Ninety minutes after the marathon bombings, Tsarnaev texted his friend Azamat Tazhayakov. “Don’t go thinking it’s me,” he wrote.54 The next day, the two young men were captured on surveillance cameras entering and leaving the gym at UMass-Dartmouth. Dzhokhar appeared nonchalant and smiling on the video.55
On Wednesday, April 17, 2013, just forty-eight hours after the bombings, Kadyrbayev met briefly with his friend Dzhokhar during his last visit to campus. While chatting in the student lounge inside Pine Dale Hall, the Kazakh exchange student noticed that Tsarnaev had cut his curly black hair a bit shorter. They continued to make small talk while Kadyrbayev smoked a cigarette. Dzhokhar then returned to his dorm room alone. A day later, when the FBI released its photographic evidence connecting Suspect One and Suspect Two to the bombings, Kadyrbayev turned on the news and thought his buddy Dzhokhar looked an awful lot like the killer in the white hat. He texted Tsarnaev about it and got a reply moments later.
“lol,” Tsarnaev answered. “You better not text me. Come to my room and take whatever you want.”56
The Kazakh thought Dzhokhar was joking. Then he wasn’t so sure. Kadyrbayev huddled with their mutual friends Azamat Tazhayakov and Rob Phillipos, and all three went to room 7341 at Pine Dale Hall and were allowed in by Dzhokhar’s roommate, Andrew Dwinells. Tsarnaev and Dwinells were not friends — they had been randomly chosen to room together in Pine Dale Hall. They ran in different social circles and did not share much with each other. In the days after the bombings, Dwinell did notice that Dzhokhar slept longer than usual. The roommate did not know the names of Tsarnaev’s friends who asked to enter the room.57 Once inside, the trio noticed a backpack containing fireworks. There were seven red tubes; each one was six to eight inches long. The explosives had been opened and emptied of gunpowder. The moment he saw the empty fireworks, Kadyrbayev knew that his friend was one of the Boston Marathon bombers. He also spotted a tube of Vaseline that he believed Dzhokhar had used to make the bombs. Instead of calling 911, however, the Kazakh grabbed the backpack — the potentially damning evidence — and left the room. He took the laptop also so that Dhzokhar’s roommate wouldn’t think he was stealing or acting suspiciously by taking just the backpack. The three men then drove to the apartment on Carriage Drive in New Bedford, where they monitored TV reports throughout the night.
“Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov started to freak out because it became clear from a CNN report that [Dzhokhar] was one of the Boston Marathon bombers,” Rob Phillipos later told FBI agents.58
The Kazakhs began speaking rapid-fire in Russian, which Phillipos couldn’t understand.
“Should I get rid of the stuff?” Kadybayev later asked Phillipos.
“Do what you have to do.”
The trio then made a pact to destroy the evidence linking their friend to one of the bloodiest crimes in American history. At 10 p.m., Kadyrbayev stuffed the backpack and the fireworks into a large trash bag. He also gathered trash from the apartment and dumped it on top of the evidence before tossing the bag in a dumpster outside.
On Friday, April 19, law enforcement agencies swarmed the apartment complex on Carriage Drive and arrested all three men. Exactly one week later, authorities recovered Dzhokhar’s backpack from a New Bedford landfill. The backpack was partially enclosed in a black garbage bag with red drawstring handles. Inside the backpack, agents found the fireworks, the jar of Vaseline, and a UMass-Dartmouth homework assignment sheet from a class Dzhokhar was enrolled in.
Khairullozhon Matanov was also busy trying to get rid of evidence. He had been following the story throughout the night on his laptop computer and knew his friends had now been identified as the suspected marathon bombers. Matanov called Dzhokhar on Friday morning but got no answer. He then begged a friend to take some cell phones he had in case the FBI raided his Quincy apartment.59 The friend refused. He then asked the friend to help him scrub his computer and delete large amounts of data from his Google Chrome Internet cache. Once again, the friend said no.
