BOSTON – A doctor involved in treating the Boston Marathon bombing suspect who died in a gunbattle with police says he had injuries head to toe and all limbs intact when he arrived at the hospital.
Dr. David Schoenfeld said 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev was unconscious and had so many penetrating wounds when he arrived at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center early Friday that it isn’t clear which ones killed him, and a medical examiner will have to determine the cause of death.
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The second bombing suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was in serious condition at the same hospital after his capture Friday night. The FBI has not allowed hospital officials to say any more about his wounds or condition.
Schoenfeld lives in the Boston suburb of Watertown and heard explosions from the shootout between the two brothers and police early Friday. He called the hospital to alert staff they likely would be getting injured people, then rushed in to coordinate preparations.
“We had three or four trauma teams in different rooms set up and ready,” unsure of whether they would be treating a bombing suspect, injured police or bystanders, Schoenfeld said.
The older Tsarnaev’s clothes had been cut off by emergency responders at the scene, so if he had been wearing a vest with explosives, he wasn’t by the time he arrived at the hospital, the doctor said.
“From head to toe, every region of his body had injuries,” he said. “His legs and arms were intact — he wasn’t blown into a million pieces” — but he lost a pulse and was in cardiac arrest, meaning his heart and circulation had stopped, so CPR, or cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, was started.
How did the medical team react to treating the bombing suspect?
“There was some discussion in the emergency room about who it was. That discussion ended pretty quickly,” Schoenfeld said. “It really doesn’t matter who the person is. We’re going to treat them as best we can.”
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