds said he raised Collier from about the age of 6.
"It was sort of a 'Brady Bunch' situation," he said.
Reynolds, as well as Collier's younger brother, Andrew, described Sean as a kid who always had a strong sense of right and wrong, down to putting bugs outside rather than killing them.
"He was a cop at an early age," Reynolds said, testifying on the second day of the penalty phase of the trial.
Three people were killed and more than 260 wounded in the 2013 bombing.
Prosecutors showed the jury a series of photographs of Collier as a child and a picture of him at his graduation from the police academy, his mother pinning his badge on him.
"That was probably the happiest day of his life," Reynolds said.
Prosecutors say the Tsarnaev brothers shot Collier in his police cruiser during a failed attempt to steal his gun. Hours earlier, the FBI had released photos of the brothers as suspects in the marathon bombing.
Reynolds said Sean's mother has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and has not been able to return to work.
"It's been a terrible two years," he said.
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