“You’re not a good brother,” Matanov told him.60
Matanov performed the task himself. Another friend urged Matanov to go to the police before the police came for him. Matanov consented, so they drove to the Braintree Police Department, where Matanov was questioned by detectives. Matanov would bury himself during the interrogation. He told police that he had not seen the surveillance photos of the Tsarnaev brothers and only knew them from the mosque and through playing soccer. Both statements were lies. Matanov would later face a series of charges, including making false statements and destroying documents. Twenty-one-year-old Stephen Silva, another Tsarnaev friend, was later indicted on charges of heroin trafficking and possession of a Ruger model P95 9mm pistol — the same model Tamerlan had used to execute Sean Collier — that prosecutors say Silva had on him in February 2013, just two months before the bombings. The weapon’s serial number had been obliterated.61
Law enforcement was tightening the noose around Dhzokhar’s friends and associates — but there was still no sign of the young bombing suspect himself.
Back in Watertown, the epicenter of the manhunt, grid searches of the neighborhoods were in full swing. At 89 Nichols Street, a woman summoned a reporter and asked for a police officer. A state trooper talked to the woman, who believed that she had seen blood outside and that someone might have gone into the basement of her brick apartment building. Officers with K-9s went to the building and talked to the woman. Within minutes, a heavily armed SWAT team clad in black body armor and riding in an armored truck rolled up to the building. The National Guard pushed back media and spectators, shouting, “Get back!” Guns were drawn.
The officers approached the house and went inside. The building was cleared, but trickles of blood were found in the back yard. The area was cordoned off with yellow police tape. A few hours later, another commotion erupted at the top of Willow Park, a small side street in the neighborhood. There was a report of someone finding a rocket or a rocket launcher in the basement. There was another report of someone seeing a man in a hoodie on the street. The National Guard again pushed everyone back and sealed off the area. Machine guns were drawn, and cops ran down Quimby Street to Willow Park, where they took cover behind cruisers and armored vehicles. An officer on a loudspeaker shouted, “Come out!”
The house was cleared. Similar scenes continued throughout the early afternoon as cops responded to various reports and investigated suspicious activity. Media reports trickled out, quoting cops overheard on police scanner traffic claiming that Dzhokhar had posted a message online: “I will kill all of you. You killed my brother.”
Police spoke to reporters at the scene, pleading with them to stop tweeting their exact locations. They feared Dzhokhar and anyone he might be conspiring with could be monitoring media feeds to see where the cops were and, more importantly, where they were not.
Fear, uncertainty, and panic gripped the sleepy suburban neighborhood. Cops were on edge. One of their brothers had already been killed, and another was fighting for his life. Time was of the essence to catch this madman. Wounded or not, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was still a dangerous jihadist bent on killing as many innocent people as he could.
By the afternoon, talk shifted to how long the lockdown should stay in place. There were as many as a thousand cops now on patrol. Watertown was a fortress. Armored vehicles from all over New England rumbled through the streets as residents remained inside their homes, many without enough food to get through the day. One cop involved in the manhunt, Brookline Police Officer John Bradley, learned this firsthand when a young couple with an infant son shared their problem. Kevin and McKenzie Wells told Bradley they hadn’t enough milk to feed their seventeen-month-old son, Holden. Bradley then marched to the corner store and retrieved two gallons of milk and delivered them to the couple. The thankful parents offered to pay for the milk, but Bradley said no way. Kevin Wells snapped a photo of the courteous cop with his cell phone and posted it onto his Facebook page. The Boston Police Depa
rtment then tweeted the image out during the lockdown, and it would be shared more than sixty thousand times over the next few days.
Tracy Munro, the mother who had provided comfort and support to Jane Richard in the moments after the bombings, was sitting inside her apartment in Cambridge. She was scared and she was alone. Her daughter, Stella, was visiting with her dad a few miles away, and there was no way to get to her. Munro had been living a nightmare since the marathon, and now she was wondering if she’d ever wake up. After tending to Jane Richard outside Forum, Munro had made her way to the Cask ’n Flagon restaurant next to Fenway Park, where she was reunited with her cousins and with her Uncle Robby, a runner who had been stopped at Kenmore Square before reaching the finish line. The next day, she watched the news reports and learned the full names of Jane and Martin Richard.
