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Tsarnaev apartment was 'like a construction site' FBI agents testify
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The Boston Marathon bombing jury on Wednesday saw evidence, including a fuse and a piece from a pressure-cooker lid, seized at the apartment where accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother lived.
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An FBI special agent described sorting through a debris-filled room that was “like a construction site” during a search of the Tsarnaevs’ cramped three-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, four days after the deadly 2013 bombing.
“It almost looked like a construction site. There were tools in there, lots of debris,” said Christopher Derks, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who led the search of the apartment during a massive manhunt for Tsarnaev.
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The jury also saw a jar filled with nails, a pellet gun and shooting targets and a black flag with Arabic writing that hung on the apartment’s wall, all seized by agents.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 21, is accused of killing three people and injuring 264 with a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs packed with nails and BB pellets at the race’s crowded finish line on April 15 2013. He is also charged with fatally shooting a police officer three days later as he and his 26-year-old brother Tamerlan tried to flee. Tamerlan died hours after the shooting, following a gunfight with police in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers opened the trial early this month by bluntly admitting the defendant committed all the crimes of which he is accused, but contending Tamerlan was the driving force behind the attack, with Dzhokhar going along out of a sense of subservience.
Witnesses this week have detailed jihadist writings found on Tsarnaev’s computers and evidence related to a trip to a New Hampshire shooting range a month before the attack as signs that he was a motivated and willing participant.
Kimberly Franks, a supervisory agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, testified that investigators who searched Tsarnaev’s dorm room at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth found a large fireworks device and more BB pellets.
Investigators recovered a BB gun as well as a rusty 9 mm pistol on the street in Watertown where the Tsarnaevs fought a heated battle with police three days after the attack.
The bombing killed restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, graduate student Lingzi Lu, 23, and eight-year-old Martin Richard. Tsarnaev is also charged with the fatal shooting of Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier three days after the bombing.
