BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING: HOW CRITICALLY INJURED JEFF BAUMAN’S MEMORY OF ‘MAN IN THE CAP’ GAVE FBI VITAL CLUE
The FBI appealed for help identifying the men in the grainy images.
They didn’t even have time to take the calls
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NIKHIL KUMAR WATERTOWN SATURDAY 20 APRIL 2013
Jeff Bauman was in the crush of spectators massed around the marathon
finish line in Boston on Monday. It was around 15 or 20 minutes before
3pm. Waiting for his girlfriend to complete the race he saw a man
wearing a cap, sunglasses, a hoodie and a dark jacket drop a bag to
the ground. The man looked Bauman in the eye. Minutes later, the bag,
which contained a home-made explosive comprised of a pressure cooker
and ball bearings, exploded.
Bauman, from Concord, New Hampshire, lost both his legs below the
knees. A picture showing him being wheeled away from the scene,
his face spattered with blood, became one of the defining images of
the disaster.
In the days after the attack, Bauman’s memory of the man in the
cap might have been the critical clue that led investigators to the
Tsarnaev brothers – 19-year-old Dzhokhar and 26-year-old Tamerlan –
who are suspected of mounting the twin bombings that killed three
and wounded more than 170.
Still in intensive care, Bauman “woke up, under so much drugs, asked
for a paper and pen and wrote, ‘bag, saw the guy, looked right me,'”
his brother, Chris, revealed yesterday.
After the tip came the photos. The Federal Bureau of Investigation,
in conjunction with local and state authorities, had been sifting
through images and videos around the blast site since Monday. Runners
and spectators had been asked to send in any record of the time before
the bombings.
On Thursday, at a press conference in a downtown Boston hotel, the FBI
agent in charge, Richard DesLauriers, a veteran counterintelligence
officer, drafted in the public’s help: grainy images of the two as
yet unnamed suspects, along with a video showing them carrying bags
on their backs as they made their way through the marathon crowd,
were released. “Somebody out there knows these individuals,” agent
DesLauriers said.
But even before the FBI had the chance to properly chase up the flood
of tips that followed, the authorities had a stroke of luck.
Five hours after the images were released, at around 10.20pm, the
police received reports of shots being fired on the campus of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, across the
Charles River from Boston. Ten minutes later, an MIT campus police
officer was found in his car with multiple gunshot wounds. The officer,
26-year-old Sean Collier, was killed in the attack.
The shooting began when Officer Collier responded to a report of
a robbery at a 7-11 convenience store on campus. By sheer chance,
the two bombing suspects were in the store when the robbery was
taking place. They were not involved in the robbery, the police said
last night.
As Officer Collier was being taken to Massachusetts General Hospital –
the same place where so many of the wounded were rushed to on Monday –
the police were alerted to a car-jacking in the Third Street area of
Cambridge, within walking distance of MIT.
The suspects, it turned out, had taken the car. They also taken a
hostage, who was released around 30 minutes later at a petrol station
on Memorial Drive, a road that runs along the Charles, connecting
Cambridge to the small suburban community of Watertown. Before they
let the hostage go, they are said to have told him that they were
behind the Boston bombings.
As they raced along the water, pursued by police, the Tsarnaev
brothers began firing back and throwing explosives at the chasing
police cars. At some point they stopped, got out of the stolen car
and exchanged fire with police, critically injuring an officer from
the transit division.
Tamerlan was killed in the exchange. Dzhokhar is reported to have
jumped back into the car and driven over his brother, who was found
with an explosive device strapped to his body. A stony-faced doctor
would later emerge from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre to
tell reporters that he had been pronounced dead, with several gunshot
injuries and blast wounds to his torso.
Official reports in the early hours did not explicitly link the mayhem
playing out in Watertown to the Marathon bombers. But shortly before
4am Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis confirmed what everyone
suspected – that they had their men. “One suspect dead. One at large.
Armed and dangerous. White hat suspect at large,” he wrote on Twitter.
Sitting west of Cambridge, roughly six and half miles from the site of
the marathon blasts, Watertown is a community of around 32,000 people.
Many residents can trace their origins back to Armenia. “This is a
small community, mostly Armenians and Greeks. Everyone knows everyone
by name,” Kris Hagopian, who owns Coolidge Liquors, a store in east
Watertown, said yesterday. “Nothing happens here.”
But that changed in the early hours of Friday morning, when an army
of officers drawn from various local police forces, the FBI, the
Massachusetts National Guard and other agencies sealed off an area
spanning some twenty blocks. By sunrise 9,000 officers were reported
to be combing Watertown’s streets for the “white hat” suspect.
In the gloom, everyone on the street was a potential suspect.
Pictures would later emerge of terrified residents lying prostrate on
the road, guns trained on their bodies. One man was stripped naked by
police, presumably fearful that he, too, was strapped with explosives.
Many residents were asleep. But some did hear gun shots, with one
telling reporters that it sounded like “firecrackers” had gone off
on his street. Mobile phone footage shot from a Watertown window
confirmed the description, a volley of bullets ringing out amid the
flashing lights of the squad cars.
Soon things quietened down as Swat teams moved from house to house,
checking every corner, and every property, for Dzhokhar. As the sun
rose, the only sounds in Watertown were the sirens. Military jeeps
could be seen patrolling the streets and by late morning military
helicopters could be heard hovering overhead. Several buses full of
policemen could be seen going into the exclusion zone, as the local
and federal government marshalled their men to track down suspect No 2.
While Watertown was the centre of the search, the dragnet extended
far beyond, with authorities shutting down the public transportation
system that connects the different parts of the Boston metropolitan
area, a region with a population of well over four million.
At 9am the area around MIT was practically deserted, as it was around
Harvard University. In Watertown police asked residents to remain
indoors, and so-called “reverse 911” calls were made to every house
advising residents, many of whom were just waking up, to stay put.
In Cambridge a bomb squad descended on Norfolk Street, where the
Tsarnaevs lived. Later, it emerged that officials would mount a
controlled explosion close to their home. Over in Connecticut,
concern that the suspect might have boarded a New York-bound train
led authorities to stop one heading south towards Westport. At the
same time, Connecticut state police was briefly altered about the
possibility that the suspect might be in a Honda CRV heading in
their direction.
In Watertown, Mr Hagopian could not get home. He was at his mother’s
house, just beyond the cordon, when the police closed off the area
with his wife and children inside. He spent the morning calling and
sending texts telling them to stay indoors. On Monday, he was on
Boylston Street, near the site of the bombings. “Now, look, its come
to my town,” he said.