“I couldn’t believe the two children I had encountered were related,” she recalls. Tracy Munro broke down and wept. She had been having a difficult time since the tragedy, and now it continued to evolve around her: MIT Police Officer Sean Collier was murdered less than a mile from her Cambridge apartment. She awoke on Friday morning to the sound of police cars screaming by her bedroom window. Munro phoned her boyfriend, Brian.
“I hear police sirens,” she told him. “I’m afraid to look outside.”
“Don’t look,” the boyfriend advised. “Turn on some music and tune out awhile.”
Munro heeded the advice and listened to Mazzy Star on her iPod. The singer’s soft voice comforted her as it had when she delivered Stella a decade before. Munro was heartbroken to be separated from her daughter. She called Stella at her dad’s place and was relieved to find that she was alright. Stella was enjoying time with her father, but she was feeling overwhelmed by the situation.
“You understand that police are here to take care of us, right?” Munro asked.
“Yes,” Stella replied. “But can we still go to the park?”
“No, baby,” the mom replied. “The point of this is to stay inside.”
People were confused and scared — and little progress was being made. By 5:30 p.m., the entire twenty-block perimeter in Watertown had been thoroughly searched. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had vanished.
Governor Patrick conferred with State Police Colonel Tim Alben, Commissioner Davis, Police Chief Ed Deveau, Rick DesLauriers of the FBI, Mayor Menino, and others. They debated whether it was time to lift the lockdown and try to resume some sense of normalcy — hoping that the young bomb suspect would be caught riding in a cab, fleeing on a train, or hiding in the woods; hoping that he would be found somewhere before he harmed anyone else. Patrick spoke to President Obama, and they decided to lift the lockdown.
The governor and Alben, both weary from a sleepless, terrifying night, stepped to the swarm of microphones to update all those who had huddled inside their homes since dawn.
“You’re all tired, we certainly are as well. But we remain committed to this,” Colonel Alban said. “We do not have an apprehension of our suspect this afternoon, but we will have one. We’re committed to that.”
Alben went on to describe the complexity and fluidity of the volatile day. He said that a forensic team had finally removed all exploded and unexploded bombs from Laurel Street and that a decision had been made to draw back tactical teams from the area. The shelter-in-place order was officially lifted, but the state police would provide the Watertown community with additional patrols over the next three days. The MBTA was being reopened immediately, but life was far from getting back to normal. Alben and Governor Patrick stressed the need for Watertown residents and all Bostonians to remain vigilant and on alert for any suspicious activity.
“Remember, there’s still a very, very dangerous individual at large,” Patrick said.
The plan was to avoid a situation where large groups would gather. Therefore, scheduled home games for both the Red Sox and Bruins were cancelled for the night. The tent had been erected at City Hall Plaza for the Big Apple Circus, but the evening performance would be postponed as well. Those venues would simply offer too large and too soft a target. Law enforcement knew that all animals, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were most dangerous when cornered and wounded.
Like all Watertown residents, Dave Henneberry and his wife, Beth, had been monitoring the chaos unfolding on TV as they sat in their modest two-story home at 67 Franklin Street. Henneberry was going a bit stir crazy. He looked out the window at one point and saw that the white plastic shrink-wrap on his Seabird powerboat, the Slip Away II, had been lifted up and that some padding he’d put inside to protect the twenty-four-foot vessel was on the ground. The newly retired phone company installer needed to protect his boat — and he also wanted a cigarette. So when Governor Patrick gave the OK to resume normal activity, Henneberry went outside, had a smoke, and checked on the Slip Away II.
Neighbor Dan Cantor, who had lived in the neighborhood for twenty years, spoke with Hennebery outside just after the lockout was lifted. The two men had been among the residents cooped up all day, and they chitchatted in the street. Henneberry said he was upset because the shrink-wrap was partly off his boat. He thought police had taken the cover off to look inside and hadn’t put it back properly. He was going to go see what the hell was going on.
