Boston jury hears of boy’s grisly death

FILE - This combination of undated file photos shows Lu Lingzi, a Boston University graduate student from China, and Martin Richard, 8, who were killed in the bombings near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, in Boston. AP Photo/File

FILE - This combination of undated file photos shows Lu Lingzi, a Boston University graduate student from China, and Martin Richard, 8, who were killed in the bombings near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, in Boston. AP Photo/File

Published Mar 30, 2015

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Boston - The 8-year-old boy who was the youngest person to die in the Boston Marathon bombing was torn apart by the blast, a medical examiner testified on Monday as federal prosecutors wound up their case against accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

The graphic testimony about the injuries suffered by Martin Richard was illustrated by the child's bloody, torn clothing.

Holes in Richard's bloodstained gray New England Patriots T-shirt that correlated with holes in his torso were described by Massachusetts' Chief Medical Examiner Henry Nields during the 15th day of testimony in Tsarnaev's trial at Boston federal court.

Nields said one piece of shrapnel appeared to have gone straight through Richard's body. “It would be difficult to say the precise location due to the size of the openings in the abdomen,” he testified.

Tsarnaev, 21, is charged with the bombing on April 15, 2013, that killed three and injured 264 people, and the fatal shooting of Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier three days later as he and his brother prepared to flee the city.

The brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died in the early morning of April 19 after a gunfight with police that ended when Dzhokhar inadvertently ran him over with a hijacked car.

Shrapnel from the same homemade pressure cooker bomb that killed Richard punched through Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu's legs, causing the 23-year old to bleed to death within minutes, Boston medical examiner Katherine Lindstrom testified on Monday.

“Her injuries were caused by debris hitting her body and going through her body,” Lindstrom said. “They would have been very painful.”

Prosecutors have said that Tsarnaev left the bomb that killed Richard and Lu in front of The Forum restaurant. The third person to die, 29-year-old restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, was killed by a second bomb, prosecutors said.

The jury saw surveillance photos and video of Tsarnaev standing in the crowd in front of the restaurant, with a backpack at his feet, making a 19-second phone call about a minute before the blast. In one photo, he is just feet (about a meter) behind Richard and his younger sister, who was also badly injured but survived.

Defense lawyers opened the trial earlier this month with a blunt admission that Tsarnaev had done everything of which he had been accused by federal prosecutors. But they contended that he had done so out of a sense of subservience to his older brother rather than his own anger at his adopted country.

By painting Tamerlan as the driving force behind the attacks, the defense hopes to spare the younger Tsarnaev a death sentence and persuade the jury to determine that he should spend the rest of his life in prison.

The Tsarnaevs came to the United States from Chechnya about a decade before the attack, settling just outside Boston in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nields was the final witness called by the prosecution. The defense will now have a chance to call its own witnesses, which could include Tsarnaev. But they will be limited in how much evidence they put forward about the relative blame of the two brothers before the jury decides Tsarnaev's fate.

If the jury does find him guilty, the trial will enter a penalty phase, when both sides will call another round of witnesses before the same jury determines whether Tsarnaev should be sentenced to death or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Reuters

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