Victim: Race bomber stood out

BOSTON -- Jeff Bauman, wearing shorts, walked with an awkward gait into a federal courtroom in Boston on Thursday.

Both of Bauman's legs were blown off in a bomb explosion at the 2013 Boston Marathon. He cannot wear long pants because they trip him up and chafe his skin at his mechanical prostheses.

Bauman testified on the second day of the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose lawyer said Wednesday that Tsarnaev and his brother had set off the bombs near the finish line of the marathon.

Tsarnaev, 21, has pleaded innocent to 30 counts against him, including 17 that carry the death penalty, in the explosion of two bombs on April 15, 2013. The explosions killed three people and injured more than 260 others.

Bauman's injury was captured in what became an iconic photograph from the attacks. Apart from his own horrifying story, he described having seen a suspicious-looking man wearing a black hat and sunglasses, who dropped a backpack next to him. The man was said to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's older brother, Tamerlan.

"He didn't look like anybody else that was there," Bauman said. "He was alone, he wasn't watching the race." Everyone else was clapping and enjoying the marathon, he said, but this man struck him as odd.

Bauman turned his attention back to the finish line, waiting for his girlfriend to cross, he said. Moments later, he was on the ground. He thought it was fireworks. "It smelled like the Fourth of July," he said.

Then he saw the chaos, and when he looked down, "I could see my bones and my flesh sticking out."

Many thoughts raced through his head, including that he was going to die: "I had a great life. I saw the world, I played sports growing up, I had great friends, I experienced a lot."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyer, Judy Clarke, argued that her client had been a fairly normal teenager, interested in Facebook, girls and cars, who was under the sway of the older brother he loved and respected.

"It was him," Clarke, said of the bombing role of her client, who sat slouched in a chair at the defense table.

But, she argued, he did not act alone. All of the horror and grief of the bombing were "caused by a series of senseless, horribly misguided acts carried out by two brothers." Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a shootout in the days after the marathon blasts.

Her stark admission of her client's culpability was made in service of Clarke's ultimate goal -- to persuade the jury to reject the death penalty and spare Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's life.

Another spectator at the finish line when the bombs went off, Rebekah Gregory, who testified Wednesday about losing her leg in the blasts, has posted a letter on Facebook to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Gregory said she had been nervous about taking the stand but that it had been a transformative experience.

"I looked at you right in the face ... and realized I wasn't afraid anymore," she wrote. "And today I realized that sitting across from you was somehow the crazy kind of step forward that I needed all along."

She said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a coward: "A little boy who wouldn't even look me in the eyes to see that. Because you can't handle the fact that what you tried to destroy, you only made stronger."

A Section on 03/06/2015

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