Essay On Boston Marathon Bombing

Sean Clyne
Boston Marathon Bombing
9/20/15

It’s a day most people won’t forget, April 15th, 2013. It was a sunny day, perfect weather for a marathon. A beautiful day to celebrate the 117th running of the infamous Boston Marathon, the world’s oldest marathon. This annual event is held every year on Patriot’s Day, a legal holiday in Massachusetts, a day that remembers the start of the Revolutionary War.
The race consisted of over 23,000 runners, starting around 9:30AM in the town of Hopkinton, just west of Boston. The top women runners started the race, followed by the top men and then thousands of other runners. The race was 26.2 miles and the runners traveled through 8 different towns and cities. Rita Jeptoo of Kenya won for the women and Lelisa Desisa won for the men, both completing the race in record time.
Around 2:45PM, when thousands of people were still running the race, tragedy struck. Two bombs, both made from pressure
The first break on the case came just two days after the bombing. After sorting through thousands of images, both video and photography, FBI analysts determined two male suspects. Although their identities were not known at that time, they would later be identified as brothers, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts & 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a married man with a young child. Authorities were able to link the brothers to a shooting that occurred the evening of the marathon. A young police officer, Sean Collier, was shot dead in his patrol car. Soon after the shooting, the brothers allegedly jacked a Mercedes, taking the driver hostage at gunpoint and told the driver they were the bombers. The brothers drove around Boston with the hostage, forcing him to stop at an ATM and talked about possibly driving down to New York. The hostage was able to escape and immediately notified