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Boston Bombings Suspect Remains in Serious Condition at Hospital
Bomb Investigation Pivots to a New Mystery: Motive
(about 1 hour later)
BOSTON — The teenage suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, whose flight from the police after a furious gunfight overnight prompted an intense manhunt that virtually shut down the Boston area all day, was in serious condition at a Boston hospital Saturday morning after the police found him in nearby Watertown, Mass., officials said.
BOSTON — With one suspect dead and the other captured and lying grievously wounded in a hospital, the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings turned on Saturday to questions about the men’s motives, and to the significance of a trip by one of the bombers took to Chechnya.
The suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, was found hiding in a boat just outside the area where the police had been conducting door-to-door searches all day, the Boston police commissioner, Edward Davis, said at a news conference Friday night.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed early Friday after a shootout with police in Watertown, Mass., traveled to Russia for six months in 2012. Law enforcement officials are now conducting a review of that trip, to see if Mr. Tsarnaev might have met with extremists or received training from them while abroad, current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials said.
“A man had gone out of his house after being inside the house all day, abiding by our request to stay inside,” Mr. Davis said, referring to the advice officials gave to residents to remain behind locked doors. “He walked outside and saw blood on a boat in the backyard. He then opened the tarp on the top of the boat, and he looked in and saw a man covered with blood. He retreated and called us.”
Kevin R. Brock, a former senior F.B.I. and counterterrorism official, said, “It’s a key thread for investigators and the intelligence community to pull on.”
“Over the course of the next hour or so we exchanged gunfire with the suspect, who was inside the boat, and ultimately the hostage rescue team of the F.B.I. made an entry into the boat and removed the suspect, who was still alive,” Mr. Davis said. He said the suspect was in “serious condition” and had apparently been wounded in the gunfight that left his brother dead.
The investigators began scrutinizing the events in the months and years before the fatal attack, as Boston began to feel like itself for the first time in nearly a week. Monday had brought the bombing, near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, which killed three and wounded scores, and the tense days that followed culminated in Friday’s lockdown of the entire region as police searched for the younger Mr. Tsarnaev from suburban backyards to an Amtrak train bound for New York City.
A federal law enforcement official said Mr. Tsarnaev would not be read his Miranda rights because the authorities would invoke the public safety exception to question him extensively about other potential explosive devices or accomplices and to try to gain intelligence.
On Saturday morning, federal prosecutors were drafting a criminal complaint against Mr. Tsarnaev’s brother and suspected accomplice in the bombings, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, who was wounded in the leg and neck and had lost a great deal of blood at the time he was captured Friday evening. The F.B.I. and local law enforcement agencies continued to gather evidence and investigate the bombings on Monday, the slaying of an M.I.T. police officer Thursday night and the subsequent battle with the police that left another officer critically wounded.
President Obama, in his weekly address Saturday morning, praised the first responders, the doctors and “the big-hearted people of Boston” who gave the world “stories of heroism and kindness, resolve and resilience, generosity and love.”
The official said that the criminal complaint will likely include a constellation of charges stemming from both the bombing and the shooting, possibly including the use of weapons of mass destruction, an applicable charge for the detonation of a bomb. That charge, the official said, carries a maximum penalty of death. While Massachusetts has outlawed the death penalty, federal law allows it.
“If anyone wants to know who we are, what America is, how we respond to evil and terror – that’s it,” Mr. Obama said. “Selflessly. Compassionately. And unafraid.”
Both President Obama and Republican lawmakers devoted their weekly broadcast addresses to the Boston attack, with both sides finding a common voice over the five days of uproar and lockdown leading up to the death of the elder Mr. Tsarnaev, the amateur boxer who seemed to follow a path of anger and alienation, and the capture of his younger and seemingly more easygoing and Americanized brother, Dzhokhar.
In the Republican response to the president’s address, Representative Tim Scott of South Carolina sounded a note of national unity. While the bombers hoped to “shake the confidence of a city,” he said, “they have instead only strengthened the resolve of our nation.”
In his weekly radio address, the president applauded the “heroism and kindness” on display in the aftermath of the bombings. “Americans refuse to be terrorized,” he said. “Ultimately, that’s what we’ll remember from this week.”
On Friday night, the president said he had directed federal law enforcement officials to continue to investigate, and he urged people not to rush to judgment about the motivations behind the attacks.
In the Republican response, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, sounded a note of national unity. While the bombers hoped to “shake the confidence of a city,” he said, “they have instead only strengthened the resolve of our nation.”
