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The Boston Area Peers Out at Scenes From a Bad Dream
The Boston Area Peers Out at Scenes From a Bad Dream
(about 3 hours later)
BOSTON — The oasis of Boston Common was transformed overnight into an armed camp. In place of the usual commuters and tourists who pass through the park in the morning was a police convoy with about 20 officers on motorcycles and six S.U.V.'s escorting what looked like a bomb-disposal truck.
BOSTON — The scene was extraordinary. The hub of the universe, as Boston’s popular nickname would have it, was on lockdown from first light until near dark on Friday. A massive dragnet for one man had brought a major American city to an absolute standstill.
A major American city and its suburbs were brought to a standstill on Friday in a frantic search for a lone suspect from Monday’s marathon bombings. Overnight, his brother, who was also a suspect, had been killed in a shootout with the authorities; as the remaining suspect sped away in a car, he ran over his brother’s body.
The people were gone, shops were locked, streets were barren, trains did not run. The often-clogged Massachusetts Turnpike was as clear as a bowling lane.
At a news conference Friday evening, officials said they were lifting the lockdown that had forced residents of the greater Boston area to stay inside with doors locked. The announcement came even though the remaining suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was still at-large.
With just a few words from Gov.Deval Patrick, this raucous, sports-loving, patriotic old city became a ghost town. The governor had said to stay away, stay inside. His warning applied not only to the city, but to a half dozen comfortable towns just outside its limits. The entire region had become a gigantic crime scene.
Hundreds of thousands of people across the region had woken up Friday morning to the surreal scene of terror on their screens. And when they looked out their windows, many could see the same thing in real time: an overwhelming show of force by heavily armed law enforcement officers. SWAT teams roamed their normally tranquil streets, rifles were raised and helicopters clucked overhead.
The lockdown caught many residents off guard, including Michael Demirdjian, 47, a postal worker who was pulled over by a flock of police cars while trying to take his new puppy to his home in Watertown near the scene of the night’s dramatic shootout.
A sense of fear rippled across a region already on edge from Monday’s bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 170 others. A crime spree that began late Thursday night with a carjacking of a Mercedes sport-utility vehicle quickly snowballed into a deadly rampage that took the life of an M.I.T. campus police officer who was sitting in his car and that left the one suspect dead after a Wild West-like shootout in the streets of suburban Watertown.
“They were everywhere,” Mr. Demirdjian said of investigators. “My backyard, everybody’s backyard, front yard, up and down the streets.” His house was blocked off, so he spent much of the day marooned in a mall parking lot where the news media had set up.
It was a gray but unusually warm morning that finally promised the arrival of spring in southern New England. But residents of Watertown, many of whom could not have slept through the police sirens and volleys of gunfire, were quickly put in lockdown.
Todd Wigger, 25, a software salesman, used the occasion to take a nap. When he blinked awake on Friday afternoon, he was surprised to see how empty the streets were outside his South End apartment.
At 5:45 a.m., Gov. Deval Patrick ordered all public transit shut down, including the subway. Amtrak trains were halted south of Boston. Several area colleges, including Harvard, M.I.T. and Boston University, canceled Friday classes. By 6:30, residents of Cambridge received recorded phone calls telling them to “shelter in place,” meaning to stay home.
“This time Friday, there’s lots of traffic and beeping horns,” he said as a plastic bag wafted across Dartmouth Street, a four-lane thoroughfare, unobstructed by cars. But he said he respected the police and wanted to help any way he could. “So here we are,” he shrugged, “waiting and wondering.”
At 7:10, residents of Newton Center received a recorded phone call from Newton’s chief of police telling them that one suspect was dead and that another was armed, dangerous and in the area. The call advised residents to stay inside with doors locked and not to let anyone in. It urged businesses to close and asked people not to dial 911 unless it was a true emergency.
This seemed to be the general attitude. Janet Hammer, 59, a physician assistant, said in a phone interview from her home in Cambridge, near the scene of much police activity, that the streets were deserted.
By 8 a.m., the governor appeared at a makeshift command post in Watertown to say that he was extending his “shelter in place” order to “all of Boston.” Taxis were ordered off the streets.
“Everyone here is really obeying,” she said, not out of fear but out of civic respect and trust. “People realize that you have to actually allow space for this investigation.” After a pause, she added, “I don’t know how long we’ll do it — at some point, people will want a gallon of milk.”
