HE WILL NEVER REST IN PEACE-SAMUEL WOLKOFF

A lot people read my Blog. I suppose they come for many different reasons and I can see they are from all over the world.

There are good people who come here, victims, families of victims, people seeking justice, those who are fighting against injustice, people who care.

There are also extremely evil people who visit here. 

They are killers, murderers, sometimes the guilt ridden who are responsible by their actions or inaction's to resolve the injustices that are specifically detailed in many of my Blog posts.

To me it's very personal when June 6th arrives every year, a very painful day. It has now been 55 agonizing years since my father Samuel Wolkoff was brutally tortured and murdered on June 6th, 1958.

HE WILL NEVER REST IN PEACE

It's that time of the year again. Another June 6th to mark the date of his execution by pure evil.

Today's Blog is in memory of Samuel Wolkoff, My FATHER, My DAD, tortured and murdered at 42 years of age.

He believed in honesty, family, kindness, hard work, ethics, and his rights as a human being to reap the fruits of his labor for himself and our family.

MY FATHER was a courageous HERO. A man who did not run away from the corrupt animals who wanted a "cut of his business" for themselves. He believed in himself and the law enforcement, legal, supposedly moral "systems" to protect him from those that wanted the business that he had built from nothing with his blood and sweat.

All of this because he believed in a code of  personal ethics, morality, integrity that dictated honor, respect, fairness, loyalty, faith in humanity, and that no one is entitled to steal from another human being their right to live.

On June 6th, 1958 the world was evil, corrupt, his life was cheap, and scum bags took what they wanted, from who ever they wanted. That was the day they took my father's life, his business, and the souls of my family.

Today, June 6th, 2013, the world is infinitely more evil, corrupt, life is cheaper, scum bags thrive as they take even more what they want, from who ever they want.

There was no shame in 1958, no conscience on the part of the evil that murdered my father. Ironically the murderers are still alive. They have all done extremely well financially and life wise for themselves, their families.

There is no shame today in 2013 as we live in a world where corruption reigns supreme in every part of life, the value of a human life is treated as worthless, and money remains the god that is worshipped by our society.

Yes, my father was a hero, he is a hero who sacrificed his life for his beliefs. Seems old fashioned, naive, for someone to believe strongly in doing the right thing. Yet somehow, he who had nothing, created a thriving business, and maintained his righteousness of believing in goodness, the legal system, and that goodness is to be rewarded.

In the end, he was dead wrong and paid for it with his life.


Dead heroes, no matter how courageous they are, are not recognized by society for their acts of courage. 

There has and is a pervasive societal process that stinks like a toxic cesspool, spreads as a deadly cancer which pays homage to those who are corrupt, steal, and become powerfully rich with money. Those human beings, who are good seem to be ignored, forgotten, and deemed fools for believing in fairness, a code of respect.

Was it worth it for MY FATHER, Samuel Wolkoff, to stand his ground and give up his life in such a terrifying, grotesque manner at the hands of cowardly pussy punks? 

Was it worth the unimaginable pain that he felt as he was tortured slowly for 5 hours? What must he have been thinking during those horrific hours of going in and out of consciousness as they repeatedly tightened and loosened a rope around his neck?

Was it worth it, my hero, my dear beloved father? Was it worth it?

SAMUEL WOLKOFF IN HIS MEMORY

           HE WILL NEVER REST IN PEACE

Samuel Wolkoff- June 6th, 1958, forever etched in my soul. My father was gruesomely murdered on this day many years ago, at the age of 42. I was 10 years old. 

Certain facts in this blog post and also in the book "Blood Relation" have been deliberately edited to protect myself and others. 

To learn more information from the book, YOU CAN CLICK ON THIS LINK, OR THIS LINK.

The following are excerpts taken from the book, "Blood Relation":

  BLOOD  RELATION-P.130

"Thanksgiving  morning, 1957, and left on the floor of a parked car in Jersey City. Thirteen  one-dollar bills were fanned out on the backseat above them. The tableau, and the fact that one of the men had taken a bullet in his mouth and one in each eye, led a supervisor to surmise in the Jersey Journal that they'd been killed as payback for a "gangland double cross." Harold's version of events confirmed this. He said that he and a team of mobsters had carried out the killings. The victims had been indiscreet in their handling of a truck full of stolen cobalt, he said, and the Cosa Nostra boss who assigned the hits "wanted to teach every­ one a lesson."

