04-22-2013, 09:40 AM
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The People's Post
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Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: invisible 7-11
Posts: 66,653
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Quote:
The release of the pictures, however, meant a full identification was inevitable ? and rapid. High school friends of Dzhokhar immediately recognised him as ?White Hat? and began phoning the FBI hotline.
Knowing they would soon be arrested at their home in Cambridge, the site of Harvard University, or else on Dzhokhar?s University of Massachusetts campus an hour south at Dartmouth, the brothers seem to have decided to break cover.
With no apparent escape plan, they must have hoped to die in a blaze of glory, taking a few more people with them. The precise sequence of events remains unclear but within the space of two hours beginning just before midnight the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) camps and nearby Watertown became a war zone.
Shortly before midnight, less than seven hours after the photographs had been released, a man in his twenties was driving his black Mercedes-Benz on the campus of when the brothers held him up at gunpoint and jumped in. He was forced to drive to ATM machines and take out cash.
Police say that around then same time officers investigating an unconnected robbery at a nearby 7-Eleven found footage of Dzohkhar on the CCTV. At around the same time, Sean Collier, 26, an MIT police officer, was shot multiple times by the brothers as he sat in his cruiser - a senior officer later described it as a "savage assassination".
Now on full alert, the police began tracking the Mercedes via a GPS system in the car. On Memorial Drive, 1½ miles from where they had killed Collier, the brothers pushed their hostage out of his vehicle and headed to Watertown.
The man ran into a Shell petrol station screaming: ?Call the police! Call the police! These people are trying to kill me!? He was so agitated the cashier thought he was drunk.
Why the brothers spared the man?s life is unclear ? not least because, as he later told the FBI, they had boasted to him of carrying out the bombings.
At 12.40am, 15 minutes after the carjacking victim ran into the petrol station, Stephen McAlpin and his wife, Emily, were in bed when they heard gunfire outside their flat at 40 Laurel Street. The young couple threw themselves on the floor and called 911.
As the gunfire got closer and was accompanied by explosions, a bullet came through the wall, lodging itself in their television set. Outside the brothers were flinging grenades and shooting at the police, injuring several, one of them critically.
The McAlpins crawled into their kitchen and were taking shelter under the table with their dog Taco. ?I didn?t know if we were going to make it out of there,? McAlpin said.
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