Second Boston Bombing Suspect Captured

After a full day of a seemingly fruitless search, and a late afternoon press conference that seemed to essentially concede that the Boston Police and other law enforcement agencies had let Dzhokhor Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect of the two men apparently responsible for the bomb attacks at the Boston Marthon, skip through their fingers, things began to develop very quickly:

WATERTOWN — The man that police believe is responsible for placing the bombs that struck the Boston Marathon on Monday, killing 3 and injuring more than 170, is in custody after a standoff lasting nearly two hours in Watertown.

Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, was taken into custody 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 pinned down in a boat in the backyard of a home in Watertown, just outside the city. He was rushed to a local hospital.

The reaction from Watertown right now depicts a crowd of citizens, no doubt glad to be out of their homes after twelve hours, applauding police and emergency vehicles as they drive away. No doubt, one of those was the ambulance that Tasrnaev was riding in.

So, it’s over. Or, at least the siege part of it is over. The details of all of this, as well as what ever the international implications of all of this might be, will be matters for aother day.

FILED UNDER: Crime, Law and the Courts
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. aFloridian says:

    Glad to hear it and glad they caught him alive. Hope he lives, for a while yet. Hopefully it will help us learn more about this act of terrorism and its motivations.

  2. Ben says:

    I am so relieved they took him alive. Just getting ahold of another corpse would have been terrible.

  3. Anderson says:

    Bill, what I find disquieting is that YOU are in this country.

    … I would like to think the cops announced they’d lost track just in case the fugitive was monitoring the news; the best way to flush him out might have been to pretend they thought he’d escaped. Tho now it seems he’s been in that boat since last night.

    Mainly glad no more dead. I hope we get some good intel out of him, and that he’s put on trial in US district court.

  4. C. Clavin says:

    So impressed by the multi-jurisdictional law enforcement effort.
    Not a mis-step.
    As a Native New Englander and a student of the Revolutionary War…Boston has always been my favorite American city.
    Never more than today.

  5. JKB says:

    There is no evidence they did this due to the Chechen heritage. More likely their Muslim religion led to them to being drawn into radical islam.

    But Art Carden has a good post up Bayes theorem that disposes of presumptions knowing someone is Muslim provides any meaningful chance of the individual being a terrorist.

    Of course, some here seem to willfully make the error with gun owners and school shooters

    A lot of us also understand that even if all school shooters are gun owners, it’s a mistake to be suspicious of all gun owners because they might be school shooters. Being suspicious of Muslims generally because a lot of terrorists are Muslims is the exact same mistake.

  6. @JKB:

    Basically, you have no idea what motivated these two men so you’re just making stuff up.

  7. C. Clavin says:

    @ bill

    “…enjoy our freedoms…”

    See…I have always thought ALL MEN were endowed with inalienable rights.
    Not just you and your friends.
    Why do you hate America so???

  8. JKB says:

    @Doug Mataconis:

    Know? No. But it has been reported the older brother followed a radical Iman and had Islamic Jihad videos on his Youtube. So the odds are that radical Islamic beliefs not Chechen separatist beliefs influenced them between those two. There is always the possibility they were just murders without political/ideological motives looking to get their names on TV.

    But there are those seeking to push the Chechen angle, often with the hopes of instilling the specter of Chechen terrorists who have been particularly brutal in Russia. I don’t think that is supported by what is known by the public at this time.

  9. Should be noted that the way the found him is that after the lockdown was lifted, the boat owner noticed blood on it and call the police, so ironically the fact everyone was stuck inside is what drew out the manhunt all day.

  10. @bill:

    not all muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists seem to be muslim!

    Only 6% of the terrorist attacks that occurred on US soil from 1980-2005 were the work of Islamic extremists:

    http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/01/not-all-terrorists-are-muslims/

  11. JKB says:

    So there was an earlier suspicion, at least by a foreign government of ties to extremists. The mother has also said her son had “religious views”

    As first reported by CBS News correspondent Bob Orr, the FBI interviewed Tsarnaev, the elder brother of at-large bombing suspect Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, at the request of a foreign government to see if he had any extremist ties, but failed to find any linkage.

  12. john personna says:

    As I read JKB, he recognizes (Bayes) that it is low probability that any random Muslim is a terrorist, but that it is a motivation in rare cases, of which this may be one. Going that far is not too far out in the limb.

  13. ernieyeball says:

    …now his chechen cronies will have time to bomb the trial…

    How clever of you to suggest targets for radicals!

  14. anjin-san says:

    it has been reported the older brother followed a radical Iman and had Islamic Jihad videos on his Youtube.

    Yea, apparently he was also into videos talking about gun love…

  15. Jenos Idanian #13 says:

    @Stormy Dragon: @Stormy Dragon: Interesting link. And it took some real engineering to get the conclusions you drew.

    For one, it chose the years 1980-2005 for some reason.