There  was Samuel Wolkoff, whose body had been found on  June 6,1958, in a parking lot near the West Side Highway.He was forty-two years old and a partner in a meat packing company. Harold and two men whom the F.B.I. identified as Genovese soldiers killed him because he supposedly knew the whereabouts of a hoard of stolen cash and jewels to which the Genovese's felt entitled.

Harold had walked into Wolkoff's office on West Fourteenth Street, according to the statements he gave, and claimed to be an N.Y.P.D. de­tective sent to arrest him. He told Wolkoff that a surveillance operation had implicated him in a case, then let him call his wife from a pay phone to tell her he wouldn't be getting home on time. Wolkoff begged not to be put in handcuffs, so Harold held off until they got into his car. Harold's two accomplices were waiting for them in a cream-and-orange Mer­cury.They drove Wolkoff to a house in the town of River Edge, New Jersey, where they alternately tightened and loosened a rope around his neck and questioned him about where the money  and  jewels were. Harold told the others, "This  guy isn't going to tell you anything be­ cause he doesn't  know anything. Let's kill him now." Then, as he re­counted to the agents, he and one of his henchmen took hold of the rope

BLOOD RELATION-P.131

and strangled Wolkoff to death."Subsequent events," an F.B.I. report notes, "proved  that the 14th Street butcher never did have control of any alleged fund."

On and on it went, over the course of two years,with Harold doling out information in bits and pieces, depending on his mood. When he was unhappy with his prison treatment, the Feds would move him to a new facility. Sometimes, once he had established his own participation in a given murder, Harold would narrate in the third person,  referring to himself as "you know who" or "the other guy." In some of the 302s, as the F.B.I. reports are known, Harold says that he was the person who fired the gun, or tightened the garroting rope, and so on. In others, he gives the credit to a collaborator or leaves his own role vague. In the de­scriptions of the latter type of confession, the agents' play-by-play leads to the moment  that Harold and a couple of his thugs are about to commit a murder, then stares elliptically that the victim "was killed" or "was shot," without naming the trigger man.There are also murders he discusses that he claims to have had no part in, explaining that he has merely heard about them.

"The assumption was, he had a primary involvement in these mur­ders he was talking about," one of the F.B.I.agents who visited him told me, and two of Harold 's lawyers confirmed this. "He  wouldn't have survived in the Mafia, because they couldn't have controlled  him. But they put him to work."

Given the sheer magnitude and dimension of the confessions, some people in the government who did not hear them firsthand were initially skeptical. David M.Satz, Robert Kennedy's newly appointed U.S. At­torney for New jersey at the rime, says that when the F.B.I. first mailed him the interview reports, "I thought this guy was just popping off." John Wilgus, an agent charged with  running down Harold's  claims.

         BLOOD  RELATION-P.262

"gunned down in gangland fashion." The Manhattan District Attorney had called Scanlon "the most vicious goon on the waterfront." He had once been charged with opening fire on a Greenwich Village stoop after a girlfriend dumped him, killing a sixty-six-year-old  woman and a teenage boy.

"When I saw the newspaper, I was purely disgusted," she said. "My image of my father was always this wonderful man, good father, good husband. My mother talks about a soul mate. I cried all the way home. I told my husband and he said, 'There was always rumors about your dad and I didn't  mention it.'"

Scanlon's daughter had never heard of Harold either,and had no in­terest in learning more about her father's death."I don't care if the case is ever solved," she said."It's over, it's in the past, but they should hook him into a chair and electrocute him. I'm sorry. I want to meet the man and spit in his face."

She was by turns,impassive,sarcastic,grieving,irritable, and above all ambivalent, even about  the loss of her father. "Maybe we'd have been worse off if my father had lived with his criminal activities and not been killed," she said."I  think my mother thanks God that they didn't do it at the house. She raised five children with good values. There's been no arrests or troubles with the law."

She wanted to know the "nationality" of the name Konigsberg. I told her.  "He  was  Jewish in the Mafia?" she said. "How many people did be kill again? I'll tell you, in my religion, he's not going to heaven with that on his record."

Most recently, I was contacted by Jerry Wolkoff, a man with a surname I immediately recognized. The protracted strangulation of Samuel Wolkoff, his father, was one of the murders Harold had boasted of to the F.B.I.

