Boston Marathon bombing survivor Karen Brassard (L) and bombing witness Carlos Arredondo (R) leave the federal courthouse after the second day of the trial of accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Boston, Massachusetts March 5, 2015. Photo credit: Reuters
Moments after being blasted into the air “like a rocket” in the Boston Marathon bombing, nurse Jessica Kensky saw that her husband’s leg had been blown off and leaped into action, struggling to put a tourniquet on him, she testified on Monday.
Running on adrenaline, she did not realize the blast from one of the two homemade pressure-cooker bombs had set her back on fire, Kensky told jurors in the third day of accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s federal trial in Boston.
“There was smoke, there was blood. I was most focused on my husband, he was right next to me still, and his foot and his leg were kind of detached,” said Kensky. “A man came over as I was trying to fumble to put a tourniquet on Patrick and said, ‘Ma’am you’re on fire, you’re on fire.'”
Tsarnaev, 21, is accused of killing three people and injuring 264, including Kensky, at the famed race’s crowded finish line on April 15, 2013.
Kensky, who rolled into the courtroom in a wheelchair, lost her left leg on the day of the bombing. Her right leg was amputated in January of this year because it had failed to heal from injuries sustained in the blast.
She and her husband, Patrick Downes, were taken to separate hospitals and did not see each other for two weeks when a volunteer medical crew brought her to visit him. Downes also lost a leg in the blast.
Tsarnaev’s attorneys opened their case last week by bluntly declaring that the defendant and his older brother were responsible for the attack as well as the fatal shooting of a police officer three days later, in an effort to focus attention on the brother’s role in the plot.
Defense lawyers contend that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died following a gunbattle with police three days after the bombing, was the driving force behind the attack, with Dzhokhar following along out of a sense of submission. By pinning the bulk of the blame on the older brother, defense lawyers hope to persuade the jury at U.S. District Court in Boston not to sentence their client to death.
Prosecutors maintain that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev also read jihadist magazines online and “believed that he was a soldier in a holy war against Americans.”
Despite his lawyers’ admission of responsibility, Tsarnaev has not changed his plea from not guilty. In the first weeks of the trial, prosecutors say evidence will focus on the ethnic Chechen’s actions leading up to the bombing and in the four chaotic days that followed, before he was found hiding in a drydocked boat at the end of a long manhunt.
U.S. District Judge George O’Toole has worked to keep both defense and prosecution attorneys focused on direct evidence of Tsarnaev’s guilt, leaving the question of how his responsibility compared with his brother’s until the trial’s sentencing phase.
The bombing killed Martin Richard, 8; restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, and graduate student Lingzi Lu, 23. Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 27, was shot to death three days later.
Đăng ký: VietNam News