Woman accused of stealing from One Fund speaks out about photo taken day of bombings

BOSTON (MyFoxBoston.com) -- Joanna Leigh is accused of stealing thousands of dollars from the One Fund. She claims she was hurt in the marathon bombings, but a photo seems to prove otherwise.

On Tuesday night, she reacts to that picture. Many are asking, if Leigh was so hurt, how did she walk away?

The photo was taken at the intersection of Newbury and Fairfield, about a half mile away from where Leigh says she was injured, outside Forum restaurant.

But Leigh told FOX25 on Tuesday that she remembers very little of that day because of the trauma to her brain.

"There was talk of a third bomb and I sat there wiping blood off his face you know and they're turning it into something ugly," she said.

She says the photo snapped on the day of the marathon bombings shows her tending to a man who was injured. Now, she says, others are trying to use her act of goodwill against her.

Leigh says she was thrown by the second bomb and knocked out. A neurologist diagnosed her with a traumatic brain injury, but prosecutors say while Leigh was at the bombing, she wasn't hurt.

And a grand jury recently indicted her for allegedly defrauding the One Fund.

The photo is the only known photo of Leigh from that day and she does not appear to be bloody or injured.

We tracked down the man who took it. Arturo Gossage says even when he zoomed in, he couldn't see any blood on Leigh although he could see blood on others in the photo.

"If you look at other people who were there 10 feet away, one guy had his pants blown off. If you look at her, she's got a nice coat on her, her hair looks pretty good, and her pants look fine," he said.

So we asked Leigh about it.

When asked why her clothes don't have any rips in them in the photo, Leigh said, "neither did his clothes and he was 3 feet from the bomb. So you know look, that was me helping a man."

But Peter Brown isn't buying it. He's the uncle of JP and Paul Norden, who both lost legs in the blasts.

"People that were affected by the explosions, their clothing was a mess," he said.

There's also another photo that Leigh posted on Facebook and says its proof of her injured brain. The problem is, it lists her birthday as 1983. Leigh was born in 1974.

But Leigh tells FOX25, it was just a case of the company who took the image, entering in her birthday wrong.

Cox Media Group