BOSTON — Moments after investigators went before television cameras to broadcast photos of two men in ball caps wanted for the Boston Marathon bombing, queries from viewers started cascading in — 300,000 hits a minute that overwhelmed the FBI’s website.
It marked a key turning point in a search that, for all the intensity of its first 72 hours, had failed to locate the suspects. While it’s unclear how much the tips that resulted helped investigators zero in, experts say it instantly turned up already intense pressure on the two men to flee or almost certainly be recognized — increasing the chances they’d make mistakes that would lead to them being exposed.
Late Friday, the bloody trail at last reached an end in the Boston suburb of Watertown, when police cornered 19-year-old suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, hunkered down inside a boat parked in the backyard of a three-bedroom house.
The decision that led to their quarry — whether or not to make photos of the suspects public — was something of a gamble, one that investigators had to weigh carefully.
“It was a good decision to put this out to the public … and this would have been a calculated risk. But the intent would have been to get these guys to change their pattern” of behavior, said Martin Reardon, who spent 21 years as an FBI agent and is now a vice president of security consultant The Soufan Group.
Releasing the photos greatly increased the odds the two men would be recognized and turned in, even as it significantly upped the chances they would try to vanish or commit more mayhem — exactly the scenario that played out.
“Clearly these guys were reacting and responding exactly as (law enforcement) predicted,” said Robert Taylor, a criminologist at the University of Texas at Dallas who studies terrorism. “If you saw your face on TV and everywhere else as associated with the bombing … you would act irrationally, and that’s exactly what they did.”
After three days without being able to identify a suspect by name, investigators clearly made the decision to release the photos Thursday on the belief that, without doing so, the suspects might remain at large for weeks or months, with the chance to flee or to act again, said David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor in Miami.
So with photos in hand, investigators made a choice deemed both necessary and prudent.
“And then the worst possible thing happens,” Weinstein said. “They do actually begin their flight and then start to wreak vengeance on the whole city of Boston.”
Weinstein, Reardon and other experts had differing opinions on whether investigators’ decision to release the photos was worth the cost exacted by the two men: the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, a carjacking, the shooting of another transit police officer and a block-by-block manhunt that led officials to shut down Boston and many of its surrounding suburbs.
But all agreed the photo release was pivotal in breaking open the case, because it instantly deprived suspected bombers Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother, Dzhokhar, of time, anonymity and options.
By late Friday, many of the details in the chain of events that led to the older brother’s death and the capture of the younger one after a massive manhunt were still unclear.
It began just after 5 p.m. Thursday, when investigators released the photographs and video of two unidentified suspects and asked for the public’s help.
Just over five hours later, shots were heard on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, across the Charles River from Boston in Cambridge. Ten minutes later, an MIT campus police officer who was responding was found shot multiple times in his vehicle and was later pronounced dead.
Soon after, two armed men carjacked a Mercedes SUV in Cambridge, holding the driver for about half an hour before releasing him unharmed. Police pursued and the men inside the vehicle threw explosive devices from the windows, while exchanging gunfire. A Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officer was wounded in the firefight and the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was fatally injured and pronounced dead.
The hunt then continued for the younger brother, who fled on foot.
In the pre-dawn hours Friday, dozens of police officers and FBI agents converged on Watertown after gunshots and explosions were heard, ordering people to stay inside. But the search proved fruitless, leading authorities to shut down Boston’s mass transit system and urge residents of several cities and towns to stay indoors.
State Police spokesman Dave Procopio said police realized they were dealing with the bombing suspects based on what the two men told the carjacking victim during their getaway attempt.
The chaos of the pursuit contrasted sharply with the sweeping, methodical investigation that began almost immediately after the Monday afternoon bombing that killed three and wounded more than 180, and was marked by officials’ notable reluctance to disclose information. In the hours and days after the bombing, dozens of investigators in white hooded suits carefully combed, cataloged and photographed evidence at the scene, even canvassing the roofs of nearby buildings to search for items blown into the air by the bomb’s force.
Investigators gathered hours of videotape footage from security cameras that scanned the area around the bombing and appealed to the public to turn in their own video and photos, for help in determining the sequence of events and identifying a suspect.
