Barbara Faherty waves an American flag and cheers on the police with her neighbors moments after the last of the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects was caught on Arsenal Street in Watertown, Massachusetts on April 19, 2013. Monday's Boston Marathon bombing left three dead and over170 injured. UPI/Matthew Healey |
License Photo
WATERTOWN, Mass., April 20 (UPI) -- The Boston Marathon bombing suspect's capture Friday came on the anniversary of the victorious start of the Revolutionary War that Patriots' Day commemorates.
U.S. TV networks pointed out after 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested that the culmination of the five-day manhunt for Monday's marathon bombing suspects coincided with the anniversary of the 1993 Branch Davidian fire that killed 81 near Waco, Texas, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168.
Going more or less unnoticed was that the arrest also fell on the anniversary of the April 19, 1775, Battles of Lexington and Concord, the start of the American Revolution, famously memorialized by Ralph Waldo Emerson as the "shot heard round the world." The battles are officially celebrated in Massachusetts on Patriots' Day, the third Monday in April -- the day the Boston Marathon is run each year.
The colonists won the first battle against the British in Concord, Mass., on that April 19 date 238 years ago.
The Battles of Lexington and Concord took place in the same general part of greater Boston as the manhunt for the suspects in Monday's bombings near the marathon finish line that killed three people and injured more than 175.
Among the towns and villages involved in the April 19, 1775, battles was Cambridge.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer Sean Collier was killed in Cambridge Thursday night, allegedly shot by the suspected Boston Marathon bombers.
Tsarnaev -- whose 26-year-old brother and fellow bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed early Friday in a police shootout -- was apprehended shortly before 8:45 p.m. Friday from his hiding place in a boat parked in the back yard of a home in Watertown, Mass.
During the Revolution, Watertown is where colonist Maj. Gen. Joseph Warren prepared and set out for the June 17, 1775, Battle of Bunker Hill.
Warren served in the battle as a private, rather than exercise his rank, and was killed in combat.
