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An intensive manhunt for the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, who has been identified as 19-year-old Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, continues, after one suspect died in police custody following a shootout. Police have surrounded a house in Watertown, a Boston suburb, and established a perimeter; they have also issued the details of a car they are looking for:
Earlier this morning, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick urged residents of Boston and surrounding towns to seek shelter. NBC has rounded up Twitter photos of the manhunt.
The suspect at large, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the second suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are brothers. The Boston Globe reports that the police found an explosive trigger on the dead suspect’s body at the morgue. Here is a photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, released by the FBI:
The Associated Press reports that the suspects came from an area near Chechnya; the Moscow Times reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a resident of Dagestan, a ethnically diverse republic that borders Chechnya. NBC News reports that the brothers came to the US in 2002 or 2003. In 2007, Tamerlan Tsarnaev became a legal permanent resident.
The AP spoke by telephone with Anzor Tsarnaev, the father of the two suspects, who lives in Russia. ”My son is a true angel,” he told the AP. “Dzhokhar is a second-year medical student in the U.S. He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here.”
While Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a scholarship recipient who attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, Tamerlan Tsarnaev boxed in the Lowell Golden Gloves boxer and represented Team New England in the National Golden Gloves Tournament in 2009 and 2010. ”I like the USA … America has a lot of jobs,” he told the Lowell Sun at the time.
Thursday evening’s bloody, chaotic events began with the robbery of a 7-11 (Update: the police have since said that the Tsarnaevs were not the ones who robbed the store) , which led to the fatal shooting of an MIT campus policeman, followed by an carjacking that culminated in a shoot-out in the Boston suburb of Watertown.
The New York Times interviewed witnesses in Watertown who saw two young men “shooting at dozens of police officers from behind a black Mercedes SUV.” After the men threw a bomb at the police, one of them ran at the cops and was subdued. He later died in the hospital. The other man “got back into the SUV, turned it toward officers … broke right through and continued west.”
Police are conducting a house-to-house search for the suspect. Mass transit has been suspended throughout Boston, and colleges and universities have closed for the day. Residents are being urged to stay indoors.
“We believe this to be a terrorist. We believe this to be a man who has come here to kill people. We need to get him in custody,” said Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis.
The FBI has released a new photo of the two suspects together on the day of the bombing:
