Hundreds of mourners gathered outside a suburban Boston church yesterday for the first of a series of funerals for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing.
The morning funeral of Krystle Campbell, 29, was the first since last Monday's attack at the race's finish line, which killed three people and injured more than 170.
The suspected bombers are also believed to have fatally shot a security guard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Thursday night before a gun battle with police and day-long manhunt that left most of the Boston area locked down.
Some in the crowd outside St Joseph's Church in Medford had driven as far as 160km to attend the funeral, where officials including Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick were in attendance.
As she waited for the funeral, Renee Arsenault, a 28-year-old hairdresser, said she had gone to middle school with Campbell.
"I am so happy this many people showed up in her honour," Arsenault said.
The hearse carrying Campbell's red-tinted casket was escorted by about 20 police motorcycles and a guard of honour by uniformed law enforcement officers who stood in front of the church as pallbearers carried the casket in.
The marathon draws about 27000 runners each year and hundreds of thousands of spectators, making it one of Boston's best-attended sporting events and one to which many area residents have some personal connection.
Arsenault's mother, Leslie, recalled her daughter standing along the finish line near the bombing site in 2000, cheering her on when she ran the race. "My daughter stood exactly where the first bomb went off," she said.
Campbell's funeral was the first of the memorial events planned for the day.
No public funeral has yet been scheduled for the bombing's youngest victim, Martin Richard, or for Sean Collier, a member of the MIT police, whom the two suspected bombers gunned down on Thursday night.
Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was in custody at a Boston hospital yesterday after being apprehended on Friday night.
He was badly injured in a gun battle with police that led to the death of his older brother Tamerlan, 26.
TANGLED ROOTS
AN AUNT of the Boston bombing suspects says the elder one struggled to find himself while trying to reconnect with his Chechen identity on a trip to Russia last year.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev "seemed to be more American" than Chechen and "didn't fit into the Islamic world", said his aunt Patimat Suleimanova.
She said Tsarnaev spoke daily on Skype to his American-born wife, who had recently converted to Islam, and that she instructed him on how to observe Islam correctly.
Investigators are focusing on the six months Tsarnaev spent last year in southern Russia, where he stayed with his father for at least part of the time.
Tsarnaev was killed in a gun battle with police. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, is under guard in hospital. - Sapa-AP
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