Two years after the Boston Marathon bombings, Seattle Assistant Police Chief and former Boston homicide detective Bob Merner shares an unforgettable tale of that tragic week.
Takedown at the Boat
Even though most law enforcement had left the Watertown area, Chief Merner had a good reason to stick around. He received a tip from a homeowner that he had spotted blood on his boat.
“We immediately responded to this area on Franklin Street, and when we got there, we saw the boat and we saw blood on the boat,” Merner said. “The call is going out that there’s a resident who says he found blood on his boat and you hear us quickly say, ‘We’re already here.’”
“I asked the owner if he had pulled the top back, he said yes, he had. I asked him if he saw somebody, he said, ‘Yes, he appeared to be injured.’ I asked him if he was armed, he said ‘He didn’t appear to be armed at that time,’” Merner recalled. “I covered it from one side, Lieutenant O’ Connor covered it from the other, and Superintendent Evans assumed command of the operation, the takedown at the boat.”
When Merner arrived, there were only three of them there. With no SWAT team and only two other officers on scene, Merner started going right for the Boston bomber.
“My first instinct was to apprehend this individual who had just murdered three people and injured 264 others in my city,” Merner said.
Merner ultimately decided against going in and making a quick arrest and opted to wait until he had an explosive ordinance team on scene, along with a K9 dog.
“I got in the back of a bearcat and initiated negotiations with him to try to talk him out of the boat,” Merner said. “The police commissioner called me at one point when we were at the boat, he had just left when they lifted the shelter in place. He said, ‘Should I come back?’ I said, ‘You’re going to want to come back if you want to see him captured.’”
“It had been a long week. We knew that one of the brothers was deceased, and we knew we had the other one,” Merner recalls. “When we were in the driveway covering Tsarnaev, we could see that he was poking a hole through the tarp with his finger. Basically trying to do the same thing we were doing, trying to get eyes and ears on us.”
I started to negotiate with him to put his hands outside the boat, put his hands on his head and come outside the boat,” Merner said. “We received no response.”
Eventually after a lengthy standoff, a resolution.
“We were able to negotiate Tsarnaev to hoist himself up on the edge of the boat, lift his shirt, and raise his hands,” Merner said. “We took him into custody.”
Since his arrest, Tsarnaev has been convicted and given a death sentence.
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