An ambulance carrying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev approaches Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Friday. (AP)
Bing map’s view of the house in Franklin Street, where police pinned down a suspect in a boat in the backyard. (
)
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, known as “Suspect No. 1” in the Boston Marathon bombings, died early Friday following a firefight with police, officials said. (AP)
Police clear the bleachers after two explosions went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 15. (Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The FBI released these surveillance photos of the suspects Thursday. (AP)
SWAT team members and police swarmed Watertown Friday searching for 19-year-old bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. (Getty Images)
The second of two brothers accused of orchestrating the Boston Marathon bombing massacre is now in custody.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — whose older brother Tamerlan died after a firefight with cops early Friday — was captured hiding out in a boat parked in a backyard last night, capping a furious 24-hour drama that transfixed the nation and paralyzed the Boston area with fear.
At approximately 8:45 pm EST, cops cuffed him.
He was rushed away to a hospital moments later in serious condition.
Massachusetts State Police Col. Timothy Alben said, “For neighbors that lived in fear for an entire day, we are entirely grateful for the outcome here tonight. We have a suspect in custody.”
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MEDIA
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Gov. Deval Patrick said, “It was a very, very complicated case, a very challenging case. There are still some questions to be answered. It’s a night when I think we’re all going to rest easy.”
President Obama spoke from the White House about Tsarnaev’s capture, saying it closes what he calls “an important chapter in this tragedy.”
He said the nation owes a debt of gratitude to law enforcement officials and the people of Boston for their help in the search for the men.
Obama says there are still many unanswered questions about the Boston bombings, including whether the two men had help from others. He is urging the public not to rush to judgment about their motivations.
Capturing Tsarnaev marked the end of a tense and chaotic twenty-four hours.
“Negative movement. Negative movement. He’s on his back,” a cop radioed after a series of loud pops at the scene of the standoff — where police feared Tsarnaev may have wearing an explosive suicide vest, as his brother had when he died.
“He’s bloody and definitely been shot,” a source told The Post. “He’s bleeding badly, covered in blood.”
Cops spent the whole day scouring Watertown for the fugitive bomber.
They tracked him to a back yard in Watertown around 7 p.m. hiding in the boat. The owner of the boat had just stepped outside when the Boston lockdown was lifted, and noticed some movement under the tarp.
“He unhooked the zipper door [on the canvas wrapped around the boat]. He saw there was a body,” said George, a neighbor of the older man told The Post. “So he ran in the house and called the police right away.”
Cops raced to the boat owner’s house, and opened fire when they thought Tsarnaev reached for a weapon, sources said.
Tsarnaev was later seen sitting up in the boat, and police used a flash bang grenade to stun him.
He eventually was captured without further incident and he was taken to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge.
More than 20 hours before, Tsarnaev’s 26-year-old brother Tamerlan was shot and killed after the pair cold-bloodedly murdered an unsuspecting MIT campus cop, car-jacked a woman in her Mercedes SUV, then fired assault rifles and lobbed pipe bombs and a grenade at pursuing police.
Dzhokhar amazingly managed to escape on foot after mistakenly running over his shot brother with a black SUV — triggering an unprecedented lock-down of Boston and surrounding areas.
During that manhunt, his and his brother’s fascination with “jihad” videos on social media and following the preaching of a firebrand cleric came to light.
But the Chechnen immigrants’ specific motive for Monday’s horrific bombings — which killed three people and injured 170 others — remained a mystery as 9,000 officers hunted door-to-door for fugitive college student Dzhokhar.
Among other rapid developments:
• Authorities found multiple assembled pipe bombs in the brothers’ Cambridge apartment, where investigators planned to do a “controlled explosion” to make the residence safe to enter. They also found other explosives linked to the brothers’ elsewhere, including un-exploded pipe bombs along the chase route.
• Their mother Zubeidat, speaking from their native Russia, said “my son would never do this. It is a set-up” — and bizarrely claimed that Tamerlan, who had “was controlled by the FBI . . . for three to five years.” FBI sources scoffed at that claim.
• Sources told The Post that the FBI interviewed Tamerlan in 2009 after Russian authorities alerted US counterparts that he was a “radical,” but when questioned by the feds Tamerlan denied that claim.
• The FBI also interviewed the brothers’ father, Anzor Tsarnaev, in 2001, after the 9/11 terror attacks that year, when he was spotted taking photographs of the Manhattan skyline. No other action was taken, sources said.
• The brothers’ uncle Ruslan Tsarni angrily spoke out on live television, calling both of them losers, saying “we’re ashamed” as he urged, “Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness.” Tsarni said the brothers struggled to adjust to American life during their decade living here, but ended up “just hating everyone.”
• An Amtrak train was stopped and searched by police yesterday morning in Norwalk, Conn. after a false alarm that Dzhokhar was on-board.
• Authorities searched the West New York, NJ, apartment of one of the sisters of the brothers.
• The Boston Red Sox postponed a night game at Fenway Park, and Boston Bruins postponed their playoff game as well to keep people off the street at the search for Dzhokhar continued.
The head-spinning series of events capped a dramatic week that began when two separate homemade bombs exploded seconds apart — about 100 yards from each other — at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday.
The explosion’s three fatalities included an 8-year-old boy, Martin Richard. Multiple victims suffered amputated limbs from the blast, including two brothers who each lost a leg.
For three days authorities scrambled to discover who planted and ignited the two bombs — and sifted through thousands of videos and photos they obtained from surveillance cameras and private individuals’ cameras and smartphones.
Yesterday afternoon, the FBI, for the first time, released video and still images of two unidentified men, both wearing baseball caps, and walking purposefully with backpacks toward the locations where the bombs were left. An image after the explosions showed the man who had been wearing a white baseball hat backwards walking calmly away after the explosions — without his backpack.
That man was later identified as Dzhohkar, and his black-hat wearing companion as his brother Tamerlan.
Hours after their images went viral on the Internet — setting off a flurry of tips to authorities — the brothers began their rampage by killing MIT cop Sean Collier, and carjacking an unidentified woman who the took to multiple ATMs to get money from her account.
“Tell the police that we did the bombing,” the brothers told that woman, according to a source.
The running firefight the AK-47-toting brothers started in Watertown with cops — who they tried to slaughter by flinging homemade bombs at them — stunned residents who cowered in their houses.
“It looked like Iraq,” said a cop involved in that gun battle. “There was so many shell casings. Between them and the bombs that they threw at us, it looked like Iraq.”
The brothers’ father, Anzor Tsarnaev, echoed his wife when he spoke to reporters from the Russian republic of Dagestan, saying that his sons were “set up! They were set up!”
“They killed my older son Tamerlan,” said Anzor.
And he called the fugitive Dzhohkar “a true angel.”
But Boston Police Commissioner Ed David had something much different to say about Dzhohkar yesterday.
“We believe this man to be a terrorist,” David said. “We believe this to be a man who’s come here to kill people.”
With AP
Additional reporting by Josh Margolin and Dana Sauchelli