BLOOD  RELATION-P.263
Jerry's ordeal was no less excruciating than that of the other sur­vivors. He was ten years old when he lost his father, in 1958.When his father's sister heard about it on her kitchen radio, she collapsed from a fatal heart attack, and the family ended up holding a joint funeral. "I became a husband and a father and I became a social worker, but I have a hard time getting close to people," Jerry said. "I been cut open. My kids are angry with me. They say I taught them how to take when somebody pays you a compliment never to believe them. Well, how do you relate to people when your upbringing was such that when you were a boy your father was tied up like a pig and killed?"

About ten years ago, Jerry began to look into the case, filing requests "with every law-enforcement office from here to Guam," and hiring a private eye. Through these efforts, he was able to glean that the prime suspect had been Harold Konigsberg- a detective let him know surrep­titiously that Harold's name, which he had never heard before, was all over a heavily redacted case file-but that all of the government's in­vestigations had been subsequently left to rot. Eventually, his was, too. "I gave up because after a while none of the authorities would return my messages," Jerry said. "Somebody got killed and nobody cared."

And though Jerry had called me looking for answers and I was able to share some with him in the form of Harold's F.B.I. statements, he still couldn't see the point in holding out any hope for resolution. "It's useless," he said when I visited his house on Long Island. "It's  not going to give me back the past forty-seven years with my father."

In his  dining room, Jerry took a picture frame from the credenza and thrust it at me. It  held a faded photograph of his parents at their wed­ding. "Look at this,"he said.

  
          "Samuel Wolkoff was a person. He Lived."

Samuel Wolkoff's cause of death, 5 long hours of tortured Murder By Strangulation. Try to hold your breath for as long as you can, then wait 40 more seconds, exhale, that will give you a tiny sense of the horrific way my father felt for 5  consecutive hours, a rope tied as a noose, was continuously alternately tightened, then loosened around his neck, while his hands were tied behind his back. Death, when it finally came, must have been a merciful release for my father.

The autopsy showed that my father struggled so bravely to live, that his eyeballs eventually burst, and he finally stopped breathing. His body then deposited at a desolate gas station, in the middle of the night, thrown out onto the ground, as a piece of garbage. Hold that entire scene in your mind forever, it is I can assure you gruesome, and haunting in its profoundly graphic endless replay, over and over in my mind.

Oh, as an aside, his sister learned about his murder on the radio news, she immediately dropped dead of a heart attack in front of her four children.

The family never talked about it for 40 plus years, not even to speak my father's name, it is the taboo secret code followed by many families of victims, as if somehow, the unbearable pain would get less. I have spent most of my life investigating his case and eventually shared it with our family. Never have figured out if I did good or bad by reopening the wounds, but I do know, those are permanent gaping, seeping, painful holes, they never really were ever closed.

I have been doing more thinking than usual lately, not necessarily a good thing for me, as I yearn to be one of those who are able to practice the art of ignorance is bliss.

How can a loved one who dies suffering, rest in peace, ever? 

Seems like a simple thing to believe, say, and its even reduced to a short acronym, R.I.P., easy to write. I can't write it, not possible, not after all the never ending suffering of my father, and us.

For an ultra private person like me, a blog is obscenely public, personal, grossly revealing, definitely not my style, but  interestingly, momentarily cleansing, a way of coming out, being up front with unbearable realities, my reality. 

Mostly I do it for those that can no longer speak for themselves, who experienced unimaginable suffering that ended their lives. In this particular moment, my father's reality.

When Konigsberg was in prison years ago awaiting trial on extortion charges, he initiated contact with the F.B.I. He began confessing to these F.B.I. agents about these murders, many of which he had committed himself. They suggested the possibility of immunity, but they did not give him immunity for what he told them.  

You’ve got ten murders that I was able to find explicit written confessions to from Konigsberg, and another nine or ten he was aware of. These were cases that for whatever reason the government didn’t want to pursue.   


These unprosecuted and officially unsolved murders of human beings that nobody in the corrupt, cowardly U.S. Justice system  and Government had cared enough to do anything about them. 

To this day, law enforcement has continued to cover up the real reasons why nothing was ever been done to prosecute Konigsberg for these murders. 

Sounds strange, even weird, 55 years later why would so much energy and time be spent to make sure that I do not publish the truth of all that really happened to my father.

My requests to do so, have resulted in threats made to me by law enforcement officials and then complete arrogant indifference on their part.They didn't prosecute him because of many reasons that only "we" know as the ugly truths. 

I am often intrigued as to why over 27,000 people as of this date have visited my Blog.

