The 15 April 2002 marked race number 117 of the Boston Marathon, the oldest annual marathon in the world.
The popular event takes place on Patriots’ Day, which commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1719 that started the Revolutionary War. Celebrated on the third Monday in April, Patriots’ Day is a legal holiday in Massachusetts.
The 
Marathon began in the town of Hopkinton, west of Boston, with about 23.000 participants. The elite runners started at 9: 32 am, while the best male runners and a first wave of thousands of other runners followed the 10 am Additional waves of runners took off at 10: 20 am and : 29 am
Approximately 2: 49 that afternoon, with more than 5600 runners still in the race, two pressure cooker bombs, packed with shrapnel and hidden in backpacks among a crowd of marathon spectators, they exploded seconds apart near the finish line along Boylston.
The explosions instantly turned the sunny afternoon into a gruesome scene of bloodshed, destruction and mayhem.
Three bystanders were killed : a woman from 20 years, a woman of 20 years old and an 8 year old boy, while more than 150 people were injured. Sixteen people lost legs; the youngest amputee was a 7-year-old girl.
Tsarnaev Brothers
Immediately, an investigation was started involving more than 1.000 members of federal, state and local law enforcement personnel.
A breakthrough in the case occurred less than two days later, when FBI analysts, poring over thousands of videos and photos taken by security cameras in the area where the attack occurred, identified two male suspects. The FBI released surveillance camera footage of the men, whose identities were unknown at the time, on the night of 18 April.
That night, around 10: 30, Sean Collier, a police officer from 27 years of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was shot to death in his patrol car on the school campus in Cambridge. Authorities would later link the murder to the Tsarnaev brothers, who allegedly tried to steal the officer’s service weapon.
Shortly after Collier’s death, Tamerlan Tsarnaev stole a Mercedes SUV at gunpoint, took the driver hostage and told him he was one of the Boston Marathon bombers. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev followed him in a Honda Civic before to join their older brother and the hostage in the van.
The brothers drove around the Boston area with their hostage, forcing him to withdraw money from an ATM and talking about driving to the New York City .
Tamerlan Tsarnaev
When they stopped at a Cambridge gas station, the hostage escaped and called the police, informing them that his cell phone, which was still in the vehicle, could track the SUV.
Shortly after midnight, police in the Boston suburb of Watertown spotted the suspects in the Stolen SUV and Honda Civic and tried to det power them A shootout broke out on a Watertown street, with the Tsarnaevs exchanging gunfire with police and throwing explosive devices at them. One officer was seriously injured by gunshots, but survived.
After the police accosted Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his brother Dzhokhar drove the stolen SUV directly towards them, hitting his brother before speeding away. He abandoned the nearby SUV and then fled on foot.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, seriously wounded and whose body was riddled with bullets , was taken to a hospital, where doctors were unable to resuscitate him.
A Watertown man went out to his backyard to check on his dry-docked boat. When he looked inside the boat covered in 24 feet, it surprised to see blood and a person, later identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, hiding there.
The man from Watertown immediately called 911, the police arrived and surrounded the boat, and the suspected terrorist, who was injured in the earlier shooting, was arrested. Before his capture, Tsarnaev would have scrawled a note inside the ship indicating that the Boston bombings were committed in retaliation for US wars in Muslim countries.
Bomb Suspects
At the time of the attacks, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a former amateur boxer, was married with a young son.
The brothers were Muslims, born in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan in 1986 Y 1993. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev came to the United States with his parents in 2002, and the family soon applied for political asylum and settled in Cambridge. Tamerlan and her two sisters followed the family to the United States in 2003.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, described by his classmates as a popular student, he became a naturalized US citizen on 11 September 2012. His older brother, a community college dropout who was frequently unemployed, had a green card but was not a US citizen.
Researchers have suggested that the Tsarnaevs were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs, but planned and carried out the attacks on their own and were not connected to any terrorist group. The brothers allegedly used the Internet to learn how to build explosives.
Trial of the bombing Boston Marathon Bombing
In July 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty to the 30 federal charges against him, including the use of a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death.
Tsarnaev was found guilty by a jury of the 30 charges against him on April 8, 2015. He is eligible for the death penalty and is currently being held at the Florence-High High Security US Penitentiary in Colorado while his legal staff represents his appeals.
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