The morning was riddled with false alarms. Parts of Commonwealth Avenue, a major artery through Boston, were blocked off while agents checked for a potential danger in Kenmore Square. When that proved false, another danger zone popped up somewhere else.
The Red Sox canceled their home baseball game, leaving their opponents, the Kansas City Royals, stuck aimlessly at a downtown hotel. The Bruins canceled, too, frustrating hockey fans who just a few nights earlier had welcomed the team back by joining in singing the national anthem, with tears in their eyes.
Any relief that the bombing suspects might be caught had to be put on hold until the residents here could first feel safe.
Barbara Moran, 42, a science writer who was home in Brookline with her husband and two energetic young children, said the unexpected time off was like a snow day without the snow. “We made cookies, read books, watched videos and I looked at my watch and it was only 9 a.m.,” she said. At that point, she set up the trampoline, hoping the children would wear themselves out.
There was almost no traffic on the streets of Boston, much like Tuesday, the day after the city’s storied marathon was disrupted by two explosions. Even major highways like the Massachusetts Turnpike, which cuts through downtown and is usually jammed in the morning with commuters, was mostly deserted on Friday.
The harder part was answering questions from her 5-year-old about why they suddenly had the day off. (She settled on, “There are bad men out there.”)
Few businesses appeared to be open.
The day was riddled with false alarms.
After a night of high drama and chaos, with gun shots and explosions piercing the calm, the small suburban community of Watertown found itself an odd combination of ghost town and police state on Friday morning.
Parts of Commonwealth Avenue, a major artery through Boston, were blocked off while agents checked for a potential danger in Kenmore Square. When that proved false, another danger zone popped up somewhere else. And for some, the day and the wall-to-wall news coverage became tedious.
Residents started getting calls from the police shortly after 2 a.m. telling them to lock their doors, stay in their houses and go out only if directed to by a law enforcement officer.
At least one business decided to buck the tide.
“I got a call at 2:40 a.m., saying, ‘This is the police department calling. We have an emergency, and we need you to stay in your home,’ ” said Jeannette John, 82, in a phone interview.
Loic LeGarrec, owner of Petit Robert Bistro, sent an e-mail to his loyal patrons telling them that the restaurant would be open for dinner Friday night.
“I just see more and more police cars,” she said. She lives on Mount Auburn Street, which she said was a few minutes from where a standoff with the police took place.
He said he received some negative e-mails from people who felt he was trying to make money off a bad situation. But he said this was not so. After the dreary business of the last week, he said, he wanted to give people something to look forward to.
Most of the overnight activity — which included a police chase, gun battles and explosions -- occurred on School Street and the streets that run off it, residents said.
“Most people need a place to go after staying in the house all day,” he said, “and the staff needs the work.”
However, with people locked in their homes, they had a limited vantage, seeing only what they could glimpse out of parted curtains.
But mainly, he said, he thought shutting down the city was the wrong decision.
One resident who declined to give her name said her husband saw someone in a hoodie dashing across her yard shortly after the police called and told them to stay indoors. The couple immediately called the authorities to tell them what they saw. Like the people outside Watertown, they were relying on television to see what was happening just outside their own doors.
“I thought this whole thing went too far,” he said over the clatter of dishes. “It is not sending the right message to all these crazy people out there. We shouldn’t be hiding. It’s not us that are wrong here.”
Helicopters circled overhead as law enforcement officers canvassed the community of 32,000.
As it happened, the restaurant opened its doors just as city and state officials announced they were lifting the lockdown.
The police scanner buzzed with activity, but in the area where the news media were cordoned off, on the edge of town, the authorities declined to comment on what might be happening within the lockdown zone.
Jess
Bidgood contributed reporting from Watertown, Mass.
J.J. Smith said that police officers were gathering in a parking lot across from 480 Arsenal Street and that residents had been warned to stay clear of that area, in particular.
She said that in addition to police and SWAT teams, heavily armored vehicles were assembling.
“The police are staging something big,” she said before rushing off the phone.
It was impossible to verify her account, and the police may have been using the parking lot as a staging ground simply because it was large and convenient.
Later, there were reports of police action on nearby Boylston Street. That, too, could not be confirmed.
The situation was so fraught that CNN decided to show images from Watertown only on a tape delay.
Ms. John said that while the situation around her was intense, she had spent years in the Foreign Service and was not overly concerned.
“I am sure the police can handle it,” she said. “They told us if we see something to call a number they gave us.”
