Charlez Blog

Residents who fled the area where Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev is believed to be in hiding were comforted.

WATERTOWN — One of the men believed to be responsible for placing the bombs that struck the Boston Marathon on Monday, killing 3 and injuring more than 170, has been taken into custody after a standoff lasting nearly two hours in Watertown.
Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge was apprehended shortly before 8:45 p.m.
“They got him. He’s in custody,” a state trooper told the media gathered in the neighborhood. A crowd of onlookers broke into applause.
Tsarnaev had been hiding in a boat in the backyard of a home in Watertown, just outside the city. He was rushed to a local hospital. Police had approached him cautiously, worried that he might be wearing a suicide bomb vest.
A state official said that the suspect was “alive, conscious, captured.”
The apprehension of the suspect was the latest stunning development in a day that had shocked the city, even as it was reeling from Monday’s attack.
The other suspect, Tsarnaev’s brother, was killed early this morning in a gun battle with police. An MIT police officer was also killed Thursday night and an MBTA Transit Police officer was seriously injured.

In yet another twist in a fast-breaking story, New Bedford police said this evening that three people had been taken into custody in their city as part of the bombing investigation.
New Bedford Police Lieutenant Robert Richard said his department assisted federal investigators in executing a search warrant at a home on Carriage Drive in New Bedford, about 10 minutes from the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where Tsarnaev was a student.
Richard said the FBI took two men and a woman into custody. “They appeared to be either fellow college students or fellow residents,” he said. Richard said Tsarnaev may have been affiliated with the home on Carriage Drive in some way – possibly having lived or visited the house.
Tsarnaev was located less than an hour after authorities announced that he had eluded a 19-hour search in Watertown by legions of heavily armed police. Tsarnaev had abandoned the car he was in and fled on foot.
Before Tsarnaev was captured, residents in the Franklin Street area described pandemonium outside their doors.
Lisa Bontempi said in a telephone interview, “There’s a lot of shooting. ... I’m really scared. I’ve got to go.”
“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 neighborhood 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.”
Daniel Cantor, a resident of 84 Franklin Street, said he heard “a number of gunshots” in rapid succession just after 7:10 p.m.
He estimated it to be more than 30 gunshots but less than 50 to the west of his home, which is at 84 Franklin St., toward Washburn Street. “It was the kind that I did not want to be near,” Cantor said.
Cantor said he, his wife, and two kids were hiding under a bed when a reporter called just after 7:15 p.m.
Heavily armed police had been searching a 20-block area of Watertown since about 11 p.m. Thursday night