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| Photo of the two men the FBI says planted the bombs that killed three and maimed or wounded dozens at the Boston Marathon on Monday. The black-hatted Suspect #1 is now dead, and white-hatted Suspect #2 is at large, the subject of an intense search in the Boston area. |
Friday, 5:30 a.m. - The wheels of justice are turning swiftly in Boston. Overnight, two law enforcement officers have been shot, one fatally, and one of the prime suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings is dead, with the other being tracked by a massive manhunt in the suburbs of the city.
Authorites have ordered residents in those areas to stay indoors, businesses have likewise been ordered not to open, and the entire Boston transit system has been shut down across all of Boston - something completely unprecedented. I'm sure the news is all over cable TV, but for folks like your Head Trucker, who doesn't have cable (by choice) and for my overseas truckbuddies, here are a couple of good sources for news, frequently updated, which I've been following all night as the story has progressed:
NBC news videos
The Guardian's live blog (A sign of the times - a British newspaper has some of the most up-to-date info on an American crime scene)
Boston.com, the online presence of the Boston Globe, also updates its main story from time to time, but overnight not as quickly as the other two.
I hope they catch Suspect #2 shortly, and no police officers or innocent bystanders get hurt.
Update, 6:45 a.m., Texas time - The two suspects are said to be brothers originally from the Chechnya region of Russia, but have lived in the Boston area with their family since 2002. WTF??
Update, 6:00 p.m. - After sleeping all day, woke up to find the suspect is still at large - how, with so many thousands of cops and troops combing the area? The whole of Boston has been locked down all day until finally about the time I woke up, the Governor said people could go out and about again. I can't second-guess the cops but I wonder if shutting down an entire metropolitan area was really necessary for one 19-year-old on the run - even with a gun and a bomb.
But just now, there's been another volley of gunfire in Watertown, so I'm watching the live NBC report as cops and paramedics swarm on a location there. Hope they have the little bastard and can bring an end to all this fear and worry.
This week's New Yorker cover by Eric Drooker is well done:
6:30 p.m. - NBC reports suspect has been found in a boat, apparently in someone's back yard. Helicopter view confirms he is moving, not dead. Cops waiting around for something, not sure what. This is too much like a Hollywood movie - I'm sure somebody in California is writing a new screenplay right now, you know they will make a million billion on the film when they get it made. Calling Ben Affleck, Matt Damon.
7:45 p.m. - NBC reports wounded, bloody suspect has been taken alive, no police hurt, medic called for, cheers going up on the sidewalks of Watertown. A peaceful end to this terrible week, thanks be to God. Now the doctors can mend him, the cops can interrogate him, the courts can try him. And then, I sincerely hope, the hangman will swing him high.
8:45 p.m. - Governor Duval, Mayor Menino, police chiefs, FBI head agent, U. S. Attorney, others give news conference. Suspect is in serious condition at
For the historical record, Rachel sums up the happenings of the last two days:
Surprises surely await us as we go on, but an intuitive scenario—in which an older brother who had struggled with the promise and disillusion of American life and turned to extremist Islam for comfort, dominated and seduced a younger brother not born or made for violence—seemed plausible. But all of our experience suggests that it is not “fundamentalism” alone but an aching tension between modernity and a false picture of a purer fundamentalist past that makes terrorists. And it was an American story, too, in what could only be called a hysterical and insular overreaction that allowed it to become the sole national narrative. I happened to be in London on 7/7—a far more deadly and frightening terrorist attack—and by 7 P.M. on that horrible day, with the terrorists still at large (they were dead already, but no one knew that) the red double-decker buses were rolling and the traffic was turning and life, though hardly normal, was determinedly going on. The decision to shut down Boston, though doubtless made in good faith and from honest anxiety, seemed like an undue surrender to the power of the terrorist act—as did, indeed, the readiness to turn over the entire attention of the nation to a violent, scary, tragic, lurid but, in the larger scheme of things, ultimately small threat to the public peace. The toxic combination of round-the-clock cable television—does anyone now recall the killer of Gianni Versace, who claimed exactly the same kind of attention then as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did today?—and an already exaggerated sense of the risk of terrorism turned a horrible story of maiming and death and cruelty into a national epic of fear. What terrorists want is to terrify people; Americans always oblige.
Saturday, 7:20 p.m. - Massachusetts State Police have released this amazing (to a non-techie like your Head Trucker) photo of the boat that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding in, taken by a heat-imaging camera in a police helicopter. Unfuckingbelievable.
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