By: Eric Wood
On April 8, 2015 Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted of murder.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, along with his brother Tamerlan, manifested the two pressure cooker bombs that killed three and injured hundreds. The brothers also killed an MIT Police Officer while being pursued.
The Tsarnaev brothers were Islamic terrorists whose aim was to bring justice to those who have committed crimes against the Islamic state. The brothers carried this out by placing the bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
Dzhokhar, originally from Kyrgyzstan, came to the US and became a citizen on September 11, 2012. Dzhokhar attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tamerlan attended Bunker Hill Community College.
On April 15th, 2013 the brothers planted two pressure cooker bombs on Boylston Street in Boston. Three days later, the brothers led a manhunt through Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts.
On April 18th around 10:30 p.m., MIT Police Officer Sean Collier was shot and killed by the brothers. Shortly after the murder of Collier, the brother carjacked a Mercedes SUV and kept the owner hostage for roughly half an hour. The hostage was released unharmed.
Around midnight of the same night, a shootout occurred in Watertown. The two brothers injured a MBTA Officer (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) in the shootout. Shortly after the shootout, the brothers entered yet another gunfight around 1:30 a.m. when Tamerlan ran at the police wearing an improvised bomb vest. Tamerlan was shot and later pronounced dead at the local hospital.
Dzhokhar fled the scene whilst throwing explosives out the window. He then entered a boat stationed in a backyard of a house in Watertown. There, Dzhokhar entered a standoff that initiated around 6 p.m. shortly after the owner of the boat saw a trail of blood leading to his boat.
For the next hour and a half, FBI, SWAT, and Boston Police agents waited and eventually apprehended Dzhokhar.
April 15th marked the day that Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev violently killed and injured over 200 people. The Boston Bombing was the worst terrorist attack in 12 years dating back to September 11th, 2001 when four planes killed almost 3,000 people.
As the counts of which Dzhokhar was accused of were read, the courtroom heard “Guilty…Guilty…Guilty…Guilty.” The word guilty was heard 30 times as Dzhokhar was credited with 30 crimes. The living Tsarnaev brother is now at the Colorado Federal Prison and is on death row.
Recently the city of Boston has made a video planned to commemorate One Boston Day, a holiday honoring those who died three years ago.
The terror caused by the brothers still resonates today across the globe, but Boston remains resilient and lives up to it’s slogan “Boston Strong.”
