At about 7 a.m. on Friday, officials at the University of Massachusetts were scrambling to answer an urgent question. Was the lone surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings a student at the campus here?
By 8 a.m., they knew the answer: Yes.
Suddenly the 67 miles between this quiet college town and the suburb of Boston where Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old fugitive, had last been seen seemed distressingly few.
The campus police chief, Emil R. Fioravanti, thought the odds were slim that Mr. Tsarnaev had escaped and made it all the way down to Dartmouth. But no one knew for sure. It had been a bizarre, unpredictable week, and the chief wasn’t willing to take chances. He made the call: Evacuate the campus.
“If we’re going to err,” Mr. Fioravanti recalled later, “we’ll err on the side of caution.”
It was an unnerving 48 hours to come. Universities have grown increasingly mindful of the need to prepare thoroughly for emergencies. But this was an odd situation: Nothing was happening on the campus. Yet the impulse to clear out and lock down went unquestioned. Still jittery from the bombings days before and a violent turn of events overnight, university officials saw the news that the accused bomber was a student as enough to prompt sweeping action.
Fearing that Mr. Tsarnaev’s dormitory room in Pine Dale Hall might contain explosives, officials evacuated that building first, shortly after 8. Katie Horan, a sophomore, lived on the second floor, one floor below the suspect. She had time only to grab her cellphone and her car keys. Still dressed in the shorts and sweatshirt she’d slept in, Ms. Horan rushed to a nearby dorm, Oak Glen, and banged on the door of her best friend, Steven Tikellis.
Mr. Tikellis had stayed up till 3 o’clock watching news coverage of the rapidly accelerating story. When he finally went to sleep, he dreamed that the suspect was a fellow student. Answering the door, he was stunned by the news Ms. Horan blurted out. “I thought I was still dreaming,” he said later.
Word spread fast. Grant O’Rielly, an associate professor of physics, was driving to work from his home in nearby New Bedford just after 9 o’clock when he saw a stream of cars leaving the campus. A police officer stationed at the entrance told him what was happening, and instructed him to turn around.
He did, glanced at his e-mail on his phone, and saw a new message from the chancellor, Divina Grossman. She had summoned him and other campus leaders for an emergency conference call. Mr. O’Rielly, who is also president of the Faculty Senate, pulled off the road and dialed in. It was 9:18. The conference call had just begun.
Worry began to envelop the campus. By 10, a mandatory evacuation was under way. Colin Murphy, a junior, was in his dorm room when the campuswide alert came through by text and e-mail. He heard yells in the hallway—"This is crazy!"—and saw students outside who had been walking toward the library look at their phones, pause, and immediately turn back toward the dorms.
Through a combination of alerts, social media, pulled fire alarms, and old-fashioned door-banging, the dorms were cleared out. Students who had cars left for home, or for nearby friends’ houses; shuttles and chartered buses took a few hundred students to nearby Dartmouth High School. By midday, the entire campus was empty except for key administrators and several dozen federal, state, and local law-enforcement officials.
The student at the center of it all was still unaccounted for.
Tension, Then Relief
All afternoon, a cold, driving rain pelted the nearly vacant campus. Outside the sole entrance, a half-dozen or so police officers in bright-yellow reflective coats huddled near their cars, lights flashing. Dark-blue barricades blocked the drive. Questions swirled: Had the suspect evaded the authorities completely? Was he heading back to the campus, where he had reportedly been seen earlier in the week?
Inside the campus’s two-mile circular drive known as Ring Road, top administrators gathered in a meeting room near the chancellor’s office.
Meanwhile, law-enforcement officials, needing connectivity and space, had taken over the common areas of the newly renovated library.
Tensions waxed and waned over the afternoon hours, as investigators conducted more sweeps of the campus and gathered evidence. At 5 p.m., dozens of vehicles, including several U-Haul trucks and armored tactical vehicles from the Massachusetts State Police and the Rhode Island Bomb Squad, sped from the campus.
Several miles away, a hundred or so of the university’s students had settled into a nearby Best Western. Outside the entrance, three female students hunched over a phone. “I was on TV!” one squealed. Staff members from the university’s residential-life department bustled through the lobby and driveway, unloading packages of bottled water, Goldfish crackers, and other snacks. Later that evening supply runs to Walmart or Target were planned for students who had fled the campus with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.
Ms. Horan and Mr. Tikellis were on the way to their hometown, near the New Hampshire border. Usually the two friends, who often go home together on weekends, listen to music and chatter throughout the drive. This time, they flipped constantly through radio stations to hear reports from Watertown, Mass., where the manhunt for Mr. Tsarnaev was still under way.
Stunned, confused, and a little scared, they tried to make sense of what had happened. Neither was close to the suspect: Mr. Tikellis knew him in passing, and Ms. Horan shared mutual friends with him. But they knew enough of him to feel confident that he hadn’t seemed suspicious.
