[NEWS] Explosions near Boston Marathon Finish Line (UPDATE: MIT/Watertown shootout w/ suspects)

The thing is that if the police shot him there, it likely would have been with a rifle, and there's no way he's surviving that. It has to have been with a handgun.

I'm sure you've seen the movies where a guy puts a gun in his mouth. He probably did that, but just pointed the muzzle towards his neck instead of his actual brain. A human could probably survive that long enough for the paramedics right there to look over him and ensure he survives.

 

I'd feel like he was more of a pawn if he was 8 but at 19 and in college...maybe you don't make the best decisions in college...I think most of us can attest to that...but you can't blame anyone but yourself at that age for planting bombs in a crowd. Pretty black and white. So while it might have been his brother's idea and design, he willingly helped carry it out. He knew what he was doing and he definitely knew it could mame and most like kill.

 

He should have done the world a favor and turned his brother in.

DD

 

CNN has become a caricature of a news network. It's really kind of pathetic at this point. They were consistently 15 minutes behind Twitter on every breaking event, and somehow always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sad.

 

good questions.

--
Dzhokhar and Tamerlan's motive—or motives—is still unclear. But that's not the only unknown. Many of the Tsarnaevs' actions last week seem baffling in retrospect. Here are some of the most confounding things they did:


-Wear a backwards hat and no sunglasses. Unlike his older brother, Dzhokhar made little effort to prevent cameras from capturing his face, making him easier to identify when the FBI released security camera photos on Thursday. Indeed, classmates at University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth did see him in the photos, but dismissed the similarity because it seemed so far-fetched.

-Not react to the explosions. For three days, investigators pored over all available photos and surveillance videos of the blast area searching for abnormal reactions. The complaint filed in federal court on Monday specifically cites Dzhokhar's reaction to the first explosion as a giveaway; per the complaint, he glanced in the direction of the first blast only briefly.

-Leave the car in the shop. The Wall Street Journal reported that Dzhokhar stopped by an auto-body shop in Watertown on Tuesday to pick up the Mercedes he'd brought in for repairs.

-Stay in Boston. The second bomb exploded at 2:49 p.m. last Monday. Dzhokhar and Tamerlan carjacked a Mercedes at 10:39 p.m.* on Thursday. What did they do in the interim three days? Go to the gym, check in on their busted car, and, in Dzhokhar's case, go to a party on the UMass–Dartmouth campus. During the three-day window in which their involvement was unknown, they made no attempt to flee.

-Kill an MIT police officer. Why did the brothers shoot 26-year-old Sean Collier? The murder at 10:30 p.m. on Thursday set in motion the events that would ultimately lead to their capture.

-Run out of cash. When Dzhokhar carjacked a Mercedes on Thursday night, he and his brother had one thing in mind: Get cash, and fast. They emptied $800 from an ATM using their victim's PIN number, before they reached the account limit. Holding up a stranger for money suggests a woeful lack of planning on their part (they hadn't budgeted) that helped alert them to the authorities.

-Not understand how ATMs work. After reaching the daily withdrawal limit at one ATM, the Tsarnaevs, apparently not realizing that the machines are part of an interconnected system, decided to try their luck at two different machines. The quest to find a working ATM was how they ended up, coincidentally, at a 7/11 in Cambridge around the same time it was the scene of an armed robbery, and were spotted on the store security camera.

-Confess to the hostage. According to the complaint, when Dzhokhar got into the Mercedes, he immediately told the driver, "Did you hear about the Boston explosion? I did that." That meant their cover would be immediately blown if the driver escaped. Which brings us to…

-Stop for snacks. The Los Angeles Times reported that the hostage escaped after the brothers stopped at a gas station on Memorial Drive to buy snacks.

-Keep the hostage's phone. The Tsarnaevs continued on without their hostage—but they did have his phone, which allowed police to track their location via GPS.

