BOSTON — The Massachusetts man who found the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect hiding in his boat was glad to be able to help and feels lucky to be alive, he said Tuesday.
“If I help these people that lost people, if I can help them in their mind, then everything is good with me here,” David Henneberry, of Watertown, said in an interview aired Tuesday by WCVB-TV in Boston.
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Henneberry said he went outside to get some air and check his boat Friday evening after police lifted a shelter-in-place order following an intense daylong manhunt for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Henneberry said he did not see any blood but noticed that two bumper pads he had placed between his boat, the Slip Away II, and its shrink wrap cover had fallen to the ground. He thought it might have been the wind.
When he first went to check, he found a loose strap and went back in his house. But he decided to take another look from a ladder.
“I got three steps up the ladder and rolled the shrink wrap. I didn’t expect to see anything, but I saw blood on the floor of the boat. A good amount of blood,” he told WCVB. He said he saw more blood and noticed a motionless body.
“He was just lying there by the engine block and the floor. I couldn’t see his face. I’m glad I didn’t see his face,” Henneberry said. The man still didn’t move.
Henneberry said that he doesn’t remember going down the ladder to call 911, but that “I didn’t waste any time.” He said police took him and his wife to a neighbor’s home.
After an exchange of gunfire with police, Tsarnaev was arrested.
“I am lucky I am alive,” Henneberry said. “These other people were killed. Sometimes, I just sit and say, ‘Wow.'”
He said he is aware of talk on social media about efforts to buy him a new boat — it was damaged during the police activity — but that he would rather people make donations to the One Fund organization, formed to help Boston bombing victims.
“Slip Away is slipping away,” he said. “But I say it did its job.”
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