They then used software to search for certain types of objects or people matching a height and weight description. The technology can also spot patterns that human analysts might not notice, such as a car that turns up in different places, said Gene Grindstaff, a scientist at Intergraph Corp., a company that makes video analysis software used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
“Back in the days of 20 years ago, you were lucky if you had video and it was probably of poor quality and it took a tremendous amount of enhancement. Today you have a completely different issue,” Grindstaff said.
“Here’s the first thing that the computer was told: Tell me if you can find the same people at both of those (bombing) locations,” said Taylor, the criminologist.
Additional parameters would further narrow the search to, for example, look for people carrying backpacks.
“It’s kind of like going through a series of strainers and filters,” Taylor said.
But with the video winnowed down, the process required examination frame-by-frame, a laborious process done by an FBI unit called the Operational Technologies Division, said Joe DiZinno, former director of the FBI lab in Virginia.
By Thursday, once facial recognition software and agents had narrowed the search to images of two young men, investigators had to make a decision about how to proceed.
Meanwhile, the Tsarnaev brothers were already on edge.
At an auto body shop near their home, the younger brother, Dzhokhar, had often stopped to talk with owner Gilberto Junior about cars and soccer. But on Tuesday, the day after the bombing, the normally relaxed young man showed up biting his nails and trembling, Junior said.
The mechanic told Tsarnaev he hadn’t had a chance to work on a Mercedes he’d dropped off for bumper work.
“I don’t care. I don’t care. I need the car right now,” Junior says Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told him.
By Thursday afternoon, the brothers had to know their options were narrowing quickly. And then the FBI released their photos to millions of viewers across the city, and around the world via newspaper, television stations and websites. The time to move was now.
“I think this developed rather quickly last night,” State Police Col. Timothy Alben said late Friday. “I would wager that most of the activity that was printed in the media yesterday forced them to make decisions or take actions that ultimately revealed who they were.”
Early coverage of the day’s events following the Boston bombings follow:
Update on Boston bombing manhunt:
Thousands of officers with rifles and armored vehicles swarmed the streets in and around Boston on Friday, hunting for a 19-year-old college student wanted in the Boston Marathon bombing after his older brother was killed in a furious getaway attempt overnight.
During the long night of violence, the brothers killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, severely wounded another lawman and hurled explosives at police in a car chase and gun battle.
The suspects were identified by law enforcement officials and family members as Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, ethnic Chechen brothers who had lived in Dagestan, which neighbors Chechnya in southern Russia. They had been in the U.S. for about a decade and lived near Boston, an uncle said.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a 26-year-old who had been known to the FBI as Suspect No. 1 and was seen in surveillance footage in a black baseball cap, was killed overnight, officials said. His brother, a 19-year-old college student who was dubbed Suspect No. 2 and was seen wearing a white, backward baseball cap in the images from Monday’s deadly bombing at the marathon finish line — escaped.
Their uncle in Maryland, Ruslan Tsarni, pleaded on live television: “Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness.”
Authorities in Boston suspended all mass transit and warned close to 1 million people in the entire city and some of its suburbs to stay indoors as the hunt for Suspect No. 2 went on. Businesses were asked not to open. People waiting at bus and subway stops were told to go home.
From Watertown to Cambridge, police SWAT teams, sharpshooters and FBI agents surrounded various buildings as police helicopters buzzed overhead and armored vehicles rumbled through the streets. Authorities also searched trains.
“We believe this man to be a terrorist,” said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis. “We believe this to be a man who’s come here to kill people.”
The bombings on Monday killed three people and wounded more than 180 others, tearing off limbs in a spray of shrapnel and instantly raising the specter of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
Chechnya is the home of an Islamic insurgency that has carried out deadly bombings in Russia and the region, but its militants have never been known to export violence to the West.
Investigators in the Boston case have shed no light on the motive for the bombing and have said it is unclear whether it was the work of domestic or international terrorists or someone else entirely with an unknown agenda.
As officers fanned out across the Boston area, Bryce Acosta, 24, came out of his Cambridge home with his hands up.
“I had like 30 FBI guys come storm my house with assault rifles,” he said. They yelled, “Is anybody in there?” and began searching his house and an adjacent shed, leaving after about 10 minutes.
The endgame — at least for Suspect No. 1 — came just hours after the FBI released photos and video of the two young men at the finish line and appealed to the public for help in identifying and capturing them.
State Police spokesman Dave Procopio said police realized they were dealing with the bombing suspects based what the two men told a carjacking victim during their getaway attempt overnight.
