The 19-year-old suspect wanted for his alleged role in the
Boston Marathon bombing was taken into custody after he was found hiding in a
covered boat parked in a backyard in Watertown, a quiet suburb of Boston.
People gather around a police officer as he leaves the
scene after the arrest of a suspect of the Boston Marathon bombings in
Watertown, Mass., Friday, April 19, 2013. Two suspects in the Boston Marathon
bombing killed an MIT police officer, injured a transit officer in a firefight
and threw explosive devices at police during their getaway attempt.
BOSTON — The largest manhunt in U.S. history
ended with an emotional crescendo Friday night when the 19-year-old suspect
wanted for his alleged role in the Boston Marathon bombing was taken into
custody after he was found hiding in a covered boat parked in a backyard in
Watertown, a quiet suburb of Boston.
Shortly after 8:45 p.m. Friday, Boston Police
announced via Twitter that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger brother of Tamerlan
Tsarnaev, who had been killed early Friday morning during a gunfight with
police, was in custody.
A state official told the Boston Globe that the
younger Tsarnaev was “alive, conscious, captured.”
He was rushed to a local hospital. It was
reported that he was bleeding badly. Although the extent of his injuries were
unknown, police later said he was in serious condition.
“CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is
done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody,” said the
Boston Police Department’s Twitter account.
At about 7 p.m. Friday, police converged on a
house on Franklin Street after reports of a person being seen in the boat and
police scanners crackled with reports of gunfire. The police tactical units,
SUVS and U.S. Army Humvees raced back to the streets of Watertown that they had
occupied since early Friday morning.
Only two hours earlier, police had admitted that
Tsarnaev had given them the slip after a tense, daylong 20-street search of
this quiet bedroom community by police, the FBI and the army. Police lifted the
24-hour lockdown of Boston.
After Tsarnaev was taken into custody,
neighbourhood crowds lined the streets applauding fleets of law enforcement
vehicles as they left Watertown on Friday night.
At Boston University, students gathered in
courtyards chanting “USA, USA!”
Women cheer after the arrest of a suspect
of the Boston Marathon bombings in Watertown, Mass., Friday, April 19, 2013.
Two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing killed an MIT police officer,
injured a transit officer in a firefight and threw explosive devices at police
during their getaway attempt.
In Watertown under late rain, Michele Julian,
54, told the Star of her eyewitness sighting of the suspect. The massage
therapist, who lives on Arsenal St., said she was up in the middle of night
last night because her doorbell rang at 3:30 a.m.
An hour later she was still up and noticed a
young man wearing a hooded sweatshirt walking past her front door.
She said she called 911, and a SWAT team arrived
at her house 15 minutes later.
“This whole thing has been like living in a war
zone,” she told the Star.
Like other residents of Watertown, she spent her
day indoors, watching the news on TV and meditating.
When the suspect was finally captured, she said
she made two police officers, who had been guarding her street, green smoothies
with blueberries to say thank you.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s capture ended a violent
drama that began unfolding late Thursday night on the campus of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Sean Collier, 26, a police officer
at the renowned university, was shot several times near the Stata Center after
a confrontation with two suspects.
The
Star's Rick Westhead has details on the extraordinary manhunt underway in a
Boston suburb.
By the time police arrived, Collier was slumped
in his car. He was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital and later pronounced
dead. Dr. Richard Wolfe said his injuries were “more than gunshot wounds” —
Collier had been hit by an explosive device and suffered shrapnel wounds.
At around 10:30 p.m., two men, who had been in a
Honda CRV up to that point, carjacked a Mercedes SUV at gunpoint. The owner of
the car was held hostage briefly and escaped, or was released — it is not clear
which — at a gas station in Cambridge.
A wild police chase started with officers
pursuing the duo to Watertown, located about six kilometres west of Cambridge.
Just after 11 a.m., police released surveillance photos showing Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, 19, at the Bank of America in Watertown Square. A source told NBC
News that the suspect tried to withdraw money using a debit card belonging to
the carjack victim.
The chaos and violence intensified in Watertown
as hundreds of local, state, federal law enforcement officers, including the
Secret Service, SWAT teams, explosive experts and sniffer dogs, descended on
the town in search of the two suspects.
At around 1:20 a.m. on Friday, the suspects,
still in the car, and police began firing at each other.
Residents flee from an area where a
suspect was hiding on Franklin St., on April 19, 2013 in Watertown,
Massachusetts.
Massachusetts State Police Col. Timothy Alben told reporters at a briefing early Friday evening that 200 rounds of ammunition had been fired during the gunfight. One of the suspects threw a grenade from their car as well as five pipe bombs.
Dr. David Schoenfeld, a doctor at the Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center, heard a commotion outside his home, rang the
hospital to prepare it for possible mass casualties, put on his scrubs and
rushed to work.
“When I started hearing the gunshots and
explosions, given what had happened over at MIT, and seeing all the police cars
rushing into Watertown and past my house and hearing all the sirens, I knew or
felt very strongly that this was related to the events from earlier this week,
as well as from what happened over at MIT,” he told reporters at a press
conference.
As helicopters hovered overhead, one suspect
threw a grenade from his car window toward police cars giving furious chase. A
police transit officer, Richard H. Donahue Jr., 33, was injured in the melee.
During the chase, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was
shot and taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center where Schoenfeld was in
the emergency room. Tamerlan was badly wounded, with a large hole in his chest.
He was in cardiac arrest, Schoenfeld told The New York Times. Tamerlan was
pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev fled on foot and would elude
police for several more hours.
It is hard to imagine any city as big as Boston
going into lockdown the way this city did Friday.
For hours, as the massive, frenetic manhunt
dragged on, most of Boston and its suburbs — population 4.6 million — complied
with an extraordinary and unprecedented police request for the public to
“shelter inside.”
And so streets were empty, schools were closed
and Fenway Park and the TD Garden hockey rink were locked up tight, games
cancelled.
Boston’s entire transportation network of buses,
trains and subways shut down with some passengers left stranded on platforms.
The highways were jammed.
As a door-to-door manhunt continued in a
20-block area, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, “Americans are in
direct confrontation with evil.”
Throughout the day a picture began emerging of
the two suspects, brothers, who were of Chechen origin and had been living in
the U.S. for a decade. The University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, where
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a student, closed down its campus and any staff and
students not evacuated were told to stay in place.
The FBI released pictures of two men walking
among the Marathon crowd Monday before the blast and asked for the public’s
help in locating them. They were later identified as the Tsarnaev brothers.
In one of the day’s most emotional moments,
Ruslan Tsarni, an uncle of the suspects, pleaded on live television from his
home in Maryland for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to turn himself in. He said his nephew
had brought “shame on the Tsarnaev family, a shame on the entire Chechen
identity.”
“If you are alive turn yourself in and ask for
forgiveness from the victims, from the injured and those who live,” the uncle
said.
With the manhunt over, one thing remains
unknown: the Tsarnaev brothers’ motive.
With files from The Associated
Press and Reuters
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