Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Caught? Marathon Bombing Suspect Pinned Down in Boat

Impact

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a 19 year-old suspect in Monday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, is pinned down in the backyard of a house in Watertown, Mass. Tsarnaev is supposedly in a boat in that backyard.

Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan were first identified as suspects on Thursday by the FBI, though authorities did not know their names. On late Thursday night, an MIT campus police officer, Sean Collier, was shot and killed by one or both of the brothers, who subsequently became involved in a shootout in the suburb of Watertown.

During the police engagement on Friday night, the Boston Globe spoke to neighborhood resident Lisa Bontempi, who told the newspaper,

“There’s a lot of shooting. ... I’m really scared. I’ve got to go.”

The Globe also talked to another Franklin Street resident:

“We’re seeing every officer rushing to the corner. We’ve heard gunshots. We’ve got cops in bulletproof vests and an ambulance is there, with someone carrying out a stretcher,’’ said Louise Harrison Lepera, another Franklin street resident.

“There’s a lot of cops outside,” said another resident, who declined to give her name. “Oh, my God, they’re just crouched down by the cars. But I heard a couple of pops, I’m not sure what they were exactly.”

Based on traffic on the local police scanner, officers were preparing to converge on the boat, apparently preparing to use flash grenades to stun Tsarnaev and take him alive.