Mr. Tsarnaev was discovered just over 26 hours after the F.B.I. circulated pictures of him and his brother and called them suspects in Monday’s bombings, which killed three people and wounded more than 170. Events unfolded quickly — and lethally — after that. Law enforcement officials said that within hours of the pictures’ release, the two brothers had shot and killed a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, carjacked a sport utility vehicle and led police on a chase, tossing several pipe bombs from their vehicle.
The seeds of arguments to come were already visible, however. Questions arose concerning the arrest and prosecution of the surviving brother, and whether he should be given a Miranda warning and other elements of constitutional rights in criminal cases. Further scrutiny surrounds the government’s early monitoring of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and whether possible warning signs may have been missed.
Then the men got into a pitched gun battle with the police in Watertown, a city about 10 miles west of Boston. More than 200 rounds were fired, and a transit police officer was critically wounded. When the shootout ended, one of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, a former boxer, had been fatally wounded. He was wearing explosives, several law enforcement officials said. But Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joe-HARR tsar-NAH-yev) managed to escape — running over his older brother as he sped away, the officials said.
In the hours after the arrest, Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, both Republicans, issued a statement late Friday calling for Mr. Tsarnaev, who is a naturalized American citizen, to be treated like a terrorist, not a criminal, with reduced constitutional rights and none of the right to remain silent promised in Miranda warnings.
His disappearance, and fears that he could be armed with more explosives, set off an intense manhunt. SWAT teams and Humvees rolled through residential streets. Military helicopters hovered overhead. Bomb squads were called to several locations. And Boston was essentially shut down.
“It is absolutely vital the suspect be questioned for intelligence gathering purposes,” the statement said. “The least of our worries is a criminal trial which will likely be held years from now.”
Transit service was suspended. Classes at Harvard, M.I.T., Boston University and other area colleges were canceled. Amtrak halted service into Boston. The Red Sox baseball game scheduled for Friday at Fenway Park was postponed, as was a concert at Symphony Hall. Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts urged residents to stay behind locked doors all day — not lifting the request until shortly after 6 p.m., when transit service in the shaken, seemingly deserted region was finally restored.
The statement, released on Mr. Graham’s Facebook page, was immediately attacked by civil libertarians like Ellis Hughes of Durham, N.C., who wrote, “That is immoral, unconstitutional and wrong. Don’t let your fear or political ambitions damage our moral compass.”
As hundreds of police officers fanned out across New England looking for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, investigators tried to piece together a fuller picture of the two brothers, to determine more about the bombing at the Boston Marathon.
In fact, investigators did invoke what the Justice Department has called a public-safety exception to delay the discussion of the Miranda rule with Mr. Tsarnaev.
The F.B.I. had interviewed the older brother, Tamerlan (tam-arr-lawn) Tsarnaev, in 2011 when a foreign government asked the bureau to determine if he had extremist ties, according to a senior law enforcement official. The government knew that he was planning to travel there and feared that he might be a risk, the official said.
As federal officials now step up their investigation, an important element will be the trip the elder brother made to Russia and Chechnya in 2012. In early 2011, the F.B.I. said in a statement, “a foreign government” — now acknowledged by officials to be Russia — asked for information about Tamerlan, “based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.” A senior law enforcement official said they feared he could be a risk, and “they had something on him and were concerned about him, and him traveling to their region.”
The official would not say which government had made the request, but Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s father said his son had traveled to Russia in 2012.
The bureau responded to the request by checking “U.S. government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history,” the statement explained. The bureau also interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and family members. According to the statement, “the FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign,” and conveyed those findings to “the foreign government” by the summer of 2011. As the law enforcement official put in, “We didn’t find anything on him that was derogatory”
“They had something on him and were concerned about him and him traveling to their region,” the official said.
Mr. Tsarnaev did travel to Russia early last year and returned six months later, on July 17, a law enforcement official said. He spent most of the time with his father in Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region, the men’s father, Anzor Tsarnaev, told a Russian interviewer, but “we went to Chechnya to visit relatives,” he said.
The F.B.I. conducted a review, examining Web sites that he had visited, trying to determine whether he was spending time with extremists and ultimately interviewing him. The F.B.I. concluded that he was not a threat. “We didn’t find anything on him that was derogatory,” the official said.
Members of the Tsarnaev family in Makhachkala recalled those interviews vividly. In an interview in Russia, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the two men, said that the F.B.I. had questioned her older son closely. She recalled that they told her he was “an excellent boy,” but “At the same time they told me he is getting information from really, extremist sites, and they are afraid of him.”