Henneberry climbed up a stepladder next to the boat and lifted the shrink-wrap to have a look inside. What he saw was blood splattered on the deck and a body curled up near the steering console. America’s most wanted man was hiding out inside Henneberry’s pleasure craft.
Oh my God, he’s in there, Henneberry said to himself. He had listened to the gun battle on Laurel Street the night before and watched the explosive images later on television. He could not imagine such violence in his own backyard.
He hopped off the ladder and scampered into the house, yelling to his wife: “He’s in the boat! He’s in our boat!”
Beth dialed 911 and handed the phone to her husband.
“There’s somebody in my boat! There’s blood in the boat!” he shouted into the phone.
“Did you say there’s a body in your boat?” the dispatcher replied.
“There’s someone in my boat and a lot of blood.”
The police dispatcher asked Henneberry if the man was still in the boat. He brought the phone outside and looked closer.
“He’s still in the boat.”
“Stay in the house,” the dispatcher ordered.
Seconds later, Commissioner Davis’s cell phone rang. The ringer was set to the sound of a revving motorcycle, and the noise jolted him. “I was ragtime,” Davis recalls. “I’d been up for thirty-six hours straight, so it took me a couple of seconds to compute what was happening.” When he first learned about the boat, Davis thought it was on the water somewhere, not in somebody’s backyard. He, Colonel Alban and FBI Special Agent in Charge DesLauriers spoke briefly and then sent an army of officers to Henneberry’s home. Detective Danny Keeler, who was back at District 4 in Boston, grabbed several of his officers and raced to the scene. If this was indeed Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Keeler wanted the opportunity to look the alleged killer straight in the eye — if he was to be taken alive.
Moments later, three of the officers closest to the scene reached Henneberry’s front door and knocked.
“Come on. I’ll show you the boat. I think he’s dead,” Henneberry told the officers.
“No, no, no. Go in your house, and we’ll figure this out,” one told him.
After lifting the shelter-in-place order, Governor Patrick and his state police driver headed to the governor’s home in Milton for a little dinner and some rest. He and his wife, Diane, had decided on a few orders of food from their favorite Thai restaurant in Quincy.
“Call in the order, and I’ll pick it up on the way home,” he told her.
The governor soon arrived at the restaurant, where he found a big brown bag stuffed with cartons of spicy noodles waiting for him. At that moment, he received a call from State Police Colonel Tim Alben.
“We t
hink we have the suspect.”
The governor’s eyes grew wide. “We’re heading back to Watertown,” he told his driver. “They think they got him.”
There was just one problem — the bag of Thai food. Governor Patrick had a job to do, but he was also a husband and father who had to feed his wife and daughter. He called Diane.
“Honey, you have to meet me just off exit 10 at St. Agatha Parish,” he told her. The governor’s driver took him to Squantum Street in Milton and then to the church on Adams Street, where Patrick jumped out of the vehicle, handed his wife the Thai food, gave her a quick kiss, and sped back to the highway.
Relieved that the lockdown was over, Tracy Munro and her boyfriend went down the street to Lord Hobo, a pub in Inman Square for dinner and a few beers. Munro had read the online chatter from people who were pissed off at the government for suspending their civil liberties for the day.
“What the hell are people upset about?” Munro asked her boyfriend. “I’m extremely proud of the police. I was willing to do whatever they asked me to do.”
Tracy Munro had seen the bloodshed carried out by the bombers at close range. She was still very shaky over what she had witnessed, and the lockdown had only added to her stress. When she went to relax at the restaurant, she left Stella with her dad, as there was no need to disrupt the child’s night. But her girl was safe, and that was what mattered most.
Munro was also trying to cope with her newfound notoriety as her story had been reported in the press, and friends were now flooding her Facebook page with messages of support. They were calling her a hero.
Hero? Munro thought. I can barely keep it together. All I know is that I’m alive and I’m scared.
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