A surveillance video shows a man prosecutors say is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev placing a bomb near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, just yards from where an 8-year-old boy was killed when it exploded.
Four frantic days later, police found a hand-scrawled confession condemning U.S. actions in Muslim countries on the inner hull of a boat where Tsarnaev was captured.
Today, a year after twin pressure cooker bombs shattered the marathon and paralyzed Boston, federal prosecutors say they have a trove of evidence ready to use against the surviving suspect. But many questions remain.
What roles did Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, play in planning and orchestrating the attack? If they had not been tracked down, would they really have launched a second attack in New York they say Dzokhar Tsarnaev told them he and his brother were planning? Did federal authorities underreact to a warning from Russia that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was becoming radicalized?
With Tamerlan Tsarnaev killed in a police shootout days after the attack, some of those questions may never be fully answered.
“The obvious one is the motivation and how could two young men who were in a country that, from all appearances, was very good to them end up this radical,” said former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, who helped lead the investigation.
The bombings last April 15 killed three people and injured more than 260. At least 16 people lost limbs.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has pleaded not guilty to a 30-count federal indictment that carries the possibility of the death penalty. He remains in jail, awaiting trial.
The brothers are ethnic Chechens who lived in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan and the Dagestan region of Russia before immigrating to Cambridge, Mass., with their family more than a decade ago.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defense team, which includes two of the nation’s top anti-death penalty lawyers, appear to be building a case that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was the driving force behind the bombings. In court documents, they have focused on his influence on his much younger brother, who was 19 at the time of the bombings.
A congressional report released last month said U.S. intelligence agencies missed a chance to detain Tamerlan Tsarnaev when he returned from a trip to Dagestan in July 2012.
Russian authorities had warned the FBI in 2011 about Tsarnaev becoming radicalized. The FBI investigated, and his name was added to a terrorism watch list. But he was still able to fly to Dagestan — an area that has become the center of an Islamic insurgency — and spend six months there, then return to the United States.
“There was not sufficient weight put on the information we got from Russia,” said U.S. Rep. William Keating, D-Mass., a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Three days after the bombings, the FBI released photos of the Tsarnaevs taken from surveillance video near the bombing sites. Hours later, authorities say, the brothers shot and killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer in an attempt to steal his gun, then carjacked a Cambridge man.
The alleged victim, Danny Meng, said what he thought would be a quick robbery became more terrifying when Tamerlan Tsarnaev asked him whether he knew about the marathon bombings, then demanded to know whether he could drive them to New York. Meng managed to escape a short time later when the brothers stopped at a gas station.
Former New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators from his hospital bed after his capture that he and his brother had decided that night to drive to New York nd launch a second attack. Instead, Meng alerted police to their whereabouts, and they ended up in a gun battle with officers in nearby Watertown.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed, but his brother escaped, leading to an unprecedented lockdown of the Boston metro area. The wounded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found later that day hiding in a dry-docked boat in a backyard.
Authorities said he wrote his explanation of the bombings in pen on the boat’s in inner hull: “The U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians. Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”
People who knew Dzhokhar Tsarnaev say they still struggle to reconcile the seemingly Americanized young man they knew with the one accused of helping plant the bombs that killed Martin Richard, 8, Lu Lingzi, 23, a Boston University graduate student from China, and Krystle Campbell, 29.
Luis Vasquez, who helped coach Tsarnaev’s soccer team in high school, said both brothers appeared to be good people when he knew them. The death penalty, he said, would be the easy way out.
“That event should eat at him,” Vasquez said. “If we kill him, he will take those answers with him.”
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