Tsarni, the men’s uncle, told The Associated Press that the brothers traveled here together from Russia. He called his nephews “losers” and said they had struggled to settle themselves in the U.S. and ended up “thereby just hating everyone.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev had studied accounting as a part-time student at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston for three semesters from 2006 to 2008, the school said.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was registered as a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, the school said. The campus closed down along with colleges around the Boston area.
Their father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from the Russian city of Makhachkala that his younger son, Dzhokhar, is “a true angel.”
He said his son was studying medicine. “He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here,” the father said.
The city of Cambridge announced two years ago that it had awarded a $2,500 scholarship to Dzhokar Tsarnaev, who was listed as a senior at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, a highly regarded public school whose alumni include actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and NBA star Patrick Ewing.
The images released by the FBI depict the two young men walking one behind the other near the marathon’s finish line. Richard DesLauriers, FBI agent in charge in Boston, said Suspect No. 2 in the white hat was seen setting down a bag at the site of the second of two deadly explosions.
Authorities said surveillance tape recorded late Thursday showed Suspect No. 2 during a robbery of a convenience store in Cambridge, near the campus of MIT, where a university police officer — 26-year-old Sean Collier — was shot to death while responding to a report of a disturbance.
From there, authorities said, the two men carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz, keeping him with them in the car for half an hour before releasing him at a gas station in Cambridge. The man was not injured.
The search for the vehicle led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with police. A transit police officer was severely wounded, authorities said.
Doctors at a Boston hospital where Tamerlan Tsarnaev died said they treated a man with a possible blast injury and multiple gunshot wounds. Authorities gave no details on how his younger brother escaped.
Watertown resident Kayla Dipaolo, 25, was waiting for a bus that was to evacuate her and others from their neighborhood.
She said she was woken up overnight by gunfire and a large explosion that sounded “like it was right next to my head … and shook the whole house.” She was looking at the front door when a bullet came through the side paneling. SWAT team officers were running all over her yard, she said.
“It was very scary,” she said. “There are two bullet holes in the side of my house and by the front door there is another.”
Christine Yajko said she heard two loud explosions and gunfire. She said a police officer later knocked on her door and told her there was an undetonated improvised explosive device in the street and warned her to stay away from the windows.
“It was on the street, right near our kitchen window,” she said.
The brothers also started out the night in a Honda CRV and used it to carjack the SUV. The CRV was later found abandoned in the morning in Boston.
In the past, insurgents from Chechnya and neighboring restive provinces in the Caucasus have been involved in terror attacks in Moscow and other places in Russia.
Those raids included one in Moscow in 2002 in which a group of Chechen militants took 800 people hostage and held them for two days before special forces stormed the building, killing all 41 captors. Also killed were 129 hostages, mostly from the effects of the gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.
Chechen insurgents also launched a 2004 hostage-taking raid in the southern Russian town of Beslan, where they took hundreds of hostages. The siege ended in a bloodbath two days later, with more than 330 people, about half of them children, killed.
Insurgents from Chechnya and other regions also have launched a long series of bombings in Moscow and other cities in Russia.
Prior AP coverage of the Boston bombing suspects:
The two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing killed an MIT police officer and hurled explosives at police in a car chase and gun battle overnight that left one of them dead and his brother on the loose, authorities said Friday as thousands of officers swarmed the streets in a manhunt that all but paralyzed the Boston area.
The suspects were identified by law enforcement officials and a family member as Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, brothers from a Russian region near Chechnya, which has been plagued by an Islamic insurgency stemming from separatist wars.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, known to the FBI as Suspect No. 1 and seen in surveillance footage in a black baseball cap, was killed in a gun battle with police in Massachusetts overnight, officials said. His 19-year-old brother — dubbed as Suspect No. 2 and seen wearing a white, backwards baseball cap in the images from Monday’s deadly bombing at the marathon finish line — escaped.
The law enforcement officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation.
In Boston, authorities suspended all mass transit and urged close to a million people in all of Boston and some of its suburbs to stay indoors as they searched for the remaining suspect, a man Businesses were asked not to open Friday. People waiting at bus and subway stops were told to go home.
“We believe this man to be a terrorist,” said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis. “We believe this to be a man who’s come here to kill people.”
