Boston locked down for massive manhunt; one bombing suspect killed by police, the other at-large
By Annie Gowen, Clarence Williams and Debbi Wilgoren, April 19, 2013
washingtonpost.com
WATERTOWN, Mass. — A massive manhunt was underway Friday morning in Boston and its suburbs, after one suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings died in a confrontation with police and the second was identified as a 19-year-old immigrant from Kyrgyzstan who, a classmate said, attended high school in Cambridge, Mass.
The two suspects are brothers, authorities said, and are believed to have come to the United States with their family several years ago from the southern Russian republic of Chechnya. State Department officials said the family appears to have arrived in the country legally.
Law enforcement officials said they believe the at-large suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, may be strapped with explosives. Boston and its suburbs were in an unprecedented state of lockdown, with mass transit canceled, schools and business closed and hundreds of thousands residents ordered to stay indoors.
Attention was focused on a 20-block area of the suburb of Watertown that had been completely cordoned off. Police said they were taking extreme precautions in an effort to avoid further loss of life.
“This situation is grave. We are here to protect public safety,” Police Commissioner Ed Davis said. “We believe this to be a terrorist. We believe this to be a man here to kill people.”
A campus security officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was killed in a confrontation with the suspects Thursday night, and a transit officer was critically wounded.
(See the latest updates on the manhunt here.)
The brothers were introduced to the world as suspects Thursday, via photos and video footage taken near the marathon finish line. The suspect who was killed was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, law enforcement officials said on Friday.
The brothers’ alleged motive in the bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 170, remains unknown. Two law enforcement officials said they believe there is a “Chechen connection” to the bombings. In the last several months, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had posted videos to YouTube indicating his interest in radical Muslim ideologies.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was born in Kyrgyzstan, law enforcement authorities said. He has a Massachusetts driver’s license. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was born in Russia and became a legal U.S. resident in 2007.
A night of mayhem
The manhunt was triggered Thursday night after the brothers apparently robbed a 7-Eleven store on or near the MIT campus in Cambridge, about 10:20 p.m. They allegedly shot the Sean Collier, a 26-year-old MIT campus police officer, as he sat in his car. Collier, of Somerville, joined the force in January, 2012 after working as a civilian for the Somerville Police Department, officials said.
Soon after the shooting, the brothers allegedly carjacked a Mercedes SUV from Third Street in Cambridge. They forced the driver of the car to stop at several bank machines to withdraw money, and succeeded in taking $800 from one location.
The driver, who was released unharmed on Memorial Drive, told police that the brothers had bragged to him that they were the marathon bombers, law enforcement authorities said.
“The guy was very lucky that they let him go,” Massachusetts State Police spokesman David Procopio said.
Police were trying to activate the tracking device on the stolen Mercedes when other patrol officers spotted the vehicle in nearby Watertown, about eight miles west of Boston, and tried to do a traffic stop, Procopio said.
The suspects fled, throwing what Procopio called “IEDs” at police. Shots were fired, and multiple explosive devices were thrown from the vehicle. Some exploded, which led to panic and concern in the town.
Richard J. Donohue, 33, a three-year-veteran of the transit police force, was shot during the chase and is being treated at Mount Auburn Hospital, authorities said.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev — who was pictured in a black baseball cap in the photos released Thursday evening— was fatally injured, law enforcement officials said.
He had been shot multiple times in the torso and sustained injuries from some sort of explosives, said doctors at Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center, where he was taken. He was in cardiac arrest when he arrived at the hospital, and could not be revived.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev— who authorities on Thursday night had dubbed suspect No. 2, in a white baseball cap — fled the vehicle on foot, which prompted the search and subsequent lockdown.
Procopio said that after the night of mayhem, police have five active crime scenes around the Boston area. “We’ve got crime scenes we haven’t even been able to process yet,” he said.
Massive police response
All public transportation was shut down in the greater Boston area Friday morning, officials said, and no vehicle traffic was permitted in or out of Watertown during the massive manhunt.
Residents of Boston, Watertown, Newton, Waltham and other suburbs were asked to stay inside, with their doors locked. Universities and schools announced they would close for the day, and businesses were instructed not to open. Streets were ghostly quiet. Thousands of officers searched house-to-house, and some areas were evacuated.
In Washington, President Obama was briefed by his top national security advisers, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano canceled an appearance at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on immigration in order to monitor the situation.
Police in Cambridge closed down a stretch of Norfolk Street, where the Tsarnaev family lived.
Outside the Arsenal Mall in Watertown, scores of reporters waited outside a police staging area that was taking on the appearance of an armed camp. State troopers marched in formation, dozens of motorcycle police officers rolled past, and two large transit buses pulled up, filled with police wearing neon safety vests.
Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives swept the area with a bomb-sniffing dog.
We’ve got every asset that we can possibly muster on the ground right now,” Mass. Gov. Deval L. Patrick (D) told reporters. “We are going to need the public to help us help them stay safe.”
Michael Demirdjian, 47, a postal worker from Watertown, said he was on his way back from Logan Airport early Friday when he suddenly found himself surrounded by police cars.
“It was amazing,” he said. “There were police cruisers all around. Thirty to forty cruisers followed us to my house.”
He made it to his house, on Spruce Street, but “it was in the zone and they wouldn’t let us in.”
He said he saw police going from house to house with dogs, searching, the area blazing with flashing emergency lights. Heavily armed police told him he could not enter.
“They said ‘no way’,” said Demirdjian, who had been awake all night. “I want to go home but it looks like it’s not going to happen.”
A ‘quiet’ high school student
One high school classmate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Deana Beaulieu, described him as a quiet boy who had been on the wrestling team at Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School.
They attended school together since the 7th grade, first at Cambridge Community Charter School, she said. He graduated high school in 2011.
Another high school classmate, Ty Barros, said Tsarnaev was a student at the University of Massachusetts’s Dartmouth campus, about an hour south of Boston.
A message that was posted on the university’s Web site on Friday said that the campus was closed and being evacuated “in response to information that the person being sought in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing is a registered student.”
“Students, staff and faculty have been asked to leave campus in a calm and orderly fashion,” the statement said.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev applied to the University of Massachusetts’s Boston campus in 2011 and was accepted, but then immediately withdrew, according to spokesman DeWayne Lehman. “He was not a student.”
State Department officials said the Tsarnaev family appears to have arrived legally in the United States, though they did not specify when they arrived or the type of visas the family members had received.
Chechnya has been racked by years of war between local separatists and Russian forces and extensive organized crime since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The extent of the possible connection remained unclear. Chechens have dispersed across the former Soviet republics and other countries in the region, but officials said there are not large numbers of them in the United States.
Larry Aaronson, who said he was a neighbor of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, described the young man in glowing terms in an interview with CNN. He said Tsarnaev told him he was Chechen, and had been in Chechnya during the war there.
“He was grateful to be here,” Aaronson said. “He was compassionate. He was caring. He was jovial…. He was a lovely, lovely kid.”
Aaronson said he realized he sounded like the stereotypical neighbor who praises someone suspected of a terrible crime. But “this is what I know him to be,” he said. “He was a wonderful kid. He was an outstanding athlete…. He was never a troublemaker in school.”
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