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Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been in a lockdown after a series of events that followed when suspects in the Boston marathon bombing shot Sean Collier, a young Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer (badge 179 but yet unnamed) in his cruiser. Rediff team reports.
People are being evacuated from Norfolk Street in Cambridge, the location of the family home of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19.
Pressure cookers and other material that suggested their involvement in the Boston bombings were found in Watertown. Collier was a civilian employee with the Summerville police department before he joined the MIT police.
The two brothers are believed to have carjacked a Mercedes SUV on 3rd Street. They released the driver at a petrol pump at River St and Memorial Drive in southeast Cambridge.
Cambridge lies to the east of Boston. The carjack victim allegedly told the police that the brothers told him they were the Boston Marathon bombers.
When the police chased the car, the suspects stopped the car near Dexter Street and Laurel Street and shot at the policemen. Locals reported that the exchange lasted minutes, with hundreds of rounds being shot and the suspects throwing explosives at the police.
According to the police, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and one policeman were critically hurt in the exchange.
When his brother fell, Dzokhar Tsarnaev got back into the car and, running over his brother in the process, fled the scene. He was suspected to have carjacked a gray Honda CRV, with the number plates 3126-ES9. But the car was found abandoned later.
Tamerlane was taken to Beth Israel hospital in south Boston where he died of his injuries at 1:35 am.
Tamerlan allegedly went to the Bunker HillCommunity College in Boston to become an engineer and was a boxer for the Team Lowell, even taking time off from academics to train for the National Golden Gloves competition in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Ruslan Tsarni, their uncle who lives in Montgomery Village, Maryland still described the elder nephew as a 'loser.'
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev went to Cambridge Rindge and LatinSchool in Cambridge, even winning a $2,500 scholarship from the city. He is a student at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
The brothers are of Chechen origin. Dzhokhar was born in Kyrgyzstan and the family has been in the United States since 2002 or 2003.
“The situation is quite tense - most of the area is pretty much paralysed because of the ‘shelter-in-place’ order,” Mary Ann Joseph, acting Dean at the School of Management at Cambridge College, Massachusetts, said about the ongoing hunt for the second bomber.
“All schools and colleges in the Boston-Cambridge area and many businesses are closed. They are still hunting for the second suspect in Watertown -- which is a neighboring suburb to Cambridge.
“They are also evacuating the campus of UMass Dartmouth where one of the suspects was a student. The public safety officials are handling the situation well -- we all got emergency messages early on Friday morning with information about the lock-down -- so there is no immediate threat to the public, only the suspense of waiting for the situation to resolve and for normal life to resume,” she said.