Then a shootout and the death of one suspect, followed by a lull, and then the discovery and near-death of the second suspect. First came word of “officer down” at MIT. Within hours of the FBI video release, everything went nuts. No hard evidence had been released that connected them to the bombing itself. The still-anonymous Tsarnaevs were nothing more than people with whom the FBI wanted to talk. If there’s one thing out of all the “facts” that emerged in the early hours and days after the bombing that cemented the Tsarnaevs’ capital-G Guilt, it was, unquestionably, the killing of MIT police officer Sean Collier on the night of Thursday, April 18, three days after the explosions at the Marathon.Īt the time of Collier’s shooting, the FBI had just released video of two unnamed “persons of interest” walking with backpacks-shown amid many other people walking with backpacks. It is with this in mind that we’ve been down in the weeds.
Yet in the real world, happenings may take place for a welter of reasons that even those directly involved may not be aware of. Our media and our leading interpreters of events explain everything in terms that the unsophisticated can easily grasp. As we’ve noted, many much-loved historical narratives turn out to be little more than carefully crafted myths around a few core facts. However, it is often in the details, the “weeds,” if you will, where we find that a narrative can be useful as far as it goes and yet terribly misleading in terms of what it all means. Now, some might say that nothing else matters as long as police got their men. We’ve raised reasonable questions about the events surrounding the Marathon bombing in previous articles, from the presence of mysterious black-clad security men with well-stuffed backpacks at the race to the FBI and CIA’s awareness of the Tsarnaev family long before April 15, 2013. Otherwise, we are all dupes, of one kind or another. And getting to the bottom of this complex story is not just an option-we cannot afford as a society to have large traumas of this sort come and go without clarity. Nonetheless, many aspects of the story remain unclear, and decidedly troublesome. I spent Wednesday of this week talking to residents of the streets where the shootouts took place, and there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that both brothers were there, were armed, and threw bombs at police. Whether or not they planted the bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon, whether or not they acted alone or in concert with others, whether they were ideologues or dupes, it seems evident that they were involved in some kind of violent adventure culminating in the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the shooting and apprehension of his brother Dzhokhar. All one has to do is consider the eyewitness accounts of the shootout in Watertown to realize that the Tsarnaev brothers were almost certainly not-as a surprisingly large number of people posting comments on this site and around the Internet seem to believe-harmless naïfs who did nothing wrong.
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