Watertown Police Officers Testify About Gunfight With Tsarnaev Brothers
BOSTON (CBS) - The Watertown police officers who were there on Laurel Street on the night of April 18th, 2013 describe the firefight as less than ten minutes long - but among the most terrifying moments of their professional lives.
The carjacked black Mercedes SUV driven by the Tsarnaev brothers was tracked there via GPS.
First on scene was patrolman Joe Reynolds, who spotted Tamerlan Tsarnaev behind the wheel, but didn't yet know who he was.
"We locked eyes with each other," Reynolds told the jury Monday morning.
The vehicles passed each other and within seconds, Tamerlan was shooting at him, Reynolds testified. Before he knew it, both brothers were lobbing pipe bombs at him, and then a pressure cooker bomb.
Reynolds told jurors: "I could see ... a larger-type bomb being thrown at us. It was a cylinder, almost like a big cooking pot, a big pan. It shook me to my knees, my ears were ringing."
Other Watertown officers arrived, and they described eventually wrestling Tamerlan down to the street - only to look up and see Dzhokhar driving the carjacked SUV right at them.
Explained Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese: "I reached down and grabbed Tamerlan by back of the belt to drag him out of the street to prevent him getting struck."
But Dzhokhar drove over his older brother and dragged his body down the street.
Dzhokhar would soon ditch the car near Lincoln Street and hide inside a stranger's boat - where hours later, he was arrested.
On Monday the jury also heard from law enforcement who were there when Tsarnaev was arrested. Artnd in a surprise this morning, before court convened, they all took a trip to an undisclosed South Boston location where they got to see the boat itself up close. The defense had hoped to show the jurors the entire boat, but prosecutors were content to show the jury only the panels on which Tsarnaev wrote the note in which they say he justified the Boston Marathon bombings.
