BOSTON – Police locked down the Boston area and searched house-to-house for a suspect in the marathon bombing after a second suspect, his older brother, was killed in an overnight gun battle.
Dzhokar Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old immigrant who has been in the U.S. for several years, escaped during a confrontation with police in the Boston suburb of Watertown in which at least one person hurled explosive devices at police, according to a federal law enforcement official.
Tsarnaev was born in Kyrgyzstan, and his older brother Tamerlan, the second suspect who was killed, was born in Russia, according to two U.S. law enforcement officials who asked for anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter. At least one of the two was a naturalized U.S. citizen, according to the officials.
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick asked all residents of Boston and several surrounding suburbs to “shelter in place” and stay inside with their doors locked and allow in only police. Public transit was shut down for the area.
“There is a massive manhunt underway,” Patrick said in a news conference.
Tsarnaev ran over his brother Tamerlan during the shoot-out in Watertown, according to the official. The brother was first identified as 20 and officials later corrected that to 26. One law enforcement officer also was killed and another was seriously wounded in mayhem that began at 10:30 pm local time last night.
Investigators believe the dead brother had explosives strapped to his body when he was killed, according to two federal law enforcement officials. That increased concerns about the type of weaponry the younger Tsarnaev had on him, one of the officials said.
Maryland relatives
Authorities were searching the brothers’ residence in Cambridge, Mass., this morning. The FBI was conducting interviews with relatives of the two this morning at a home in the Washington suburb of Gaithersburg, Maryland, according to Richard Wolf, an FBI spokesman.
A profile attributed to Dzhokar on the Russian social networking site V kontakte lists “career and money” as his personal priority and Islam as his world view.
A video posted April 9 on his page called “For those who have a heart” is about the Syrian civil war.
“They’re killing your brothers and sisters without any reason, just because they say ‘our god is Allah’ and ‘Mohammed is our prophet,” it says, asking people to help the Syrians.
Brothers immigrated
The Tsarnaev brothers and their two sisters moved to the Dagestan region of Russia in October 2001 from the central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan as refugees, and left for the U.S in March 2002, said Emirmagomed Davudov, director of Gimnasium Number 1 in Dagestan, where Tamerlan went to the 7th grade and Dzhokhar to first grade.
Ruslan Tsarni, their uncle in Gaithersburg, said his brother’s children immigrated to the U.S. in 2003, arriving in Cambridge. Asked for a possible motive for the attacks, Tsarni called them “losers not being able to settle themselves and thereby just hating everybody who did.”
Images released by the FBI yesterday showed one suspect wearing a black hat, the other a white hat. Police were searching for the man identified as the “white hat” suspect, Massachusetts State Police Colonel Timothy Alben told reporters.
Boston shuttered
Harvard University and MIT closed this morning, as did other Boston-area colleges including Boston University, Boston College, Simmons College, the Berklee College of Music, University of Massachusetts Boston and Suffolk University. The Boston area includes at least 85 colleges and universities that employ more than 70,000, according to a 2009 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment in higher education and health services was 34 percent greater in Boston than the rest of the country, according to the report.
Amtrak announced that Acela Express and Northeast Regional service was suspended indefinitely between Boston and Providence, Rhode Island, due to ongoing police activity.
Police stopped an Amtrak Acela train at East Norwalk, Connecticut, and boarded it with guns drawn. Lieutenant Praveen John, head of the community services division for the Norwalk Police Department, said the agency received a call from Boston Police to investigate whether Dzhokar Tsarnaev was aboard an Amtrak Acela train that had left South Station. Authorities determined he wasn’t aboard after a 48-minute search, he said.
Boston is still coming to grips with the April 15 attack on the city’s annual marathon that killed three people and injured more than 170. The violence overnight erupted with a convenience store robbery, then escalated to the fatal shooting of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer and the carjacking of a Mercedes SUV.
Officer shot
As local authorities pursued the suspects, at least one of the individuals tried to hurl explosive devices at police, according to the federal official. At that point, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives joined the manhunt.
When police confronted the suspects, a gun battle ensued. A second officer, from the transit police, was shot and is in serious condition, according to David Procopio, a Massachusetts State Police spokesman. As the chase continued through Watertown, the FBI released two additional images of the men it said were tied to the marathon bombing.
During the shootout, the older brother stepped out of the car. At some point, the younger brother hit the gas and ended up running over his brother, a law enforcement official said.