I see search terms on my blog from people who arrived looking for information about my father, a lot of other interesting search words that only "you" would know.

Some of you are the cowardly, but powerfully dangerous scum bags who murdered my father, as well as those of you in arrogant, incompetent, corrupt law enforcement, whose agencies knowingly covered their asses, and in doing so, betrayed your sworn oaths to defend justice, by participating in covering up the truth, obstructing justice in this capital offense, which has no statute of limitations. 

We all know each other, or about each other. 

You know I have hidden away safely the written confidential secret official documents with my honest law enforcement and political friends, the written proof of all the detailed real, truthful, embarrassing facts that you never want revealed.

Not to be concerned about, it will remain buried, as long as nothing else happens to my family, myself, and other loved ones. We know the deal that protects all of us, that nothing else will be done by any of us about my father's murder, the reasons these documents will remain hidden, is the unspoken but very clear mutual understanding we all have forever, of don't ever again fuck with any of us in my family, and in return, we won't fuck with any of you by making the real truth public.

Justice not served, justice not given, nothing complicated, nothing new, an innocent, good person, a human life has always been cheap. I did the best I could to obtain that justice. My father's error that cost him his life? He  believed in trust, in the sense of obligation to very close members of his family, by giving them a chance to change their ways. The good deed he did, paid back by these very same, who had him murdered. Horrifically ugly, but brutally true, and they all got away with it, didn't bother any of them, never mattered to them.

The March continues, May/June are the saddest months for me, I dread this time of the year, horrifically gruesome memories of human, innocent lives of my family wasted. 

The rest of the year, the ever present Demons make sure we remember those, whose memories others have tried to erase, these are my family, they were human beings who will never be forgotten, they lived and never deserved to die in such horribly suffering ways. 

Today we remember my courageous father. He is not resting in peace,  and he never will rest in peace, that is certain. 

 I never stop thinking, Why? Why Him???

CONTINUOUS CHEST COMPRESSIONS- AN EASIER CPR LIFESAVER

                                                   
ABOVE is a  video demonstration of the new, easier Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation called Continuous Chest Compressions (CCC) a new form of Cardiopulmonary Resucitation (CPR) that takes the complication out of the traditional CPR method used on ADULTS that was taught and practiced a few years ago.  

Please Watch. It's easy to remember and you don't have to be certified to use this method, and it may save a life! This is a great demonstration, done by the doctors who developed the procedure at the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center.  

I urge you to watch and then share it with those you care about. 

Remember all that stuff you had to do when performing the older traditional Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) on an adult who is unconscious due to cardiac arrest and is not breathing. Complicated, tiring, alternating 30 hard compressions on the chest, then two quick breaths into the mouth at the same time. Plus you had to get a certification for attending instruction classes to be able to perform CPR.

Forget about it!!! 

How many people know that there is now a much simpler, easy to remember, anyone can perform CPR method called Continuous Chest Compressions?

This new method, actually it has been endorsed since 2008 by the American Heart Association and other major medical organizations as the preferred CPR method-CLICK HERE-

For unresponsiveness in young children (age 8 or under), drowning cases, or drug overdoses, follow conventional CPR guidelines (30 chest compressions followed by two mouth-to-mouth ventilation's). This is because in infants or children, respiratory arrest is more common than primary cardiac arrest. However, even in these cases, Chest Compression Only CPR is better than doing nothing. To learn conventional CPR, a certification class is recommended.

Studies completed in the United States, England and Sweden tell us the new Continuous Chest Compression method is as effective as, or even more effective than traditional CPR.

Every 33 seconds someone dies of cardiovascular disease in America-Click here-which is roughly the equivalent of a September 11^th World Trade Center tragedy repeating itself every 24 hours, 365 days a year.
  . 1.5 million heart attacks occur in the United States each year with 500,000 deaths.

• More than 233,000 women die annually from cardiovascular disease.

Over 310,000 Americans die from cardiac arrest suffered each year away from hospitals and emergency rooms, and only six percent survive if stricken outside a hospital

The chance of surviving a cardiac arrest outside a hospital was found to be twice as high when bystanders performed continuous chest compressions without mouth-to-mouth breathing than when bystanders performed standard CPR.

These are  findings reported by the Resuscitation Research Group at the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center and the SHARE Program (Save Hearts in Arizona Research and Education) at the Arizona Department of Health Services

---

Only 5 percent of cardiac arrest victims survived if nobody performed CPR. In those receiving standard CPR (alternating between 30 compressions and 2 breaths), survival was marginally higher at 6 percent. In contrast, 11 percent survived if bystanders kept pumping on their chest and did not stop for mouth to mouth breaths until emergency medical services arrived.

