NEWS: One Boston bombing suspect dead, another on the run

FBI released photos of Boston Marathon Bombings suspects. The man in the black hat is dead during a ~1AM shootout; manhunt for Supect #2 in the white hat is ongoing.

Police: One Boston bombing suspect dead, another on the run

By Michael Pearson and Ben Brumfield, CNN

updated 7:50 AM EDT, Fri April 19, 2013

 

 

(CNN) -- Police sealed off densely populated portions the Boston metro area early Friday after a violent night chasing the Boston Marathon terror suspects left one of the men and a police officer dead.

Police ordered businesses in the suburb of Watertown and nearby communities to stay closed and told residents to stay inside and answer the door for no one but authorities. The subway and Amtrak train systems have been shut down. Every Boston area school is closed.

"It's jarring," said CNN Belief blog writer Danielle Tumminio, who lives in Watertown.

Boston's public transit authority sent city buses to Watertown to evacuate residents while bomb experts comb the surroundings for possible explosives.

Police shot one of the men dead after a wild car chase through Watertown in which authorities say they hurled explosives at pursuing officers.

Police believe the men are the same ones pictured in images released Thursday by the FBI as suspects in the marathon bombing that killed three people Monday.

The men are shown in the images walking together near the finish line of the marathon.

The first suspect, the one believed killed by police, appears in the images wearing a dark hat, sunglasses and wearing a backpack. The second suspect, wearing a white cap, is the one who remains at large, police said.

That man has a name that is common among people from the North Caucasus, a source with knowledge of the investigation said Friday. That region includes the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya.

Police warned Watertown residents to lock their homes and stay away from their windows and doors.

Federal, state and local law officers are swarming through the Boston suburb of Watertown, going door-to-door to track him down, said transit police spokesman Paul MacMillan.

Police officers in full body armor, carrying automatic weapons, flooded the area.

"This situation is grave." Massachusetts Police Col. Timothy Alben said. "This is a very serious situation that we are dealing with."

The violence began late Thursday in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston, with the fatal shooting of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer while he sat in his car late Thursday, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office said in statement. Police believe the bombing suspects were responsible for the shooting.

The same two suspects according to authorities, then hijacked a car at gunpoint in Cambridge. They released the driver a half-hour later at a gas station.

As police picked up the chase, the car's occupants threw explosives out the windows and shot at officers, according to the district attorney's office.

Officers fired back, wounding one of the men, possibly the person identified by the FBI as "suspect number 1," who is seen in the images released Thursday in a dark cap, sunglasses and wearing a black backpack.

The man died at Beth Israel Hospital. He had bullet wounds and injuries from an explosion, according to officials. The second man apparently escaped on foot.

A transit system police officer was also seriously injured in the incident and taken to a hospital. The officer's condition was not immediately known.

CNN photographer Gabe Ramirez arrived in Watertown as the chase ended.

"Police were in a standoff with the vehicle just down the hill," Ramirez said. They ordered one suspect out and commanded him to strip down completely naked before putting him in a patrol car, which did not leave the scene.

The man was later released and is not a suspect in the case.

But while the man was being held, FBI agents approached the squad car, and police ordered the man back out of the car. FBI agents questioned him -- still fully undressed -- on the sidewalk.

In an early phase of the lock down, a man could be seen lying face down on the street with his hands outstretched in front of him and his legs crossed. It is unclear whether this was the man who was arrested and ordered to undress.

CNN's Terence Burke, Dave Alsup, Carma Hassan, Jake Tapper, Drew Griffin, Steve Almasy and Chandler Friedman contributed to this report. 

Copied from http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/19/us/boston-area-violence/index.html?hpt=hp_t1