The F.B.I. released a statement late Friday confirming that it had scrutinized Mr. Tsarnaev but “did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign.” It had requested more information from the foreign government, it said, but had not received it.
The state news agency RIA Novosti quoted the father, Anzor Tsarnaev, about the F.B.I. agents close questioning, “two or three times,” of Tamerlan. The elder Tsarnaev, who lives in a five-story, yellow brick building in a working-class neighborhood of the city, recalled that the agents told his son, “We know what you read, what you drink, what you eat, where you go.” He said that they told Tamerlan that the questioning “is prophylactic, so that no one set off bombs on the streets of Boston, so that our children could peacefully go to school.”
Now officials are scrutinizing that trip, to see if he might have met with extremists or received training while abroad, current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials said. Kevin R. Brock, a former senior F.B.I. and counterterrorism official, said, “It’s a key thread for investigators and the intelligence community to pull on.”
Those comments, he said, disturbed him. “This conversation took place a year and a half ago. But there is a question, why would they talk about it then?”
The brothers were born in Kyrgyzstan, an official said, and were of Chechen heritage. Chechnya, a long-disputed Muslim territory in southern Russia, sought independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and then fought two bloody wars with the government in Moscow. Russian assaults on Chechnya were brutal, killing tens of thousands of civilians as terrorist groups from the region staged attacks in central Russia.
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva expressed confidence in her sons’ innocence. “I am 100 percent sure this is a set-up,” she told an interviewer on Russia Today. Growing up, she said, “Nobody talked about terrorism.” While her older son “got involved in religion, religious politics five years ago,” she said, “he never told me that he would be on the side of jihad.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled to Russia from the United States early last year and returned six months later, on July 17, a law enforcement official said. His father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said that his son had mostly stayed with him at his home in Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region, but that the two men had also visited Chechnya.
It was in the aftermath of the visit to Dagestan and Chechnya, however, that the most obvious alienation emerged. One month after Tamerlan Tsarnaev returned to the United States, a YouTube page that appeared to belong to him was created and featured multiple jihadi videos that he had endorsed in the past six months. One video features the preaching of Abdul al-Hamid al-Juhani, an important ideologue in Chechnya; another focuses on Feiz Mohammad, an extremist Salafi Lebanese preacher based in Australia. He also created a playlist for Russian musical artist Timur Mucuraev, one of which promotes jihad, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors statements by jihadists.
“We went to Chechnya to visit relatives,” Mr. Tsarnaev said in an interview in Russia.
Mr. Tsarnaev and his younger son first came to the United States legally in April 2002 on 90-day tourist visas, federal law enforcement officials said. Once in this country, the father applied for political asylum, claiming he feared deadly persecution based on his ties to Chechnya. Dzhokhar, who was 8 years old, applied for asylum under his father’s petition, the officials said, and became a naturalized citizen on Sept. 11 of last year. Tamerlan Tsarnaev came to the United States later, and applied applied last September 5 to become a United States citizen, federal law enforcement officials said.
He maintained that his sons were innocent and had been framed, said that during the trip to Chechnya his older son had “only communicated with me and his cousins.”
Although Anzor Tsarnaev has said that his older son’s citizenship application was denied—and certainly would have been if he were under suspicion as a potential terrorist--the officials said it was still in process and had not been either approved or denied.
The hunt for the bombing suspects took a violent turn Thursday night when the two men are believed to have fatally shot an M.I.T. police officer, Sean A. Collier, 26, in his patrol car, the Middlesex County district attorney’s office said. After that, two armed men carjacked a man’s Mercedes S.U.V. nearby and drove off with him.
As a routine part of his application, Tamerlan was subject to a criminal background check by the F.B.I. Authorities there confirmed that he had been involved in a domestic violence incident during the time he was a green card holding resident, the officials said. A review of the incident delayed Tamerlan’s citizenship application, the officials said, but it was not deemed it serious enough to halt it.
At one point, the gunmen told the man “to get out of the car or they would kill him,” according to a law enforcement official. But then they apparently changed their plans, and forced the man to drive, the official said. At one point, the older brother took the wheel.
The return to normal from the total lockdown that paralyzed the city on Friday will be gradual. On Saturday morning Logan International Airport was still being operated at a heightened state of security.
“They revealed to him that they were the two who did the marathon bombings,” the official said, adding that the suspects also made some mention to the man of wanting to head to New York. At one point they drove to another vehicle, which the authorities believe was parked and unoccupied. There, the suspects got out and transferred materials, which the authorities believe included explosives and firearms, from the parked car to the sport utility vehicle.
