Jurors See Note Left By Tsarnaev In Watertown Boat
BOSTON (CBS) - Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote his now infamous note as he waited for authorities to find him, or his body, inside a stranger's Watertown boat. A short time later, the bullets fired at him, along with his own blood, would cover some of his message. But what's still readable, jurors saw up close Tuesday.
"God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions," Tsarnaev wrote in pencil, essentially admitting the role he and his brother Tamerlan played in the Boston Marathon bombings.
"We are promised victory and we will surely get it. Now I don't like killing innocent people...but due to said [bullet hole] it is allowed," he continued.
"The US Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that. I can't stand to see such evil go unpunished. . . I ask Allah . . . to allow me to return to him and be among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven," the note reads.
The so-called boat note was just one of hundreds of pieces of evidence introduced Tuesday - boxes and boxes hauled into court, as prosecutors build their case. All of it was once stored at the city's Black Falcon cruise terminal, which FBI witnesses described became the hub for all bombing evidence.
"Now that it's been brought out in testimony I can talk about it," says WBZ security analyst who was the city's police commissioner at the time. "This was a raw mill space. It wasn't heated. There was electricity there; that was the only thing," he describes.
"It was a secret location at the time, no one knew it was there. And it was in an area where it could be secured, the public could be kept away from it," Davis said, explaining why FBI officials chose the spot.
"That was really a makeshift laboratory that was put together for processing evidence. It was quite a thing to a behold actually," Davis said. "It served its purpose very well. We were in there, we did what we had to do, then we got out of there."
Earlier in the day, tensions rose in court as one of Tsarnaev's lawyers, Miriam Conrad, angrily cross examined Steve Kimball, the Boston FBI agent who analyzed Tsarnaev's two Twitter accounts and read from them under direct examination from prosecutors.
Some of his social media entries seem damning until she got the agent to admit that many were just Tsarnaev quoting rap lyrics or comedians.