They took his gun and vest, they threatened to prosecute, they demoted him to a graveyard patrol shift, and, ultimately, they forced him from his job.
Still, he has no regrets, says Sgt. Sean Murphy, the Massachusetts State Police photographer who broke the rules by releasing grisly capture photographs of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, showing him emerging bloody and stumbling from a backyard boat.
“I stand behind what I did,” Murphy told The Post Thursday, giving his first print interview since releasing his photos in protest after Rolling Stone ran a giant picture of a doe-eyed, tousle-haired Tsarnaev on its front page this summer.
“What I released was the true face of terror, not him being fluffed and buffed on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine,” Murphy said.
“It glamorized him,” Murphy said.
“He looked like Jim Morrison. That wasn’t the face that I saw,” said the photographer, whose photos showed the blood-splattered Boston Marathon suspect with the bright red light of a rifle sight’s laser pointer on his forehead.
“I was less than a hundred feet from him,” remembered Murphy.
“I saw our tactical team going up to the boat. I saw them open it up,” he said of the plastic tarp covering Tsarnaev’s hiding spot, a 24-foot boat called the Slip Away II dry-docked in a backyard in Waterstown Massachusetts.
“I saw when he first emerged from the boat, him putting his hands up,” Murphy remembered.
“He was in tough shape. He was broken. He was defeated. But it was still an absolutely dangerous situation. We had seen what he and his brother had done. This was first and foremost a tactical operation. His brother had been wired with explosives and we knew that. That was as real as it gets.”
He released his photos of Tsarnaev to Boston Magazine out of outrage, Murphy explained. He’d spoken to victim family members, he said, and they were even more inscensed by the Rolling Stone cover than he had been.
“Anyone who saw that image was instantly pissed off,” the 48-year-old married dad of three said.
The 25-year veteran retired with full pension after a disciplinary hearing last week found him guilty of breaking state police rules by communicating with the press.
He wants to set the record straight, he said on some misconceptions that arose when he released the photos.
They were not evidence photos — he is not a crime scene photographer, he stressed, but a public relations photographer who photographed major operations along police funerals and other functions as part of the historical record of the state police.
“They told him he was going to be fired and possibly prosecuted for releasing evidence — but he was just the PR guy,” said his lawyer, Leonard Kesten. “One of the other officers there had taken cell phone pictures, and those were released, and nothing happened,” the lawyer said.
Murphy made no money on the photos, though he’s later been told he could have gotten a half a million for them, he said.
The photos had already been distributed to state police brass, and the Boston and Watertown police as a courtesy, he said, so they were already out there. Plus the capture had been broadcast live on television.
“I would never have done anything to compromise the case,” said Murphy, who had immediately told his superiors after giving the shots to Boston Magazine.
“I didn’t need to hide,” he said. “I go to bed comfortable with whatever I do during the day. I slept absolutely comfortably after giving away those pictures. And had I not done this, I would not have been sleeping well to this day.”