As the afternoon turned into evening, it became apparent that the campus was secure. By 9 p.m., the suspect was in custody. Shortly afterward, the university posted a statement on Facebook from the chancellor. The campus was safe, Ms. Grossman wrote.
But the FBI hadn’t finished gathering all the evidence it needed. Agents from the bureau’s Evidence Recovery Team told Chief Fioravanti they needed more time. The campus would be closed another day.
The Dust Settles
On Saturday the quiet campus held more abandoned cars than people. Key university officials were still around, along with 15 to 20 federal agents, working mainly in Pine Dale Hall. In the reading room of the library—the previous night’s command center—only stacks of unused napkins and a giant bag of trash hinted at the bustle of the day before. A whiteboard at the front of the room was wiped clean.
Friday’s question—Where is he?—had been replaced by other queries. Will finals be canceled? Is the cap-and-gown pickup still on?
There were serious questions, too. Had Mr. Tsarnaev been back on the campus earlier in the week, as many news reports had asserted? What about the two men who had been taken into custody by U.S. immigration officials from an apartment complex popular with students?
(It was not clear whether or how the men, who had been questioned along with a third person earlier in the weekend by the FBI and then released, were connected to Mr. Tsarnaev or to the university.)
Mr. Murphy, the student, made a trip to Walmart to buy a change of clothes. The suspect had twice been in a class for which Mr. Murphy had been a teaching assistant in the past year. “Introduction to American Politics” was a semester-long course, and Mr. Tsarnaev was taking it for the second time this spring, he said. When the suspect’s name was released, Mr. Murphy recognized it right away. In the large lecture class, though, Mr. Tsarnaev was just another face. Mr. Murphy didn’t know him.
By Saturday afternoon all he could think about was getting back on the campus. “A lot of people I’ve talked to really just want to get back to a sense of normalcy,” Mr. Murphy said. ‘We just want to get on with things.”
Wondering Why
On Sunday, just before 9 a.m., a police officer stationed at the campus entrance who had been stopping cars all morning walked up to the two remaining barricades and, piece by piece, took them apart. He got into his car, turned off the flashing lights, and drove away. The campus was open.
Over at Pine Dale Hall, only the tangles of yellow police tape on two leafless trees outside the entrance hinted at the intense investigation of previous days. By noon, carloads of students returning from home, the Best Western, and elsewhere slowly filled the awakening grounds with traffic and voices.
There was a brief scare: In the late morning, a plume of dark smoke suddenly appeared to rise above Pine Dale Hall. After a rushed exchange with a campus police officer nearby, a university official exhaled. Off campus, he said with relief. It’s burning season in New England.
The provost, Alex J. Fowler, dressed in a suit, tossed a jovial “welcome back” to a student nearby.
“By noon today we should be fully functional,” he said. At 1 p.m., it looked that way. Baseball and softball games against Western Connecticut State were in full swing; a fierce game of roller hockey played out near a cluster of dorms. Mr. Fowler and Deborah McLaughlin, the university’s chief operating officer, sent out an e-mail to students inviting them to an ice-cream social planned for Sunday evening.
In the counseling center, Christine Frizzell, the director, was at the ready with counselors and clergy members. Last week she tended to anguished students who had helped out at the chaotic finish line of the Boston Marathon, aiding victims of the bombings.
Now she’s bracing for more who may come to her with feelings of guilt. “Should I have known?” she imagines some wondering. “Could I have intervened if I had asked enough questions?”
Katie Horan doesn’t feel guilty. She just feels confused. On Sunday she worked a shift in the local coffeehouse of her small hometown. She opened at 4 a.m. and all morning fielded a steady stream of questions from familiar faces. Did you know him? they asked her. Are you going back?
She doesn’t really want to. So many other calamities that have befallen campuses and towns elsewhere—the September 11 terror attacks and the shootings at Virginia Tech and Newtown, Conn.—were the work of terrorists or social outcasts who’d struggled with mental-health problems for years. At least in those awful cases, she said, a screw appeared to be loose. There was some sort of explanation, however insufficient it might seem, for the mayhem and loss they inflicted.
“You usually get an indication of somebody you shouldn’t be around. Now that that is shattered, what do you do?” she asked. “Am I supposed to start worrying about going to school? Am I supposed to stop going to college?”
Of course, nothing actually happened here. But Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, that seemingly normal, friendly guy she’d see in her dorm, who lived a couple of doors down from one of her best friends, a guy she’d nod to in passing—she just can’t reconcile the disconnect. There’s a perplexing gap between the person she knew, or thought she knew, and what he is now accused of doing. She is haunted by it.
In two weeks, classes will be over. Exams will begin. And next year, as planned long before the events of the past week, she’ll be transferring to a college in New York City.
At the moment, the thought of returning to this campus is unsettling, but she’ll go. She has a paper due on Monday.