• Burial spot found for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev

    Worcester police Sgt. Kerry Hazelsays a "courageous and compassionate" individual came forth and helped to provide a burial spot for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

    By Tracy Connor, Staff Writer, NBC News

    The body of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was buried in a secret spot Thursday, ending a week of controversy and uncertainty over his final resting place.

    Police in Worcester, Mass., did not disclose the location of the plot.

    "A courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide the assistance needed to properly bury the deceased," police said in a statement. "His body is no longer in the City of Worcester and is now entombed."

    The transfer of the body came a day after Worcester Police Chief Gary Gemme practically begged someone to find a place where Tsarnaev, who was killed during a firefight with police, could be laid to rest.

    Cambridge Police Dept. file

    A burial site has been found for the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

    “There is a need to do the right thing," Gemme said. "We are not barbarians. We bury the dead.”

    The question of what to do with the accused bomber's remains had roiled the community. Protests sprang up outside Peter Stefan's funeral home after he accepted the body and prepared it in accordance with Muslim tradition.

    The city of Cambridge, Mass., where Tsarnaev had lived, said burying him in the city cemetery would disturb the peace. Other offers of burial plots came and then quickly went out of fear of protests or desecration.

    There seemed to be support for sending the body to Russia, where Tsarnaev's parents live, but the cost and logistics stalled that option.

    Before Thursday's announcement, a retired Vermont teacher, Paul Keane, offered to surrender a family plot in a Hamden, Conn., cemetery as a tribute to his mother, who taught him to "love thine enemy."

    Keane said he didn't withdraw his offer even after he got hate mail and threats but no one from Worcester ever contacted him.

     

    This story was originally published on Thu May 9, 2013 10:11 AM EDT

  • NYPD chief: Bombing suspects may have been headed for NYC to party

    Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is telling authorities he and his brother, Tamerlan, learned how to make bombs from Al Qaeda's online magazine, which recommends using fireworks. Officials say Tamerlan bought fireworks in New Hampshire before the bombing. NBC's Jeff Rossen reports.

    By Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News

    The brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings may have been headed for New York to party after the attack, the New York police commissioner said Wednesday.

    “There was some information that they may have been intent on coming to New York, but not to continue doing what they’re doing,” Kelly told reporters at police headquarters. “The information that we received said something about a party, or having a party.”

    A man authorities say was carjacked by the brothers has told investigators he believes one of the brothers said “Manhattan” before he escaped, but investigators have cautioned that it may have been a language mixup because the brothers were speaking with Russian dialects.

    The surviving brother has told investigators that the pair acted alone, were inspired by an al Qaeda propaganda magazine, and plotted the bombing to defend Islam after the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, federal law enforcement officials told NBC News.

    Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed early Friday after a shootout with police in the Boston suburbs. His younger brother and alleged accomplice, Dzhokhar, is in fair condition at a Boston hospital. The brothers killed a campus patrol officer and carjacked an SUV before the shootout, authorities have said.

    Homemade explosives and one semi-automatic handgun believed to belong to the brothers were recovered by investigators, officials said. The gun’s serial number was obliterated, but Massachusetts state police were working to reveal the number.

    Slideshow: Aftermath and reaction following Boston bombings

    Cj Gunther / EPA

    Heightened security, empty streets, and memorials mark the the days after the Boston Marathon bombings.

    Launch slideshow

    Cambridge police, meanwhile, released a booking photo of Tamerlan Tsarnaev from a 2009 domestic violence arrest during which he was accused of assaulting his girlfriend.

    In a closed-door session on Wednesday, members of the House Intelligence Committee were briefed by the FBI and other federal agencies on the ongoing investigation. Among the issues discussed is what federal authorities knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's trip to Russia as well as a timeline on his radicalization. 

    Also, according to an interview with Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Mich., the ranking member on the committee, it was learned that the device used to trigger the explosives was a remote control for a toy, not a cellphone as thought earlier.

    Nine days after the twin blasts near the marathon finish line, authorities early Wednesday reopened the section of Boylston Street in central Boston where the first bomb went off.

    The site of the explosion has been paved with fresh cement and is surrounded by orange construction cones but opened to foot traffic. People stopped to pay respects and take photos.

    “The people of Boston are strong like cement. Strong people. They get together when it’s needed,” said Robert Bibias, a city masonry worker who early Wednesday cemented over what had been a blood-stained crime scene.

    Thousands of people, including police from all over the country, gathered at the baseball stadium of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a memorial service for Sean Collier, the campus patrol officer who authorities said was shot to death by the Tsarnaev brothers before the carjacking and shootout.

    With police snipers holding positions atop nearby buildings, Vice President Joe Biden called the perpetrators of the marathon bombing “twisted, perverted, cowardly, knockoff jihadis.”

    “The irony is, we read about these events, we experience them, but the truth is, on every frontier, terrorism as a weapon is losing,” he said. “It is not gaining adherents.”

    Tamerlan Tsarnaev is seen in a booking photo from a 2009 arrest in Cambridge, Mass.

    The vice president went on: “We will not hunker down. We will not be intimidated.”

