Boston Marathon bombing victims spoke during a news conference after bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for the 2013 attack.
They thanked the jury for what they "had to endure" in the courtroom and despite the harsh memories, said justice has been served.
"His premeditated actions to stand behind children, wait four and a half minutes with a fully loaded bomb and then to call his brother and tell him when to explode his bomb moments earlier... his justice now. He wanted to go to hell and he's gonna get there early," said Michael Ward, an off-duty firefighter who was near the finish line when the bombs exploded.
The 2013 attack killed three people and wounded 264 others at the world-renowned race, taking 15 hours to reach a decision.
The federal jury chose death by lethal injection for Tsarnaev, 21, over its only other option: life in prison without possibility of release.
The same panel last month found the ethnic Chechen guilty of placing a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the race's crowded finish line on April 15, 2013, as well as fatally shooting a policeman. The bombing was one of the highest-profile attacks on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
Tsarnaev, dressed in a dark sport coat and light-colored shirt stood quietly in court as the sentence was read, maintaining the stoic demeanor he had throughout most of the trial.
US District Judge George O'Toole thanked Tsarnaev for his "composure and propriety."
During 10 weeks of testimony, the jury heard from about 150 witnesses, including people whose legs were torn off by the shrapnel-filled bombs. William Richard, the father of bombing victim Martin Richard, described the gut-wrenching decision to leave his 8-year-old son to die of his wounds so that he could save the life of his daughter, Jane, who lost a leg but survived.
Prosecutors described Tsarnaev as an adherent of al Qaeda's militant Islamist views who carried out the attack as an act of retribution for U.S. military campaigns in Muslim-dominated countries.
Defense attorneys opened the trial on March 5 with the blunt admission that Tsarnaev committed all the crimes he was accused of. But they argued that their client was a junior partner in a scheme hatched and driven by his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan. Tamerlan died after the gunfight, which ended when Dzhokhar ran him over with a stolen car.