The endgame — at least for Suspect No. 1 — came just hours after the FBI released photos and video of the two young men at the marathon finish line and appealed to the public for help in identifying and capturing them. Tips came pouring in to the FBI immediately but exactly how authorities managed to close in on the two young men was not immediately disclosed.
The mens’ uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., told The Associated Press that the men lived together near Boston and have been in the United States for about a decade. They traveled here together from the Russian region near Chechnya.
The White House said President Barack Obama was being briefed on developments overnight by Lisa Monaco, his assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism.
The suspects’ clashes with police began only a few hours after the FBI released photos and videos of the two young men, who were seen carrying backpacks as they mingled among marathon revelers. The bombings on Monday killed three people and wounded more than 180 others, and authorities revealed the images to enlist the public’s help finding the suspects.
The images released by the FBI depict two young men, each wearing a baseball cap, walking one behind the other near the finish line. Richard DesLauriers, FBI agent in charge in Boston, said the suspect in the white hat was seen setting down a bag at the site of the second of two deadly explosions.
Authorities said surveillance tape recorded late Thursday showed the suspect known for the white hat during a robbery of a convenience store in Cambridge, near the campus of MIT, where a university police officer was killed while responding to a report of a disturbance, said State Police Col Timothy Alben. The officer died of multiple gunshot wounds.
From there, authorities say, the two men carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz, keeping him with them in the car for half an hour before releasing him at a gas station in Cambridge. The man was not injured.
The search for the vehicle led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with police. A transit police officer was seriously injured during the chase, authorities said.
In Watertown, witnesses reported hearing multiple gunshots and explosions at about 1 a.m. Friday. Dozens of police officers and FBI agents were in the neighborhood and a helicopter circled overhead.
Watertown resident Christine Yajko said she was awakened at about 1:30 a.m. by a loud noise, began to walk to her kitchen and heard gunfire.
“I heard the explosion, so I stepped back from that area, then I went back out and heard a second one,” she said. “It was very loud. It shook the house a little.”
She said a police officer later knocked on her door and told her there was an undetonated improvised explosive device in the street and warned her to stay away from the windows.
“It was on the street, right near our kitchen window,” she said.
Yajko said she never saw the suspect who was on the loose and didn’t realize the violence was related to the marathon bombings until she turned on the TV and began watching what was happening outside her side door.
State police spokesman David Procopio said, “The incident in Watertown did involve what we believe to be explosive devices possibly, potentially, being used against the police officers.”
Boston cab driver Imran Saif said he was standing on a street corner at a police barricade across from a diner when he heard an explosion.
“I heard a loud boom and then a rapid succession of pop, pop, pop,” he said. “It sounded like automatic weapons. And then I heard the second explosion.”
He said he could smell something burning and advanced to check it out but area residents at their windows yelled at him, “Hey, it’s gunfire! Don’t go that way!”
Doctors at a Boston hospital where a suspect in the marathon bombings was taken and later died are saying they treated a man with a possible blast injury and multiple gunshot wounds.
MIT said right after the 10:30 p.m. shooting that police were sweeping the campus in Cambridge and urged people to remain indoors. They urged people urged to stay away from the Stata Center, a mixed-use building with faculty offices, classrooms and a common area.
The suspects’ images were released hours after President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama attended an interfaith service in Boston to remember the dead and the wounded.
At the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Obama saluted the resolve of the people of Boston and mocked the bombers as “these small, stunted individuals who would destroy instead of build and think somehow that makes them important.”
“We will find you,” he warned.
In the past, insurgents from Chechnya and neighboring restive provinces in the Caucasus have been involved in terror attacks in Moscow and other places in Russia.
Those raids included a raid in Moscow in October 2002 in which a group of Chechen militants took 800 people hostage and held them for two days before special forces stormed the building, killing all 41 Chechen hostage-takers. Also killed were 129 hostages, mostly from effects of narcotic gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.
Chechen insurgents also launched a 2004 hostage-taking raid in the southern Russian town of Beslan, where they took hundreds of hostages. The siege ended in a bloodbath two days later, with more than 330 people, about half of them children, killed.
Insurgents from Chechnya and other regions also have launched a long series of bombings in Moscow and other cities in Russia. An explosion at the international arrivals hall at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in January 2011 killed at least 31 people and wounded more than 140.