BOSTON, March 12 (UPI) -- A witness who passed within five or six feet of the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer during the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers two years ago testified he remembers seeing only one of the Tsarnaev brothers there.
In testimony outlined by the New York Times Thursday, Nathan Harman, then a mathematics graduate student at MIT, said he was riding home on his bicycle when he came upon the scene the night of April 18, 2013.
According to prosecutors, both Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were at the scene and sneaked up on campus officer Sean Collier. Their plan, officials claim, was to kill Collier and take his .45 caliber handgun. They succeeded in killing the officer, prosecutors say, but not in getting the gun due to a security lock on Collier's holster intended to prevent exactly what the perpetrators tried to do.
During testimony Wednesday, Harman identified Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as the man he saw at the scene but said he doesn't recall seeing anyone else.
Related
"I only saw the one person," Harman said.
"He's right there... he has a blue shirt on," he said, referencing Tsarnaev at the defense table.
However, Harman's testimony is in direct conflict with documented video evidence of the murder. A security camera located across a courtyard and 20 stories up is not of high resolution but it clearly shows two people sneaking up on Collier's patrol car. In fact, the footage even shows Harman as he pedaled by the scene.
During further testimony Thursday, a man who spent about 90 minutes riding around with the suspects in his hijacked SUV described the ordeal during which, he said, he believed he was about to die.
"He said, 'I'm Muslim. Muslims hate Americans,' " Chinese businessman Dun Meng recalled one of the brothers as saying.
The Boston Globe reported that Dun said his vehicle was carjacked at gunpoint and that Tamerlan Tsarnaev admitted to rigging the bombings at the Boston Marathon three days earlier. He also mentioned that he had just killed Collier.
"He said he had just killed a police officer in Cambridge,'' Dun said.
Dun said he rode in the passenger seat during the hijacking, and that Tamerlan drove while Dzhokhar was in the back seat. After driving around Boston and surrounding areas, Dun testified that he feared the pair would kill him. After about 90 minutes, and while the suspects attempted to get fuel, Dun made a run for it and escaped.
During his testimony Dun identified Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as the man he remembers sitting in the back.
Tsarnaev's defense team is attempting to argue that Dzhokhar was not responsible for Collier's death either directly or by extension. They claim Dzhokhar's older brother, Tamerlan, was the one who shot Collier and their client was heavily swayed by his older brother's actions.
If convicted of 30 counts -- including four for murder -- stemming from the bombings and the four-day aftermath, Tsarnaev could be sent to death row. Defense attorneys aren't challenging the government's claim that Dzhokhar participated in the bombings and Collier's death. Their intention, rather, is to spare Dzhokhar the death penalty.
But the defense's claims that Dzhokhar did what he did solely because of his older brother's influence might prove to be a difficult strategy. Numerous witnesses have either testified or stated to police that, in their opinion, Dzhokhar behaved like a man with a violent purpose. One night during the manhunt on April 18, for example, a blistering firefight erupted in the Boston suburb of Watertown after the suspects had been cornered by police there.
Multiple witnesses to the battle told police Dzhokhar showed a passion for the brothers' cause -- lobbing explosive devices at officers, firing indiscriminately and even shouting, "You want more? I give you more!"
Further, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev supposedly scrawled an anti-American, jihadist note on the inside of a boat he was hiding in immediately before his capture -- nearly a full day after his older brother had died.
The trial is expected to last several weeks. His defense team tried multiple times to get the court proceedings moved out of Boston to another venue, arguing that it would be nearly impossible to find 12 impartial jurors in the city that experienced such trauma due to the bombings and subsequent manhunt. Judges have disagreed, though, noting that nearly all high profile cases face that challenge.