These trends were even more pronounced in those patients facing the highest survival chance to begin with due to the specific nature of their cardiac arrest, namely those whose collapse was witnessed and whose heart was in a rhythm that is most likely to respond to a shock from a defibrillator. In those, the survival rate was 17 percent without bystander CPR, 19 percent with standard CPR and 32 percent with continuous chest compressions.

The analysis also showed that while the percentage of bystanders administering CPR increased only slightly over the past four years, of those that did choose to help, 77 percent opted for chest compressions without mouth-to-mouth breathing instead of standard CPR. Before, that number was only 16 percent.

The results of the analysis, which included 4,850 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in Arizona that occurred from 2005 and 2009, was presented by Gordon A. Ewy, MD, director of the UA Sarver Heart Center at the "Best of the Best" abstract session of the American Heart Association's Resuscitation Symposium in Orlando, Fla.

"Over the course of three days, out of hospital cardiac arrest claims as many lives in the U.S. as the September 11 attacks," Dr. Ewy said. "This study is the first to show that bystanders can raise the odds of survival by giving continuous chest compressions rather than the type of CPR they are being taught in most certification classes. If we can get more people to act, more patients who were on the brink of death will be walking out of the hospital neurologically intact."

Anyone performing these procedures are protected by the Good Samaritan Laws-CLICK HERE.

Giving CCC is better than doing nothing and since it is so easy, bystanders are more willing to assist. If someone is dying, it is better to break a rib, or bruise the chest, than to do nothing!  Step up and be a lifesaver!

IT ALWAYS BEGINS WITH IRIS

 

               REST IN PEACE IRIS

 

Every year, "it" always begins with my sister IRIS, somehow fitting symbolically for her to represent the incredible inexplicable unfairness, incalculable suffering, and tragedy that has wrought its massive destruction of so many  good, loved, close members of my family, who deserved very much better than they received in life and death.  

Once again, another year has passed and the dreaded agony of my overwhelming grief for those of my family I painfully miss, mourn for, who have died, envelops my entire being, more so than at any other time.

It  always begins on this calendar date, May 28th as a not really necessary reminder, each year at this time, and lasts forever. I need not be told that it is here, since the pain is an always present bleeding part of my soul, all the time, all year round, but becomes insidiously unbearable as of this date, and in the next few months, every year, implodes beyond that which I can even feel as a human being. 

More difficult than ever, filled with the aching of a lifetime beaten down into ever present, increasingly toxic, non stop personal demons, nightmares, flash backs, with memories vividly stamped inside my brain, as if it were just yesterday that we were all together as a family, and of course, little brother and big sister.

I planted these Iris flowers in the garden out front of my house when my sister Iris died. I liked the idea that they are perennials, each year flowering in all their beauty, now looking so alive on another yearly anniversary today of the day she died, after a courageous and agonizing battle to live. 

We do that a lot in my family, fighting to live life to the fullest, and when our time comes, refusing to let go until our last precious breath. They call our family fighters, survivors, and that is what we do in both living our happiness as a gift never to be taken for granted and the darkness which is part of remembering.

 
My sister Iris was full of life, insightful,quiet,courageous, loyal, sagely wise, and then she was gone forever, tragically, agonizingly painfully, and irrevocably. She deserved so much better in her short time on this earth but it was not to be. Why her? Why??
 
Iris, my sister, a gift to me in life, was more beautiful in a million ways than these plants. 

I will miss you forever my dear sister Iris, but most of all I will always miss your caring love. 

I love you. 

Love, Jerry.

                                  

BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING VICTIMS-WHO CARES NOW? PICTURES YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE

 REST IN PEACE

Krystle Campbell, Martin Richard, and Lu Lingzi

The Boston Marathon Bombing was another tragic attack on innocent human beings by animals that prey on hurting, maiming, killing others. 

This blood bath happened on April 15, 2013, killing three and wounding more than 170 people. 

The victims were identified in the above pictures as 29-year-old Krystle Campbell (left), 8-year-old Martin Richard (center) and 23-year-old Lu Lingzi (right). 

Martin, of Dorchester, Mass., was with his family near the finish line waiting for his father to complete the marathon. 

