BOSTON - The Search for Evidence in the Marathon Bombings

"Investigators Seek Boston Bombing Suspect’s Laptop" by SERGE F. KOVALESKI and MICHAEL COOPER, New York Times 4/25/2013

Excerpt

The search for evidence in the Boston Marathon bombings sent white-suited investigators combing through the garbage at a landfill in New Bedford, Mass., on Thursday as they hunted for a laptop computer belonging to one of the suspects, a law enforcement official said.

Investigators have been searching for several days for the laptop that they believe belonged to one of the two brothers suspected of setting off bombs at the Boston Marathon last week that killed three people and wounded more than 260, several law enforcement officials said.

They believe that the computer may have been thrown out, and they searched the Crapo Hill Landfill in New Bedford, near the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where one brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who was charged in the bombings this week, was a student.

New details continued to emerge about the bombing plot and last week’s manhunt for the suspects.  Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York called a news conference at City Hall to announce that Mr. Tsarnaev had told investigators from his hospital bed that he and his older brother, Tamerlan, had decided to drive to New York last Thursday night to use their remaining explosive devices in Times Square.  Law enforcement officials confirmed the account, but said the brothers’ intention appeared to have been more of a spontaneous idea than a real, thought-out plan.

Officials continued to revise and, in some cases, correct some of their initial accounts of the manhunt during the fast-moving events of last week.  An armed carjacking that state and federal officials at first said last week had occurred in Cambridge, Mass., actually appears to have taken place across the Charles River in Allston, a Boston neighborhood, several law enforcement officials said Thursday.

A Cambridge police spokesman, Dan Riviello, said the authorities were still trying to sort out whether the suspects, believed to be the brothers, had a car, or what car they used, in fleeing the location of a shooting earlier that night of an M.I.T. police officer in Cambridge, a few miles from Allston.

Angel Sifontes, 27, who works at a Hess gas station on Brighton Avenue in Allston, said detectives investigating the carjacking had visited the station to see if its cameras had caught any images of the crime.  “I was here when they came,” he said, adding that the carjacking was apparently out of range of the cameras.

The Cambridge police initially said the carjacking had been carried out by two men “in the area of Third Street in Cambridge.”  A sworn affidavit from an F.B.I. agent accompanying the criminal complaint against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that was unsealed on Monday said “an individual carjacked a vehicle at gunpoint in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

Christina Sterling, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney’s office in Massachusetts, said Thursday that officials had written “Cambridge” in the affidavit because that is what investigators believed at the time.  She said that “has since changed.”