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Latest update: 8:35 p.m.
A wounded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured this evening in a boat parked in a backyard in Watertown, MA. When the local police department tweeted the news, cheers from onlookers and emergency personnel were broadcast live on media networks — which had not yet reported the news.
Previously updated at 3:15 p.m.:
Officials in Boston and Watertown, MA this afternoon rescinded their request for people to stay indoors. Gov. Deval Patrick urged people to “remain vigilant” but go about their business. The bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has not been located. Police will continue looking for him.
Previously updated at 1:15 p.m.:
Here's what is known after a night of fast-moving news out of Watertown, MA, across the river from Boston.
There is a manhunt on in the Watertown area for Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old student who was suspect #2 in the Boston Marathon bombing in the FBI video released yesterday. He is a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, officials there confirmed.
He may be wounded. The New York Times reports two officials said the authorities had tracked him at some point during the manhunt by his blood trail.
His older brother, identified by some media sources as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed last night in a confrontation with police. He was suspect #1 in the FBI video. A law enforcement source told the Boston Globe that an explosive trigger was found on his body at the morgue.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled to Russia from the United States last year and returned six months later, a law enforcement official said in the New York Times. It was unclear if he had spent the entire time in Russia.
Local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, including the Secret Service, are searching door-to-door in Watertown. K-9 teams, explosives experts, and SWAT officers are involved, said State Police spokesman David Procopio.
A controlled explosion was triggered by bomb experts at a home on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, where the two brothers lived.
Transit service, taxis and universities in the Boston area are shut down. Governor Deval Patrick asked people who live in Boston, Watertown, Waltham, Newton, Belmont and Cambridge to “shelter in place” — stay inside and not open their doors to anyone, except police with proper identification.
MIT Police Officer Sean Collier, 26, of Somerville was killed at about 10:30 p.m. Thursday; MBTA Transit Police Officer Richard H. Donahue Jr., 33, was shot shortly afterwards in a firefight. He is in stable condition at Mt. Auburn Hospital.
The Boston Globe sums up the start of last night's news events, sourcing it to Col. Timothy Alben, commander of the state police:
The night’s outbreak of violence began when police received reports of a robbery of a convenience store in Kendall Square near MIT. A few minutes later, an MIT police officer, later identified as Collier, was shot multiple times while in his cruiser at Main and Vassar streets, near Building 32, better known as the renowned Stata Center on the MIT campus. Collier was later pronounced dead at Massachusetts General Hospital.
A short time after the Cambridge incident, two men carjacked a Mercedes SUV at gunpoint, and the owner of that car was able to flee at a gas station on Memorial Drive.The SUV proceeded out Memorial Drive toward Watertown followed by a long train of police vehicles in pursuit. At one point during the pursuit, the two suspects opened fire on Watertown police and the Transit Police officer, Donahue, was shot. He remains in stable condition with a gunshot wound at Mt. Auburn Hospital, the hospital said this morning.
During the gunfight, one suspect was wounded and taken into custody. This morning, Dr. Richard Wolfe said the man was brought to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center emergency room about 1:10 a.m. with multiple traumatic injuries.
“It was more than gunshot wounds,’’ Wolfe told reporters about 5:30 a.m. “It was a combination of injuries. We believe a combination of of blasts, multiple gunshot wounds.”
Wolfe said it looked like the man had been hurt by an “explosive device’’ and that the man was struck by “shrapnel.’’ The man was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m.
The late-night news unfolded first online, as eyewitnesses — including several journalists who live nearby — and media outlets such as WGBH in Boston posted accounts to Twitter and passed along what they overheard on Boston police scanners. The stream of news on Twitter, Facebook and sites like Reddit was a mixture of accurate information, conjecture and mis-information, but it was in full swing long before national networks such as CNN came on the air. Tens of thousands of people were listening to Boston scanner chatter online.
The suspects were born in Kyrgyzstan of Chechen origin, according to family members and the Kyrgyz state news agency. The family moved to the U.S. about ten years ago. A public radio host said on NPR this morning that she has known the family for years.
"My son is a true angel," the men's father, Anzor Tsarnaev, told the Associated Press by telephone from the city of Makhachkala on Friday. "Dzhokhar is a second-year medical student in the U.S. He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here."
An uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., told reporters that he was ashamed of his nephews' actions, bitterly calling them “losers” and denouncing the bombings. “I say Dzhokhar, if you’re alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness,” said Tsarni, who said that his family had been estranged from theirs, and that their father, who recently moved back to Russia, had worked “fixing cars” in America. Tsarni said that the family had moved to Cambridge in 2003 from Kyrgyzstan, where Tamerlan was born. Dzhokhar was born in Dagestan, he said. Tsarni said that the last time he saw his nephews was December 2005. NYT
Media scouring over social media this morning found a profile for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that says he attended elementary school in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, a small Muslim Caucasus republic near Chechnya before coming to the U.S. and graduating from Rindge & Latin School in Cambridge in 2011. "He wrote that he speaks English, Russian, and 'Nokhchiin Mott,' the Chechen language," says the LA Times, and "describes his world view as 'Islam' but his priorities as 'Career and money.' He belongs to religious and secular social media groups linked to Chechnya, almost all in Russian."
Friday's home games of the Boston Red Sox and Boston Bruins were postponed until another day.
Top photo: New York Times screen grab. Suspect photo: FBI