President Barack Obama was briefed overnight about the events in Boston and Watertown, and he convened a meeting of his national security team this morning, according to a White House statement.
Suspect dead
Police brought one of the suspects, an adult male with multiple gunshot wounds and an injury consistent with an explosion, to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at 1:20 a.m., Dr. Richard Wolfe, chief of emergency medicine, told reporters at a news conference held with the hospital’s chief executive officer, Dr. Kevin Tabb.
The patient, whose name Tabb wouldn’t release, was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m. local time after efforts to resuscitate him failed.
Beth Israel cared for 24 of the injured from the bombings. Twelve remain in the hospital, one of them in serious condition, Tabb said.
Dr. David Schoenfeld, who worked on the injured male early this morning before he died, told reporters he was home in Watertown last night catching up on paperwork. When he heard the gunfire and explosions outside, he headed to the hospital to help with what he assumed were casualties headed to Beth Israel.
‘Two shooters’
Andrew Kitzenberg, a Watertown resident, said he witnessed from his bedroom window a confrontation between two men in a black SUV and police.
“There were two shooters with handguns,” he told MSNBC. They also had “what seemed to be grenades” and “what looked to be a pressure cooker bomb,” referring to the type of explosive device that the marathon attackers are thought to have used.
As an explosion went off, one of the shooters ran toward officers, and “went down,” Kitzenberg said. The second shooter got in the SUV and “floored it” in the direction of the officers.
Police had issued warnings over their radio about “multiple explosive devices.” People in the area were told to stay off mobile phones to avoid setting off any potential bombs. At least one loud explosion was heard.
Police sweep
This morning, police carrying assault rifles swept through Watertown, where people were warned to stay inside their homes. A message from state police on the Twitter social network urged residents not to open their doors unless it’s an identifiable law enforcement officer.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has been shut down, Boston police said, as officers continue to hunt for the suspect who escaped during a gun battle in Watertown.
Police streamed into the area from many local towns, as did law-enforcement officers from the FBI, transit authority and the National Guard. Multiple ambulances were standing by.
Reports of chases and sightings in nearby areas sent streams of police cars careering through the narrow streets. Officers converged with spotlights and guns drawn.
Gunfire
Watertown resident Larry Victor described the scene: “Tons and tons and tons of gunfire. Explosions. What a wild event right here in Watertown. I wasn’t about to walk out in the middle of a gun battle.”
One man in Watertown was ordered by police to strip naked and then taken into custody. Police had surrounded the man with their guns drawn, ordered him to the ground and shouted. “Drop your underwear!”
It was not immediately known whether the man had any involvement in the overnight violence or the marathon bombing.
“Our daughter woke us up and said there were a lot of gunshots,” said one witness, Scott Price.
The family heard multiple gunshots, he said. “You could smell the gunpowder.” Price’s wife, Anne, said they heard three explosions. “It was very frightening,” she said. “Our daughter was very scared.”
Shortly before 2 a.m. local time, a half dozen Boston and state police, some carrying assault rifles, ran past a group of construction workers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, across the street from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, yelling “active shooter, active shooter” and urging the workers to get inside, said Michael Hartley, one of the workers. The police ran toward Children’s Hospital, Hartley said.
At Beth Israel, city and state police cruisers, their lights flashing, stood by. A state police officer shooed a reporter off the hospital grounds, declining to answer questions.
Officer shot
The MIT officer who was shot last night was responding to reports of a disturbance on campus, according to a statement from Middlesex Acting District Attorney Michael Pelgro. The officer, who wasn’t identified, was found with multiple gunshot wounds and taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Pelgro said.
Gunshots were heard on the campus at about 10:48 p.m. local time last night near the Ray and Maria Stata Center, and people have been asked to stay clear of the area, according to a statement posted on the university’s website. MIT later issued an all-clear.
Officers from state and local law enforcement units were on the campus shooting scene, along with some personnel wearing FBI jackets. Two police dogs were seen sniffing around a building marked the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
About 20 police vehicles with lights flashing were seen along Vassar Street at MIT, which was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. A police boat with lights flashing was patrolling the nearby Charles River, and a helicopter hovered over the campus.
The Cambridge Police Department issued a message of condolences through a posting on the Twitter social network.
“Our thoughts & prayers are with the officer’s family & our brothers & sisters at the #MIT Police,” the Cambridge police said.