Campbell, of Medford, Mass., went with her best friend to take a picture of the friends boyfriend crossing the finish line. 

Lu, of Shenyang, China, was a graduate student studying statistics at Boston University

Today is May 12, 2013, almost a month after this bombing. People forget about the dead victims, and those who are struggling to survive with their injuries.

The media frenzy has quieted down as usually happens after these horrific acts of violence. One is hard pressed to read or see anything about the victims in the current media.

Almost all the coverage now is focused on the 2 animals who set off the bombs because they didn't like Americans, or whatever bull shit is being fed to the public by the media. 

Politicians and lobbyists use the blood of these victims for their own personal agendas, grotesquely twisting what has happened, without any feelings about the victims and their families.

Sadly, there are so many stories to tell about all of these victims and how their lives have been changed forever.

How can their agony, terror, and courage be written about so that others understand what happened that day will never be erased from the minds and bodies of these victims and their families?

Similar to the Newton, Connecticut Sandy Hill School Massacre, how many people remember the victims, other than their families? Click Here-

I have been grappling for a way to make people remember that victims and their families have to live with their tragedies forever, while the rest of the public forgets, does not even understand the suffering that has and will take place.

In trying to not disrespect the Boston Bombing victims I have wrestled within myself as to what to do with the mostly unpublished pictures of the human carnage that took place that day.

I believe that you cannot sugar coat or censor the true horrific nature of what takes place when people become victims. I do understand that some people may feel it shows a lack of respect for the victims by showing pictures.

I also personally know from my own experiences that when the violence, ugliness, and suffering of victims is diluted, sanitized, it is far more disrespectful of those who have been harmed because it does not accurately reflect what has happened to these human beings. It then becomes another easy way for people to disconnect,forgetting those who must be remembered. 

WARNING-CAUTION GRAPHIC CONTENT-You need to be warned that these are bloody gruesome pictures- WARNING-CAUTION GRAPHIC CONTENT.

DO NOT CLICK ON HERE TO VIEW THESE PICTURES UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND THIS IS GRUESOME.

If anyone has any sympathy for the Tsarnaev brothers, the pictures above should dispel it. Everyone needs to see the results of their actions. These pictures say more than any words could about the evil of these murderers and what being a victim of ANY tragedy actually experience.

I wrote a previous story about 8 year old Martin Richard who was one of the 3 people killed in the bombing-CLICK HERE.

The Boston Marathon bombings, also injured more than 260 people, with many of the victims suffering complex wounds that are causing intense pain and that will require several more operations.

Thirty-one victims still remain hospitalized at the city’s trauma centers, including some who lost legs or feet. 

Sixteen people had limbs blown off in the blasts or amputated afterward, ranging in age from 7 to 71. But in a way, their cases are the simpler ones, said Dr. David King, a trauma surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital.

For some whose limbs were preserved, Dr. King said, the wounds were so littered with debris that five or six operations have been needed to decontaminate them.“The idea is to spread out the physiological stress over multiple operations,” he said.

Some of the wounded also still need surgery to repair bones, veins and nerves. Many will need physical therapy as well. 

About 10 patients have already arrived at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, said Timothy Sullivan, a spokesman, and that number could soon double.

For many of the wounded, managing pain is a constant challenge. Dr. Alok Gupta, a trauma surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said the hospital was giving patients oral and intravenous narcotics and, where possible, regional nerve blocks using catheters.

Dr. King said that for those who lost limbs, so-called phantom pain, which feels as if it is coming from the body part that is no longer there, can be excruciating and particularly hard to treat.“You have to balance between taking the pain away,” he said, “and them being interactive and able to participate in their own rehabilitation.”

The ailments are not just physical. Some patients are upbeat, doctors said, but others are angry, anxious and depressed.

Joan Smith, the manager of social work services at Tufts Medical Center, said that virtually all of the 14 victims who came through the hospital were experiencing acute stress disorder.“

I also personally did a lot of work with family members who were trying to be strong for their children but at the same time were falling apart behind closed doors,” said Ms. Smith, who made sure all the patients and their families had a list of mental health specialists to contact if they felt the need.

Dr. Scott Ryan, chief of orthopedic trauma at Tufts, said he could not stop thinking about how traumatic it must have been for the victims, most of whom remained conscious after the blasts, to see the extent of their wounds as they were raced to hospitals.

