The April 21 marathon, and its memorial the week before, are evidence of a city focused on its own strength, resilience, endurance. However, for some, the memory of the bombers is not a spectral ghost of 2013, but real — and personal. "This is a small neighborhood. And all the kids know each other," Tony Munoz explained. The bombers were neighbors and friends and playmates. Other old neighbors of the Tsarnaev brothers recall reaching out to each other in fear and confusion after news of the bomb broke: "I got a phone call from my mother to come get her. And when we got here, there was police, SWAT, everything," Kimberly Albino remembers.
The small, tight-knit community has been left wondering how two terrorists could have emerged from their midst, and how to move forward from the knowledge that they did. The apartment the bombers grew up in is now occupied, and other new occupants of the neighborhood have expressed their unease. "No one said anything. We found out from a neighbor, who said 'oh, by the way, they used to live in this building right here, second and third floor,'" said a father whose daughter just bough a condo across the street from the old Tsarnaev family home.
Many neighbors had no interest in speaking about the brothers at all, understandably trying to distance themselves from the memory of the boys they grew up with. Raz Ssercress, an area merchant, admitted "we would like see them sometimes, but we didn’t know who they were."
These people, like the city of Boston choose to look forward and not back.