-Bring a BB gun. The weapons used by the two suspects, according to police: a pressure-cooker bomb, seven IEDs, an M4 carbine, two handguns, and a BB gun. Why a BB gun?

http://m.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/eleven-most-mystifying-things-tsarnaev-brothers-did

 

explosive powder for the pressure cookers?

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings, bought two large pyrotechnic devices in February from a New Hampshire branch of a national fireworks chain, according to executives at the chain's parent company.

William Weimer, a vice president of Phantom Fireworks, said the elder Mr. Tsarnaev on Feb. 6 purchased two "Lock and Load" reloadable mortar kits at the company's Seabrook, N.H. store, just over the border from Massachusetts. Each kit contains a tube and 24 shells, he said. Mr. Tsarnaev paid cash for the kits, which cost $199.99 apiece.​

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324235304578440843633991044.html

 

thanks, basso. great questions.

It is becoming more clear that they acted alone. They were pretty dumb in some instances like the ATM and confessing to the victim. And the kid failed to kill himself but he did manage to kill his brother (if the reports are true).

 

FBI lol-ed at KGB for calling them terrorists back then. Those two were bad at everything ... (can they really shoot? because the younger one could not even kill himself from that close)

They must have flunked all the classes that they had in the terrorist training school.

 

I agree. Watched documentaries about death penalty in many countries compare to life sentence, before execution all they want is not to die.

 

i have some questions for DHS and DOJ too- FBI (DOJ) says they missed Tamerlan's trip to russia due to his name being misspelled on his ticket, but Customs (DHS) says they got a "ping" on the outbound trip, but nothing when he came back.

Napolitano says "the system worked."

i get the sense both agencies dropped the ball, and even after all the post 9/11 efforts to break down bureaucratic barriers, significant info still does not get shared between various intel and LE agencies.

 

That said, there is still no reasonable basis to assume that the Russia trip was necessarily connected to the bombing. Not saying that it wasn't, but if you want to be properly objective about it (and an investigator has to be), all we really have here is a family trip that happened to include some visa troubles which are extremely commonplace, especially with a country like Russia that would understandably go the extra mile to scrutinize a Chechen visitor. For me it is telling that the Russians themselves found nothing further on their end that warranted a visa denial. Any extra zealousness on the part of the FBI would really be venturing into police state territory.

That said, I'm sure there are still deficiencies in information-sharing that need to be improved. We know the FSB wasn't completely open about whatever suspicions they claimed to have about Tamerlan back then.

 

i may be wrong about this, but wasn't Tamerlan still a Russian citizen? if so, why would he need a visa to visit Russia?

 

Try 1-2 hours at least.

 

So, he probably tried shooting himself with the BB gun.

I feel like something happened that caused them to go into action. I do think they lacked planning out of ignorance, but it also seems like they may have been rushed. IIRC, the shop owner said the older brother showed up to pick up the car before it was ready and wanted it now.

 

Crazy idea.

Maybe they thought they wouldn't be caught?

Do you think there is a reason they chose to leave on Thursday night just a few short hours after their photos were released worldwide?

 

Oh, wait...my mistake, when i saw the interview with the shop owner, a few days ago, I understood the car was picked up before the bombings. Now, i see it was picked up after. My post was referring to their actions prior to the bombings.

In this case, i guess they didn't think they'd be ID'ed, or at least not so quickly. There were reports of them being seen out and about the day after, like normal. I don't know if that was ever confirmed. I guess they understimated the amount of photographs and video that would be taken, including by security cams. If it wasn't for the surveillance cam at the store, they may still be on the loose now and we'd be dealing with more bombings.

 

the terrorists have won.

In what can only be described as a posthumous victory for raging ******* Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Williams-Sonoma, the (absolutely amazing) kitchen-stuff company, has pulled pressure cookers--which the Tsarnaevs built into bombs--from shelves in Massachusetts.​

http://reason.com/blog/2013/04/23/williams-sonoma-concedes-victory-to-terr

 

it is only williams sonoma. It looks like other stores are still carrying it.

 

I saw a foreign national buy one at Macy's this weekend.

He spoke Spanish though