CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Gov. Deval Patrick went to his rural home the day after the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect was captured and got "quite drunk" alone in a restaurant, he said during a candid conversation at a Boston area marketing firm.
Patrick also told employees at HubSpot in Cambridge on Wednesday that he was relieved that bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured on April 19 because, otherwise, people would have been complaining about the "shelter in place" order he gave that day, locking down Boston and several suburbs.
Patrick went to Berkshire County the day after Tsarnaev was captured, he said. The governor and his wife have a vacation home in the town of Richmond, about three hours west of Boston.
He said he went for a swim, then out to dinner alone to read a book. The restaurant's co-owner put him in a corner away from other diners.
"She starts bringing me things to drink as a celebration. And by the end of the meal, I was actually quite drunk, by myself," Patrick said, according to the Boston Herald (http://bit.ly/11jvoXv ).
A spokeswoman for the governor, Heather Johnson, said Thursday that Patrick was driven home that evening by his state police driver. She said the governor is always accompanied by a trooper when he goes out, but wasn't sure if the driver was elsewhere in the restaurant or waited outside.
Maggie Merelle, co-owner of the restaurant Rouge in West Stockbridge, said Patrick had a "glass of chardonnay or two" with dinner but she doesn't remember him being drunk.
"He wasn't tipsy. I never would have known," Merelle said.
