Victims Tell Court Of Horrific Injuries In Boston Marathon Bombing
BOSTON (CBS) - Boston Marathon bombing survivor Jessica Kensky was the first person to testify Monday - along with her service dog named Rescue - who we first met months ago. Court officers had to reconfigure the witness stand so she could testify from her wheelchair.
She described the horror of the day she and her husband barely survived.
Kensky told jurors: "People were screaming; our eardrums were blown out. You just hear yourself breathing. There's smoke, there's blood... This was a war zone, something I've never experienced before."
She would end up losing both legs after a series of surgeries that probably isn't even over.
She called the pain "Absolutely horrendous. The worst pain I have felt in my life... I was really not wanting to live."
For the first time, jurors heard Monday from a friend of Lingzi Lu, the Chinese woman studying at Boston University. Danling Zhou told jurors that the international students at BU wanted to see the event they'd heard was so special to people in Boston.
Lu died on the sidewalk; Zhou had her abdomen ripped open and explained to jurors how she had to keep her hand pressed a against her stomach to stop her internal organs from spilling out. In slightly broken English, She explained what it was like waiting to be rescued.
"I didn't think I should waste any energy yelling. If I'm yelling, I would bleed faster," she said. "I know that help is coming but it's hard, just to wait there like that."
Lynn Firefighter Matt Patterson recalled how he ran in to help 6-year-old Jane Richard, whose hair was so singed, he said she looked like a boy. When he got to 8-year-old Martin, and saw his ashen skin, Patterson told jurors he knew "there was nothing that could be done at that time."
Bill and Denise Richard held each other as Patterson testified how he helped carry Jane to safety with her father.
Prosecutors also shifted their focus today, building the factual case against Tsarnaev. Jurors saw a compilation video of surveillance images showing the brothers move along Boylston before, during, and after the blasts.
Defense attorneys disputed the video's accuracy, noting discrepancies in the time stamps that some, but not all, of the surveillance videos contain.
Jurors also saw phone records that showed the Tsarnaev brothers speaking to each other in the moments before the blasts, though under cross examination the FBI expert testifying had to admit he could not determine which brother had called the other.