    For another, it treated each incident equally. For example, this incident:

    July 7, 2005

    Attempted Arson
    Los Angeles, California
    (One act of Domestic Terrorism)

    In the early morning of July 7, 2005, fire officials responded to a vehicle fire in the driveway of a private residence in Los Angeles, California. In extinguishing the fire, authorities recovered a partially melted, plastic gasoline container from behind the vehicle’s left front wheel. The car belonged to a representative for the Ani-mal Care Technicians Union, which represents employees for the Los Angeles Animal Services (LAAS). LAAS and its affiliates have been targeted by local animal rights extremists, and the LAAS union representative had been placed on a “targets” list of individuals profiled by extremists for “direct actions.” The incident remains under investigation.

    Is counted as equal to 9/11. 1 incident each.

    And then there’s the death toll cited. A grand total of 3,178 killed and 14,038 wounded over 25 years. But the year-by-year breakdown shows two spikes. Well, one spike and one Mount Everest — 168 killed and 754 wounded in 1993, and 2,997 killed and 12,017 in 2001.

    That means that 9/11 accounts for 94% of the deaths and 86% of the wounded out of that entire 25-year period. But it counts the same as one car getting burned.

    By leftist eco-terrorists. Who, according to your own argument, are just as bad as the 9/11 hijackers.

    That study you cited doesn’t change the essential truth of this statement:

    No, not all Muslims are terrorists. Only a very small percentage are extremists.

    However, if there is a serious terrorist attack, the odds of the terrorist or terrorists being Muslim are pretty good.

  16. Caj says:

    Everyone involved in his capture is to be congratulated. Both suspects found, one now dead and the other captured within a week was nothing short of wonderful. Boston can get back to hopefully some normality and feel proud of their law enforcement and all the others involved in bringing this horrific attack to an end. All we want to know now is why! Justice will be served at the end of the day. The events of that fateful day will live in the minds of those who ran or were just onlookers forever but I doubt it will break their spirit or that of others holding marathons around the country.

  17. aFloridian says:

    @Stormy Dragon: Can’t you find some statistics from a site that isn’t so blatantly biased? Loonwatch? Really?

    Jenos addresses the stats pretty well. I had no idea Latinos were the most dangerous group. Also, according to that list, there are far more left-wing terror acts than right-wing. Surely you don’t agree with that? I’m not sure I do either, but I’m not the one pushing this bogus website.

  18. CSK says:

    @Doug Mataconis:

    Two men and one woman who lived with the younger suspect have been taken in for questioning, and massive amounts of potential evidence (including, apparently, some non-detonated IEDs) have been taken from the apartment in Cambridge, so a clearer picture of the exact motivation may emerge from that. The investigators (federal, state, and municipal) seem to be coordinating their efforts very well.

  19. Jenos Idanian #13 says:

    @aFloridian: I’m not sure I do either, but I’m not the one pushing this bogus website.

    Not to stick up for Stormy, but Loonwatch isn’t the source of the info — the FBI is. I guess Stormy figured that if he/she/it didn’t cite the information directly, no one would fact-check his/her/its ass by going to the source.

    He/she/it chose poorly.

  20. grumpy realist says:

    @bill: Like normal, you know nothing.

    From what I’ve read, it looks like the older brother started becoming quite religious, violent, and dragged his younger brother into the whole mess.

    Bill, if we’re supposed to mistrust all religious people who are jerks, there’s going to be a large percentage of the US population to lock up. Even if you limit it to those who profess Islam. Which has certain Constitutional problems…..

    One would think that you had never heard of due process.

  21. Jenos Idanian #13 says:

    @grumpy realist: Please, cite any other religion that has, over the past, say, 30 years, racked up anywhere near the body count that Islam has.

    And what’s worse, most of the people killed in the name of Allah are Muslims who aren’t the “right” kind of Muslim.

  22. matt bernius says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:
    To blame that particular high body count specifically on religion is to ignore countless other facts — in particular a geo-political-economic history of a region where countries were assembled largely by outside colonial forces.

    And what’s worse, most of the people killed in the name of Allah are Muslims who aren’t the “right” kind of Muslim.

    It’s also that sect is tied in with a number of other factors including tribal and sub-ethnic groups. It also should be noted that depending on the country in question, often one particulars sect/ethnic group have long histories of oppressing other ethnic groups.

    The continuous problem is that all of that continually gets boiled down simply to “religion” in the way that other issues are boiled down by others to “race.”

  23. matt bernius says:

    @matt bernius:

    To blame that particular high body count specifically on religion is to ignore countless other facts — in particular a geo-political-economic history of a region where countries were assembled largely by outside colonial forces.

    To this point, one need look no further than the history of Terrorist Acts in the UK during the 20th century. Countless bombings and other incidents were largely committed by one Christian sect (Irish Catholics) against members of another Christian sect (British and Irish Protestants). However, we rightfully don’t reduce the history of the IRA and the free Ireland movement to being all about religion.