New Images Show Murder Scene After Boston Marathon Bombing
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Obtained by ABC News(BOSTON) — A security video that prosecutors say captures the moment when the Boston Marathon bomber brothers ripped open an MIT Police cruiser door and shot the officer inside is expected to be shown to jurors in the fourth day of testimony against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Wednesday.
A still image of one of the scenes, obtained by ABC News, shows emergency responders surrounding the mortally wounded officer.
Assistant United States Attorney William Weinreb described the cold-blooded execution of Officer Sean Collier, 27, in his opening statements last week. He said the surveillance video “on top of a very high building” shows the men “walk through the courtyard and round the corner where the cruiser was parked.”
“As soon as the reach the car, they open the door,” Weinreb said, and then a man opened fire, “shooting him in the head at point-blank range twice in the side of the head and once right between the eyes.”
Weinreb said the figures in the video were too small to determine who the assassin was.
“The video didn’t reveal whether the defendant pulled the trigger, or whether the both did, but it doesn’t matter. They both murdered him,” he said.
In addition, Weinreb said, the Ruger P95 9-millimeter gun that was used to kill Collier came from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, then 19.
A few months before the bombing, Weinreb said, Tsarnaev told a friend “that he needed a gun.” That gun came from Tsarnaev’s high school classmate, Stephen Silva, 21, who pleaded guilty in December to heroin dealing and charges connected to that gun.
Silva will testify as a government witness against Tsarnaev, prosecutors said.
During an unrelated arrest in Nov. 2013 Silva told police that he “smoked a lot of weed because his best friend was the bomber.” After Collier was dead, Weinreb said, the brothers “tried to steal his gun from his holster.” A lock on his holster prevented that theft, he said.
The Tsarnaev brothers went on to commit more bloodshed that night, prosecutors say, carjacking a man and then using his vehicle to flee to a street corner in Watertown, Massachusetts, where a gun and bomb battle ensued.
Less than 24-hours later, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was dead, shot by police and dragged 50 feet by his brother in the carjacked SUV he used to escape the firefight, which also left MBTA Officer Richard Donahue — Sean Collier’s police academy classmate — in critical condition.
A third MBTA police officer was grazed by a bullet and a state police vehicle with a trooper and a Boston Police officer was also fired upon in the chaos, ABC News has learned.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was apprehended hours later hiding in a dry-docked boat. He has pleaded not guilty to 30 charges related to the bombing, though his defense team admitted during opening statements that he participated in the attack.
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