Bomb Suspect Is Charged and Could Face the Death Penalty
Published: April 22, 2013 242 Comments
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Video from a nearby restaurant, Forum, shows the bomber remaining in place, checking his cellphone, and even appearing to take a picture with it, the papers said. Then he seems to check his phone again, and speak on it.
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“A few seconds after he finishes the call, the large crowd of people around him can be seen reacting to the first explosion,” the court papers said. “Virtually every head turns to the east (towards the finish line) and stares in that direction in apparent bewilderment and alarm. Bomber Two, virtually alone among the individuals in front of the restaurant, appears calm. He glances to the east and then calmly but rapidly begins moving to the west, away from the direction of the finish line.”
“He walks away without his knapsack, having left it on the ground where he had been standing,” the court papers said. “Approximately 10 seconds later, an explosion occurs in the location where Bomber Two had placed his knapsack.”
The agent added: “I can discern nothing in that location in the period before the explosion that might have caused that explosion, other than Bomber Two’s knapsack.”
In the court papers, Agent Genck said that he compared driver’s license photos of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to the video images, and that he believed “based on their close physical resemblance, there is probable cause that they are one and the same person.” He also identified the other bomber, called “Bomber One” in court papers, as Mr. Tsarnaev’s brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Mr. Genck also described how, just seven hours after the F.B.I. had released their pictures and sought the public’s help in identifying them, the brothers emerged shortly before midnight in Cambridge, Mass., when a man was carjacked at gunpoint.
“Did you hear about the Boston explosion?” the affidavit said that one of the suspects told the carjacking victim. “I did that.”
The suspect forced the victim to drive to another location, the affidavit said, where they picked up the other brother, and placed something in the car’s trunk. The driver was then moved to the passenger seat, while the two suspects conversed in a foreign language, it said.
The affidavit said that the two men took $45 from the driver, and then took his A.T.M. card and password and tried to withdraw money from his account. They then drove to a Shell gas station on Memorial Drive in Cambridge where, when the two suspects got out of the car, the driver escaped.
The stolen vehicle was located soon after that in Watertown, Mass. As the two suspects drove down Dexter Street in Watertown, they tossed at least two small improvised explosive devices from the car window, the affidavit said. When the police caught up with the men on Laurel Street, a gunfight broke out between the suspects and law enforcement officers in which “numerous shots were fired,'’ the affidavit said.
One of the suspects — later identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev — was severely wounded and was left behind on the ground at the scene while the other suspect escaped in the vehicle. The vehicle was found abandoned a short distance away, the affidavit said, with what was described as an “intact low-grade explosive device” inside it. At the scene of the shootout on Laurel Street, the F.B.I. found two unexploded improvised explosive devices and the remnants of “numerous” exploded devices, the affidavit said.
Those explosive provided more clues: the remnants were similar to those found at the scene of the marathon bombings — and at least one was in a pressure cooker, the affidavit said. “The pressure cooker was of the same brand as the ones used in the Marathon explosions,” it said, noting that it “also contained metallic BBs contained within an adhesive material as well as green-colored hobby fuse,'’ like in the marathon bombs.
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