Checks Being Sent to Boat Owner Who Found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Getty Images By CHRISTINA NG

America wants to help David Henneberry get a new boat.

The Watertown, Mass., resident became a hero when he discovered suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding in his backyard boat.

Henneberry quickly called the cops and in a final standoff, his boat was riddled with bullet holes.

“That boat’s his baby. He takes care of it like you wouldn’t believe. And they told him it’s all shot up,” Henneberry’s friend and neighbor George Pizzuto told ABC News. “He’s going to be heartbroken.”

Today, people around the country want to make help mend that broken heart.

Deborah Newberry, 62, of Orlando, Fla., has already put a $ 25 check in the mail to Henneberry’s home.

“Something told him to go and check things,” Newberry told ABCNews.com. “I just want him to know that people care about him because I know he’s probably the guy that would say, ‘Well, that’s okay.’ But I just would like him to know that we’re all thinking about him and appreciate his spirit.”

She believes Henneberry had to be “awfully, awfully cool” to emerge from a daylong lockdown, notice something wrong with his boat, find a bloody man in it and slip away to call police.

“Just listening to his coolness and how he handled the situation, it was like okay, that is a man who needs to have his boat restored,” Newberry said.

When asked if she sent Henneberry any note with the check Newberry said no, she simply wrote, “towards a new boat” on the check.

“He don’t know me from Joe Turkey,” she said with a laugh. “I want him to go back to his regular little things that he do and don’t have to worry about having a boat.” Getty Images
Florida lawyer John Phillips felt the same way.

“[The boat] is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but that’s what’s significant to him,” Phillips told ABCNews.com of the bullet-riddled boat. “If that’s what the guy’s passion is, I have no problem whatsoever chipping in and helping out.”

Phillips, 38, is a personal injury attorney in Jacksonville, Fla. He wants to send Henneberry $ 1,000 for a new boat since he predicts the boat will be held as evidence for some time.

“He just had his boat shot up and had a terrorist live in it for a day,” Phillips said. “If the dude wants an upgraded boat, let’s get the guy a boat without terrorist blood in it.”

Watertown Police Chief Edward Deveau has been inundated with messages of gratitude and praise as well as requests from people who want to know how they can get a Watertown Police T-shirt.

“I’m getting emails and things from all over the world,” Deveau told ABC News. “I got an email this morning. Some person in Detroit, Michigan, who wants to replace the boat for the Watertown resident that got shot up. I mean, it’s just incredible.”

People on Twitter are echoing the calls to help Henneberry, hailing him a hero.

“Bravo, David Henneberry! You are a true American hero. I say we all pitch in and buy you a new boat. #welldeserved,” one person tweeted.

Another wrote, “Some boat company needs to hook David Henneberry up with a new boat. His has a few holes in it. Holey #boats don’t float.”

Henneberry’s boat is reportedly a 22-foot Seahawk cruiser with a fiberglass hull, which retails for around $ 50,000.

He did not return ABC News’ request for a comment.

“It took more than the police department to get it done and that’s the American spirit to me,” Phillips said. “It’s one random guy and one random boat ironically in a town named Watertown that’s supposedly landlocked. Truth is stranger than fiction. You couldn’t write this stuff and be believable.”

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Checks Being Sent to Boat Owner Who Found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Watertown, Boston suburbs on lockdown as search for suspect intensifies

Two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing killed an MIT police officer, injured a transit officer in a firefight and threw explosive devices at police during their getaway attempt in a long night of violence that left one of them dead and another still at large on Friday morning, according to the Associated Press.

Authorities have described the remaining suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a dangerous terrorist and have urged residents of several Boston-area cities and towns to stay in their homes. All modes of Boston-area transit have been suspended. Businesses are being asked to remain closed as the search continues. The AP is reporting that an empty SUV linked to the suspect has now  been found in Boston.

 

 

Katie Zezima, a correspondent with the Associated Press covering the events from Watertown, says clashes between the suspects and the police took place in a very residential area of Watertown.

“There were people in the street just because they were woken up by it at two or three in the morning. They were nervous, there were sounds of gunshots that were going off, there were dozens and dozens of police cars, SWAT team vehicles,” says Zezima.

This morning, Boston police took to Twitter to urge people not to use social media to reveal where police are conducting searches.

 

“If the suspects themselves were on a smartphone or some kind of mobile device and were monitoring social media, they could get information that would put those officers at risk,” says William Ward, professor of social media at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Ward adds that the directive may also help to keep local area residents safe and accurately informed.

“It’s kind of a nervous, scary feeling,” says Arthur Paloukos, who owns Linda’s Donuts in Belmont, Massachusetts. “We locked the back door, it is nerve-wracking, especially when the SWAT teams came walking by with the dogs, and yelled at us to be inside and don’t open the door.”

 

This morning’s events began only a few hours after the FBI released photos and videos of the two young men, who were seen carrying backpacks as they mingled among marathon spectators. The bombings on Monday killed three people and wounded more than 180 others, and authorities revealed the images to enlist the public’s help finding the suspects.

This story has been updated to include the name of the suspect and the directive from the Boston Police Department. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Watertown, Boston suburbs on lockdown as search for suspect intensifies

During lockdown, a Watertown business stayed open, thanks to a tenacious CEO -- and the cloud

Boston and its surrounding suburbs were on lockdown Friday morning as police searched for the remaining suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings earlier this week and authorities urged residents to remain in their homes.

Businesses in the area were also asked to remain closed, but there was at least one outlier. Athenahealth, Inc., is a cloud-based provider of electronic health records and care coordination services to medical groups and health systems based in Watertown, Mass. This morning, co-founder and CEO Jonathan Bush sent out this letter to employees and athenahealth’s social media network, stating that the business would continue on.

“We are open for business. WIDE open,” Bush wrote. “Though the exact motives of this attack are still unclear, the point of this kind of terrorism is to generate enough widespread fear and panic that a society freezes up and stops functioning.”

“At athenahealth, we don’t allow that. We don’t flinch.”

The lockdown was lifted around 3:09 p.m. PST.

In an interview with Marketplace early Friday, Bush said it was important not to allow terrorism to stop progress.

“It is the fundamental intention of terrorists to stop that momentum, and so if you’ve got a shot at leaning some extra momentum in, that’s your cue. We’ve felt it that way, big time,” he said.

Bush said besides two employees “far away from the glass, behind rows and rows of men with guns and some cameras” at the Watertown headquarters, the majority of his 2,339 employees were working in the cloud or out of the company’s six offices outside of Boston. On a typical day, around 1,000 employees work from Watertown. 

“We’ve doubled down on the work that we have to do manually. Most of that is in our Belfast, Maine, location,” he said. “The client support center’s been up the whole time. And the guys who do [research and development] and new stuff, they can work on their laptops from anywhere … so far everyone’s just been banging away over email and chat.”

“I supposed we’re a little bit lucky as a cloud-based company, it’s easier for us to activate and respond,” Bush said. “But I think most of the people watching TV are thinking, ‘What the hell can I do right now? I wish I could do something.’”

Bush said he was confident that with a bit of weekend work, there will be no backlog come Monday.

“We’re proud of that, to keep that going for our clients, and for the principle of the thing.”

Update: This story was updated at 3:09 p.m. to reflect that the lockdown in Boston had been listed.

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During lockdown, a Watertown business stayed open, thanks to a tenacious CEO -- and the cloud