No “Eureka” Moment in Boston Bombing Videos or Images
March 17, 2015 by Lara Turner
Categories: Boston Bombing Investigation
Evidence against Tsarnaev: Shrouded in darkness, lacking clarity. U.S. Attorney’s handout.
The state of the evidence thus far presented against Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev can be summed up in those four words.
From the first moments after the FBI’s April 18, 2013 press conference naming “White Hat” and “Black Hat” as the prime suspects, law enforcement has contended they had video that conclusively showed Tsarnaev dropping a backpack bomb at the Forum restaurant.
They were less confident that video surveillance at MIT showed the brothers ambushing MIT Officer Sean Collier. Instead, they had witness Dun “Danny” Meng to corroborate that Tamerlan Tsarnaev admitted to the killing.
Yet the video images and evidence photographs entered into the court record are proving to be anything but the “Eureka” moment former Boston FBI Chief Richard DesLauriers described in a National Geographic docu-drama.
Here’s what we have been shown:
• In the Forum video,
we do see the brothers walking with backpacks, like hundreds of other
marathon-goers, down Boylston Street. We see the brothers split, with
Tamerlan Tsarnaev walking ahead of his little brother. We see Dzhokhar
standing at the tree, but we only see a slight shrug that could be him
placing the backpack at his feet. We certainly don’t see the backpack
and we can’t see if he left with it before the fatal bombing.
• We do see Tsarnaev
walking away without his backpack in subsequent photographs, but there
was no indication in the much-heralded video if he dropped it at the
Forum or somewhere between there and the Boylston/Fairfield
intersection.
•In the surveillance video
from MIT, we see two distant, dark and grainy people walk behind the
Koch Building toward the Stata Building and up to Collier’s patrol car.
We see other people walking and bicycling in the Quad, but no one seems
to react to any loud gunshot-like noises. Finally, we see two grainy
people run away. Viewers can’t even tell if these two people are male or
female. Bicycling witness
Nathan Harman says he saw a man who looked like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
leaning into the patrol car, but the defense didn’t bring out the fact
that the man was quickly cycling by at night.
Video Player
• Watertown police
testified Monday that the Tsarnaev brothers attacked them with guns and
pipe bombs on Dexter Avenue early in the morning on April 19, 2013.
Tamerlan was killed in that shootout and Dzhokhar was on the run.
However, the only pictures the jury and the public saw of the pipe bombs
on the streets of Watertown are dark and, frankly, not of very good quality
for an investigation of this magnitude. While collecting the bombs
quickly is tantamount for the safety of both the police and residents,
surely Watertown emergency service personnel have flood lights that
could have been employed to improve the quality of the pictures.
• Finally, jurors got a
chance Monday to view the boat where Tsarnaev was found hiding the
following evening after the shootout. The boat notes were said to
contain a confession—although that, too, might be a dubious claim—and were still scrawled upon the bullet-ridden, blood-stained boat. However, as reporters noted, the scribbles, too, had faded over time.
With the defense apparently making little effort to fight until the
sentencing phase, who will ask why the video and photographic evidence
presented in the case to date is so grainy, dark, faded and
inconclusive? In a death penalty case, the answer is important.
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