“The most disturbing thing for me in treating these patients is that they were awake after it happened and looked down and saw these terrible wounds,” he said. “Most of the time, patients with that bad injuries, they’re from a car accident or motorcycle accident and by the time they get to hospital they’re not with it enough to look down and say, ‘Oh my God, look what happened to my leg.’ ”

Those still hospitalized include Heather Abbott, 38, whose left foot, mangled in the first blast, was initially saved by doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She chose to have her leg amputated a few inches below the knee this week, after doctors essentially told her that life would be harder with the foot than without it.

“I walked maybe 10 feet today on a walker and everybody was so proud of me,” Ms. Abbott, a human resources manager from Newport, R.I., told reporters at the hospital on Thursday. “And I thought, ‘Oh gosh, this is going to be a long time.’ ”

Fund-raising Web pages for some victims describe their physical and emotional ordeals in raw detail. A page for Christian Williams, 41, an art director whose legs were gravely injured as he stood near the marathon finish line, included a note from Mr. Williams in which he described how he felt after his fourth operation on Monday. 

Although the doctors “managed to get my right leg closer to being closed,” he wrote, “the meds weren’t working and I couldn’t hide from the pain.”

A video posted on a fund-raising page for Celeste Corcoran, 47, who lost both legs below her knees, shows her meeting with Sgt. Gabe Martinez, a Marine who lost his lower legs and came to give her a pep talk. “I can’t do anything right now,” Ms. Corcoran told him tearfully.

Sergeant Martinez, who walked into her room at Boston Medical Center on prosthetic legs, replied: “Right now, yes. But I’m telling you with all my heart, you are going to be more independent than you ever were.”

At Spaulding, the rehab hospital, a team of doctors, nurses, psychologists and physical therapists will focus exclusively on the bombing victims, many of whom will be fitted with prosthetic legs while they are there. Inpatient rehabilitation usually lasts a few weeks, said Dr. Ross Zafonte, Spaulding’s chief medical officer, although some of these patients will be there longer. 

Months of outpatient rehabilitation will follow, “They’re learning to walk with a prosthetic, regain balance, take care of that extremity, perform their own activities of daily living,” Dr. Zafonte said. “They have to deal with all of those rather life changing issues rather quickly.”

Ryan McMahon, 33, who fractured her back and broke both wrists when she fell off the stands at the finish line in the panicked moments after the explosions, is starting her long recovery at her grandmother’s home in Newton, Mass. 

Sitting straight up on her grandmother’s couch on Thursday afternoon, her back supported by a brace and one arm by a pile of pillows, Ms. McMahon said she was struggling with some anxiety.“I was really nervous transitioning into coming home, feeling like this was a safe environment, but looking around feeling like it was a different place again,” said Ms. McMahon, who has an appointment to see a mental health counselor on Friday.

Her father, John McMahon, said it would take her about a year to recover fully. Ms. McMahon, who was hospitalized for a week, was not buying it. It’s not going to be a big deal,” she said. “It’s not. I’m going to be fine.”

Ms. McMahon had run to Boston Medical Center after the bombings, and was one of the first patients to arrive there.“I just saw everyone coming in, and that was really hard,” she said, adding that the sight of other patients arriving covered with blood and without limbs has been much more difficult to process than her own injuries. “Every once in a while, I just kind of break down and think about the whole big picture of it, just focusing on other people.”

Let these victims be symbolic of all innocent victims past, present and future that have been murdered, maimed, destroyed. The images of the pictures are burnt into every victims family of any tragedy, because they all involve the unimaginable, the unforgettable, and the unreal. It is real to those of us who have lost loved ones through the acts of others who have no value for human life.

On Monday, Kenneth Feinberg (who previously administered the 9/11 disaster fund), the administrator appointed by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to run the One Fund, presented the first outline of how money will be distributed.

Based on Feinberg’s description, the families of the four people killed in the attack and its aftermath will be in line to receive the highest amounts, along with “individuals who suffered double amputations or permanent brain damage,” according to the Associated Press.

The next level of recipients will include those who lost a single limb. After that, funds will be distributed to people who required overnight hospitalization. Feinberg said that there were other groups who may be eligible for relief, pending further review, including those injured who did not require hospitalization, people who suffered psychological trauma, and business owners who were forced to remain closed during the investigation.

Victims will have until June 15th to submit claims, and Feinberg said that the One Fund planned to distribute money by the end of June.

Anyone who wants to donate money to help pay the medical costs for the victims or victims families who want to register to be part of the distribution of these funds should CLICK HERE.