Bombs explode at the Boston Marathon

[Miguel]

Police this morning are searching a 20-block area in Watertown for one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects after a violent night during which an MIT Police officer lost his life and a Transit Police officer was seriously wounded in a firefight. The other Boston Marathon bombing suspect, who was wearing a black hat in photos released Thursday evening, is dead after firing bullets and launching explosives at police.

Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said the man now known as Marathon bombing Suspect #2, the man with the white baseball cap who actually dropped the bombs at the race finish line, is the person being sought by a massive collection of federal, state, and municipal police.

http://boston.com/

With gunfire ricocheting around the tranquil neighborhood, residents were later told to go into their basements and stay away from windows.

The pursuit began after 10 p.m. Thursday when two men robbed a 7/11 near Central Square in Cambridge. A security camera caught a man identified as one of the suspects, wearing a gray hoodie.




About 10:30, police received reports that a campus security officer at M.I.T. was shot while he sat in his police cruiser. He was found with multiple gunshot wounds, according to a statement issued by Middlesex Acting District Attorney Michael Pelgro, Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas, and MIT Police Chief John DiFava. The officer was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

A short time later, police received reports of an armed carjacking of a Mercedes SUV by two males in the area of Third Street in Cambridge, the statement said. “The victim was carjacked at gunpoint by two males and was kept in the car with the suspects for approximately a half hour,” the statement said. He was later released, uninjured, at a gas station on Memorial Drive in Cambridge.

Police immediately began to search for the vehicle and pursued it into Watertown. During the chase, “explosive devices were reportedly thrown from car by the suspects,” the statement said,and the suspects and police exchanged gunfire in the area of Dexter and Laurel streets.

A Watertown resident, Andrew Kitzenberg, 29, said he looked out his third-floor window to see two young men of slight build in jackets engaged in “constant gunfire” with police officers. A police SUV “drove towards the shooters,” he said, and was shot at until it was severely damaged. It rolled out of control, Mr. Kitzenberg said, and crashed into two cars in his driveway.

The two shooters, he said, had a large, unwieldy bomb that he said looked “like a pressure cooker.”

“They lit it, still in the middle of the gunfire, and threw it. But it went 20 yards at most.” It exploded, he said, and one of the two men ran toward the gathered police officers. He was tackled, but it was not clear if he was shot, Mr. Kitzenberg said.

The explosions, said another resident, Loretta Kehayias, 65, “lit up the whole house. I screamed. I’ve never seen anything like this, never, never, never.”

Meanwhile, the other young man, said Mr. Kitzenberg, got back into the SUV, turned it toward officers and “put the pedal to the metal.” The car “went right through the cops, broke right through and continued west.”

The two men left “a few backpacks right by the car, and there is a bomb robot out there now.” Police had told residents to stay away from their windows, he said.

During this exchange, an MBTA police officer was seriously injured and taken to the hospital.

At the same time, one of the suspects was critically injured with multiple gunshot wounds and taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, where he was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/bos...bings.html