Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice Read Online Free Page B

exploits were legion—running his age in miles every year around his birthday, trying to swim across the English Channel, and participating, with his son Ryan, in what was then, according to Guinness World Records, the largest-ever game of Duck, Duck, Goose, on the field of the Lowell Spinners, a single-A affiliate of the Red Sox. Often his wild endeavors had a charity component—he had helped raise millions for cancer research and other causes over the years. They were also about self-esteem, about pushing himself as far as he could. His unrelenting drive was a marvel to everyone around him. He had long outrun those teenage feelings of inadequacy, but he would never stop trying. As his mother wrote in her diary, “Once Dave starts running, maybe he’ll finally be able to get some rest.”
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    S he was in the best shape, physically and mentally, of her life. Shana Cottone had stopped drinking five months earlier, in the fall. It had not been easy, over the long winter, to adapt her life to fit the decision. It still seemed impossible, at times, for the twenty-seven-year-old to find new ways to socialize. That was partly a hazard of her job: Shana was a police officer in Boston, and so were a lot of her friends, and they liked to go to bars together when they were off duty. In one way, it was a kind of therapy. They saw a lot of hard things at work, things that other people didn’t understand and didn’t really want to hear about. It could be isolating. Sorting through the craziness with other cops was a ritual of healing and of bonding, and alcohol had seemed an essential part of the process.
    Shana had been on the job five years. Her first assignment was in West Roxbury, but it hadn’t really clicked; the neighborhood on Boston’s outer edge had one of the lowest crime rates in the city, and it felt like people didn’t really need her there. When her probation period ended, she had asked to be transferred to Roxbury, an inner-city neighborhood with a similar name but a lot more trouble on its streets. When she got there, the district was beginning an innovative project aimed at bringing psychiatric help to troubled residents through policing. Some officers were wary of the assignment, which demanded that they respond to calls in tandem with a civilian, a social worker trained in crisis intervention. Shana was intrigued. Paired up with the clinician, she quickly found her niche. They roamed the neighborhood together, stepping in to defuse domestic conflicts, suicide threats, out-of-control teenagers. Shana loved the sense of potential in the work, the promise of making things better. She thrived in the role, assisting in more than three hundred incidents. One involved a six-year-old boy in a Spider-Man costume who had pulled a butter knife on his foster parent. Shana talked to him as she loaded his booster seat into the back of her cruiser, trying to keep the mood light so he wouldn’t be afraid. Before she dropped him off for a mental health evaluation, the little boy gave her a sticker shaped like a heart. Shana stuck it to the back of her badge, where it remained—an invisible reminder, worn over her own heart, of what mattered most to her about her work.
    She cared about her job, and she knew she was making a difference. When the day came that her drinking affected her work, it was a slap in the face, and the shock of it brought instant clarity. It had happened back in the fall. She had gotten angry about something on a day off, and before she thought about it, she had acted on the anger. Word of what had happened made it to her supervisors, and the fallout had gotten in her way at work. It was the first time that had ever happened, and she knew it had to be the last. So she had made her decision and never looked back. On the first day of October 2012, Shana had gone to Western Massachusetts, to a residential treatment program for first responders. She hadn’t had a drink since.
    Coming back