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Boston Marathon Bombing Survivor Danny Meng Appears In A New Netflix Doc
His heroism led police to the two bombers.
About four years after immigrating from China to pursue a Master’s degree at Northeastern University, Dun “Danny” Meng became an unwitting hero of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. As revisited in Netflix’s true-crime docuseries, American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing, home-grown terrorists Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev planted and detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the marathon’s finish line on April 15, killing three and wounding hundreds. While on the lam three days later, the Tsarnaev brothers carjacked Meng as he sat in his parked Mercedes Benz SUV answering a text message.
For the next terrifying hour, the two held Meng captive, and he wasn’t sure he would survive. When the Tsarnaevs stopped at a Cambridge, Massachusetts gas station for food and to reprogram the vehicle’s GPS, Meng saw an opportunity and escaped on foot. With his help, police tracked his stolen SUV and located the bombers in Watertown. Following a shootout that ended with Tamerlan’s death, authorities eventually arrested Dzhokhar, who hid in a nearby boat. Though the brothers were brought to justice, Meng remained deeply affected by his kidnapping.
“It was very difficult for me, especially in the first couple of years,” he told Boston.com in 2016. “I was very fortunate to survive that night. I really wanted to keep my private life private. I didn’t want people to focus on me, because I acted just like anyone else would have that night.”
Meng had plenty of support while readjusting to his new normal. “Fortunately, a lot of people helped me,” he explained to People in 2017. “I had to talk to Red Cross people, they counseled me, and I reached out to my friends. My professors even, they helped me a lot and got me through it. It’s very important to talk to some people you trust.”
Meng’s heroism was revisited in the Mark Wahlberg-led 2016 movie, Patriots Day, in which Silicon Valley star Jimmy O. Yang portrayed him. In addition to sharing more details of his harrowing ordeal with the film’s producers and director Peter Berg, he also had several conversations with Yang in both English and Chinese. “He really wanted to get into it,” Meng added. “He wanted to put himself in that situation where it [felt] like it was him.”
He walked the red carpet at Patriots Day’s Boston premiere in December 2016 and participated in several promotional interviews. At the time, Meng shared that he was running his own mobile food delivery startup company in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. Otherwise, he has largely kept a low profile, but to mark the Boston Marathon bombing’s 10-year anniversary, he reemerged to appear in Netflix’s American Manhunt doc.
“The risk Danny took ended up saving a lot of people,” director Floyd Russ said in a Netflix interview. “We wanted to make sure that people understand who he is, and why he’s in this country. The way he speaks is very humble, and the fact that he was an immigrant — it shows that this isn't an ‘us versus them’ thing. The solution was everybody chipping in. American heroes come in all shapes and sizes.”
Executive producer Tina Gazzerro Clapp added, “It’s interesting to see so many years later, how impacted he still is by that event. Frankly, everybody is. The bombers wanted to strike terror, and their plan worked. A decade later, the people who were there still live with it, every single day.”
