Boston bombers' hostage: "They were going to New York"

(CBS News) As the manhunt for Boston bombing suspects Tamerlan and Johar Tsarnaev closed in on the brothers, they looked to find a car that was not traceable to them. The pair carjacked a man, who calls himself Danny, and according to the victim, "asked me a question like 'Do you know the Boston explosion on Monday?... I did that. And I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.'"

In an exclusive interview with CBS News' John Miller, Danny described the night he was taken hostage by the Tsarnaev brothers and the ways the suspects emphasized their violent nature.

"I thought it was just a robbery you know ... He took out his gun, pointed to me. He told that, 'You know I am serious. Don't be stupid,'" Danny said, describing the first moments of the carjacking.

"He ejected the magazine of his hangun, showed me the bullet in the magazine ... he did it very expertly, you know, very fast," Danny told Miller.

Dzhokhar, Tamerlan's younger brother, followed Tamerlan and Danny in another car behind them, before abandoning the vehicle.

At that point, Danny said he suspected "something really, really bad" would happen to him at the hands of the Tsarnaev brothers but said, "I wasn't thinking 'I'm gonna die.'"

"I was thinking, "Oh, they will just not only ask for money, they're going to ask me for something else. Probably they're going to take my car. Probably they're driving me to ... kidnapping me and putting me as a hostage or something. Something really, really bad.'"

When Dzhokhar ditched the second car, Danny said Tamerlan then opened his car trunk and "moved, like, four or five luggages from the other car to my car."

He now knows that "luggage" was actually several bombs but at the time, "I didn't know that it was bombs ... I thought, 'They are trying to flee, trying to go further.'"

Dzhokhar and Tamerlan conducted much of their conversation in Russian and Danny said he only heard one word throughout: "Manhattan."

It seemed like they were going to New York," Danny said, "He asked me a lot of questions like 'Can your car go out of state ... like New York?' So I think ... they're trying to go to New York by that time."

In need of fuel, the brothers stopped at a gas station in Cambridge -- a stop Danny viewed as "my last chance to run."

I already have a plan in my mind. When we get up to the gas station and Dzhokhar gets out of the car, he took my credit card, just went into [the] pump using my credit card. I was very lucky the pump was cash only. So Tamerlan asked him to pay some cash inside."

At this point, Danny's car door was unlocked and he was building up the nerve to flee from the car.

"I was counting ... 'one two three four.' And I just do it, I did it. I close the door and I feel Tamerlan was trying to grab me ... I was just running as fast as I can and I never, never look back."

Danny ran to the another gas station across the street and instructed the manager to call 911. He told the police, "Just send me someone here. After the police came in, I told them, 'They did the bomb and someone was ... very dangerous, they have guns.'"

The police used the GPS in Danny's car to track the Tsarnaev brothers down, which led to the gun battle that killed Tamerlan. Dzhokhar escaped the scene but was found a day later hiding in a boat in a Watertown, Mass., backyard.

Although Danny set in motion the chase that led to the death and eventual capture of the suspects, he backs away from the "hero" label.

I don't think I'm a hero ... Cause what I was trying to do was just trying to save myself. And as I told police, they are the hero ... They are the heroes."