UPDATED 8:45 P.M.
After a day of empty streets in Boston, angry relatives, dismayed friends, and bulletins that seemed to lead nowhere in the hunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, there was a gun fight in Watertown, with what sounded like hundreds of shots fired. It began around 7 P.M., almost as soon as the lockdown in the city was lifted, as if to mock it. The first reports were scattered: a boat, blood, maybe a body, maybe a stopping point in the drama that began when two bombs went off at the marathon on Monday, killing three people. And then, at around 8:30 P.M. on Friday, it was over: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was in custody, alive. NBC News reported that once the police had him and had delivered him to medics, the law-enforcement officers and bystanders on the scene applauded. They didn’t want to kill this teen-ager.
Thursday night had been punctuated by small explosives tossed from a getaway car and marked by the death of a police officer in what it slowly emerged was the pursuit of the marathon bombers. By dawn, a suspect was dead, and another was a fugitive. Just before 7 A.M., NBC News and the A.P. identified him as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, nineteen years old. The dead man was said to be his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was twenty-six. The family is Chechen, which, in terms of possible motives and passions, can mean many different things (or nothing definitive). On Friday, Dzokhar was pursued through a city on lockdown. The M.B.T.A., Boston's public transit system, had been shut down; people were told to “shelter in place.”
At a press conference just before sunrise, Ed Davis, the Boston police commissioner, came out to say that “what we are looking for now is a suspect consistent with the description of Suspect No. 2”—“the white-capped individual” whose picture had been released by the F.B.I. in connection with the bombings. (Davis also tweeted, “White hat suspect at large.”) He showed a security-video image from a 7-Eleven which, he said, the brothers had tried to rob—one of the suggestions of the later part of the day was that this wasn’the case; somehow, they had just been there around the time of a robbery—and said that “several explosive devices were discharged from the car at the police officers.” He said he believed the man was a terrorist; he told people to be careful.
For hours, there was no confirmation that this was about the Boston Marathon bombings, as opposed to a campus shooting or a carjacking (both of which were part of the suspects’ flight), or something else. There were only guesses, extrapolations from things like sightings of a clutch of F.B.I. agents in Watertown, where there were scores of local officers and a helicopter circling. The caveats were based on knowing that at this moment, with all the fear in the city, something could easily look like what it wasn’t. The one point of agreement was that an M.I.T. police officer was already dead. The university released a statement saying that it was “heartbroken.” A Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officer had been shot, too, and was in the hospital.
Here is how the narrative of Thursday night began: just after 5 P.M., the F.B.I. released photographs of Suspect One and Suspect Two, men who looked relatively young. Suspect One had on a black baseball cap, and Suspect Two a white one, and the face of Suspect Two, in particular, was clear enough to recognize. He was the one the F.B.I. said had dropped a bag near the marathon finish line, just before one of the blasts. Then, six hours later, M.I.T. issued an alert saying that there was gunfire on campus, at 10:48, near its Building 32: “The area is cordoned off.” In rapid succession, there were reports of injuries and advisories that everyone should stay indoors, an injunction that was in place until just before 2 A.M.
By then, half the world was listening to the Boston police scanner, and many rushed to Watertown, reporting on what they saw by way of Twitter. Every word that could be used to describe a shot or a bang or a minor explosion came into play, mostly framed by confusion. The inventory of items people thought they saw or heard included grenades, pressure cookers, a bomb-squad robot, the screeching tires of getaway cars. There were tweets about a suspect told to take off his clothes—the guess was that it was to see if there were explosives strapped to his body. Just after 3 A.M., CNN broadcast video of a man, stripped and in handcuffs, being led to a police car; the network blurred out some of his nakedness, but his face was visible. (Since he is neither dead nor a fugitive, it now seems that he is not one of the brothers.) On television, there was footage of the body of a man in a tracksuit on the ground. As the gunfire stopped, the F.B.I. released more photos, with better images of the suspects on the day of the marathon.
“One marathon suspect has been captured, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation,” the Boston Globe reported on its Web site around then. “Another remains on the loose in Watertown after a firefight with police.” The police had set up a twenty-block perimeter in Watertown. By four in the morning, the Middlesex County District Attorney released a statement saying that the suspect who was caught had also been shot; he had been taken to a hospital, and he was now “deceased.” They were still chasing the second man.
Law-enforcement officials told people in Watertown and nearby suburbs to stay inside and businesses not to open. Soon after that, the entire city of Boston was in lockdown, complete with no-fly zone, and the manhunt was on. That was the beginning of the day that ended, after more gunfire and many questions, with an arrest in Watertown.
Read more of our coverage of the Boston Marathon explosions.
Top photograph: Matt Rourke/AP