Reporting
was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt from Washington, Ellen Barry from Moscow, Katherine Q. Seelye from Boston and Julia Preston from New York.
The victim was released, uninjured, at a gas station on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, law enforcement officials said.
After he called the police, they went off in search of his car, and a frenzied chase began.
The police and the suspects traded gunfire, and “explosive devices were reportedly thrown” from their car, law enforcement officials said. A transit police officer, Richard H. Donohue, was shot in the right leg and critically wounded.
Officer Donohue had nearly bled to death when he arrived at a hospital, said a person familiar with his treatment. The hospital’s trauma team gave him a transfusion and CPR, and got his blood pressure back up, but he was still on a ventilator, the person said.
Finally, the brothers faced off against the police on a Watertown street in what officials and witnesses described as a furious firefight.
A Watertown resident, Andrew Kitzenberg, 29, said he had looked out his third-floor window to see two young men of slight build engaged in “constant gunfire” with police officers. A police vehicle “drove towards the shooters,” he said, and was shot at until it was severely damaged. It rolled out of control, Mr. Kitzenberg said, and crashed into two cars in his driveway.
The gunmen, Mr. Kitzenberg said, had a large, unwieldy bomb that he said looked “like a pressure cooker.”
“They lit it, still in the middle of the gunfire, and threw it,” he said. “But it went 20 yards at most.” It exploded, he said, and one man ran toward the gathered police officers. He was tackled, but it was not clear if he was shot, Mr. Kitzenberg said.
The explosions “lit up the whole house,” another resident, Loretta Kehayias, 65, said. “I screamed. I’ve never seen anything like this, never, never, never.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Kitzenberg said, the other man got back into the sport utility vehicle he had been driving, turned it toward officers and “put the pedal to the metal.” The car “went right through the cops, broke right through and continued west.”
He left behind his brother, who had been gravely wounded and who was taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center here.
Dr. David Schoenfeld, who was catching up on paperwork at his home in Watertown after midnight on Friday, had heard the sirens, and then the gunfire and the explosions. So he called Beth Israel Deaconess, where he works in the emergency room, and told it to prepare for trauma patients for the second time this week.
He arrived about 1:10 a.m., he said. Fifteen minutes later, an ambulance carrying Tamerlan Tsarnaev pulled up. He was handcuffed, unconscious, and in cardiac arrest, Dr. Schoenfeld said.
As a throng of police officers looked on, Dr. Schoenfeld and a team of other trauma doctors and nurses began to perform CPR.
“There was talk before the patient arrived about whether or not it was a suspect,” Dr. Schoenfeld said. “But ultimately it doesn’t matter who it is, because we’re going to work as hard as we can for any patient who comes through our door and then sort it out after. Because you’re never going to know until the dust settles who it is.”
The trauma team put a breathing tube in the patient’s throat, Dr. Schoenfeld said, then cut open his chest to see if blood or other fluid was collecting around his heart. His handcuffs were removed at some point during the resuscitation attempt, Dr. Schoenfeld said, because “when the patient is in cardiac arrest and we’re doing all these procedures, we need to be able to move their arms around.”
The team was unable to resuscitate him, and pronounced him dead at 1:35 a.m. Only as the doctors prepared to turn the body over to the police did Dr. Schoenfeld look closely at the patient’s face and see that he resembled one of the suspects whose pictures had been released by the F.B.I. “We all obviously had some suspicion given the really large police presence,” he said, “but we didn’t have a clear identification from the police.”
Dr. Schoenfeld, whose emergency room treated a number of people injured in the bombings on Monday, said he had not had time to process what he had been through early Friday.
“I can’t say what I’ll be feeling as I reflect on this later on,” he said in an interview before Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured. “But right now I’m more concerned with everybody who’s still out there and still in harm’s way.”
He added, “I worry about everybody in the city, that everyone’s going to be O.K.”
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Boston, and William K. Rashbaum and Michael Cooper from New York. Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr. and John Eligon from Cambridge, Mass.; Jess Bidgood from Watertown, Mass.; Serge F. Kovaleski and Timothy Rohan from Boston; Ravi Somaiya from New York; Eric Schmitt, Michael S. Schmidt and Abby Goodnough from Washington; Andrew Siddons from Montgomery Village, Md.; Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul; Ellen Barry and Andrew Roth from Moscow; and Andrew E. Kramer from Asbest, Russia.
