Almost a million residents of Boston and surrounding towns were ordered to stay in their homes on Friday as the hunt for one of the suspects in the marathon bombing continued.
The suspects were identified as brothers, reportedly of Chechen origin. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, remains on the loose. Law enforcement officials said he was the suspect wearing the white hat in images released by the FBI on Thursday of the bombing suspects. His elder brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in the early hours of Friday after a car chase and shootout with police.
Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick warned people to remain indoors “with their doors locked” until further notice, after a night of high drama during which a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was shot dead.
“We’re asking people to shelter in place: in other words, to stay indoors, with their doors locked, and not to open the door for anyone other than a properly identified law enforcement officer,” Patrick said.
“That applies here in Watertown, Cambridge, Waltham, Newton, Belmont and at this point all of Boston. All of Boston. This is a serious situation. We’re taking it seriously; we’re asking the public to take it seriously as well.”
The announcement, made during a brief press conference in Watertown just after 8am on Friday, dramatically extended the lockdown area to over 930,000 across the six neighborhoods. Earlier, residents in Watertown, population 32,000, had been told to stay inside, and public transport systems in and around Boston had been shut down.
Source: Boston on lockdown as police home in on bombings suspect | US news | The Guardian