Sgt. Clarence Henniger was the first to reach Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus officer Sean Collier, who was gunned down in his cruiser three days after the Boston Marathon bombings.
The lights on Collier’s car were still on, Henniger testified Wednesday at the trial of admitted bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The driver’s side door was open, the window down.
“When I arrived at the cruiser, I looked inside and that’s when I observed a wound to the head, to the temple,” said Henniger, a 40-year veteran of MIT’s 62-officer police force. “I observed a wound to the neck and I observed a wound to his hand.”
“Was there blood?” federal prosecutor William Weinreb asked.
“Yes, sir,” Henniger said.
“Where?”
“All over the car and his body.”
Testimony on Wednesday in the death penalty trial of Tsarnaev, who along with his late brother planted two nail-packed pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon — killing three people, claiming 17 limbs and hurting more than 260 others on April 15, 2013 — centered on the fallen officer.
Henniger attempted CPR and detected a slight pulse. He radioed for help as a gurgling sound rose from Collier’s mouth. Henniger said he had no idea whether the attacker was still around.
“Hang in there, just hang in there,” another officer at the scene told Collier.
“Who did this to you?” the officer asked.
There was no response, recalled Henniger, who testified that he noticed one of the three retention devices on the officer’s holster had been breached. But his .45-caliber Smith & Wesson, covered in blood, was still there.
The defense team, which has portrayed Tsarnaev as a confused college kid who was influenced by his older brother, did not cross-examine Henniger.
On Tuesday, the jury heard how Tsarnaev was found by police who scoured the Boston suburb of Watertown for the bombing suspect. Tsarnaev slipped under a tarp and climbed aboard the Slip Away II, a fishing boat dry-docked in a Watertown backyard. He hid for hours before being discovered.
Bleeding, he picked up a pencil and wrote what Weinreb called his “manifesto.”
Tsarnaev wrote he was jealous that his brother, Tamerlan, had achieved paradise by dying like a holy warrior; he was killed the night before during a gunbattle with police. The indictment against him says Tsarnaev helped in his brother’s demise by running him over and dragging him along the road as he tried to run down police.
About the bombings, Tsarnaev wrote on the boat that he didn’t enjoy killing innocent civilians, but that circumstances excused it.
“The US Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that,” he wrote. “Know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that. We are promised victory and we will surely get it.”