    His wife, Dr. Jill Biden, visited Boylston Street on Wednesday.

    Private funerals were held Tuesday for Collier and for Martin Richard, the 8-year-old boy killed near the finish line. Two other people were killed at the marathon, and more than 200 were injured, including 39 who were still hospitalized Wednesday.

    In Russia, the brothers’ aunt said that a Boston-area mosque has refused to hold a funeral for Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

    American authorities have told the family that they can have Tsarnaev’s body, and an uncle approached the mosque to request a burial and funeral but was declined, said the aunt, Patimat Suleimanova.

    She said that she did not know the name of the mosque but that it was one the family attended. A mosque in Cambridge, Mass., has said that Tsarnaev attended and occasionally caused disruptions and that mosque leaders threatened to kick him out.

    A spokesman for the Cambridge mosque, Yusufi Vali, said the mosque had not heard from the family.

    “There were some reports out there that we had rejected his burial, and — or the family had reached out to us, rather. And to our knowledge, you know, the family has not reached out to us,” he said on the MSNBC program “Andrea Mitchell Reports.”

    The mosque, run by the Islamic Society of Boston, has also said that congregants have been questioned by the FBI. The mosque did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday from NBC News.

    Earlier this week, Imam Talal Eid of the Islamic Institute of Boston, a separate institution, told The Huffington Post: “I would not be willing to do a funeral for him. This is a person who deliberately killed people. There is no room for him as a Muslim.”

    NBC News' Adrienne Mong, Alastair Jamieson, Bill Dedman and Matthew DeLuca contributed to this report.

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    This story was originally published on Wed Apr 24, 2013 7:14 AM EDT

  • New York digging up dozens of unidentified bodies in potter's field

    Melinda Hunt / AP file

    Since 1869, more than 800,000 people have been laid to rest at the potter's field on the island that lies in the waters just off the Bronx borough of New York City.

    By Jonathan Dienst, NBC New York

    The New York City medical examiner's office is digging up dozens of unidentified bodies buried in the city's potter's field as part of a new push to solve unsolved missing persons’ cases.

    In recent months, 54 bodies have been exhumed from Hart Island, which sits on the Long Island Sound. More than 800,000 people are buried there, most of them poor citizens, officials say. 


    The unidentified include runaways, the homeless and others whose families lost track of them. And now dozens of positive identifications are being made, thanks to improved DNA technology.

    Encouraged by the success, the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner applied for and received a grant from the National Institute of Justice to continue their work. Investigators are now poring over decades of records.

    "We have about 1,200 cases that we are working on that go to the late 1980s," said Dr. Benjamin Figueroa, who is helping to supervise the search effort.

    In examining the skeletal remains of unidentified persons, anthropologists are able to extract DNA samples and glean new leads that weren't contained in the original case files. Modern science can now indicate whether remains belonged to a male or female and roughly how old the person was.

    Read the original story at NBCNewYork.com

    "We can go back now and say, for example, it's actually a black female age 17 to 25," said Dr. Bradley Adams. "There's work we can do now with forensic anthropology which couldn't be done back in the time."

    Many advances in DNA technology came about from identifying human remains recovered at the site of the World Trade Center attacks after 9/11. Scientists at New York’s new forensic lab are entering DNA samples from exhumed bodies into local and national databases.

    But generating the DNA samples is only half the battle, said assistant lab director Mark Desire.

    "Equally challenging is to get a DNA profile to compare it to a family," said Desire. "Part of the big push is to make sure reference families' samples get in the system."

    Without a DNA sample from relatives, cases often cannot be solved. If some of the people buried are from out of state or overseas, it's especially difficult to make the match.

    That appears to be the case with "Baby Hope," the 6-year-old girl whose starved body was found stuffed in a cooler in the woods off the Henry Hudson Parkway in 1991.

    "You have information that can make a very straightforward identification, but nobody is looking for that child," said Adams. "Otherwise, there would be a DNA hit. It's hard to believe you'd have a child ... that's still unidentified."

    In cases where a DNA match fails, scientists may turn NAMUS, a national website that lists missing people, unidentified bodies and clothing found on bodies.

    "The great thing about NAMUS is there is a whole community of volunteers and cybersleuths ... who will analyze what we put on the website," said Figueroa. “There have been a number of times where somebody from the general public has pointed us to a missing person in connection with one of our unidentified."

    "We don't pass judgment on who that person was," Figueroa said. "If there is something that can be done, we're going to do it. It's our job to identify that person. Doesn't matter if that case came in today or 20 years ago."

    From a legal and financial standpoint, officials say a family can move forward once they have a death certificate in their hands.

    In Queens, 83-year-old Gloria Chait has held on to her son Steven's belongings and has renderings of what her son might look like now, decades after he disappeared from his dorm room at Columbia University in 1972.

    "I love this kid," said Chait, who still keeps Steven's belongings in his room in their Fresh Meadows home. "No one wants to go 40 years not knowing where your child is."

    But she also has a grim hope that the city's new push to identify the "lost souls" of Hart Island may finally give her answers as to what happened to Steven.

    "You can't be cynical about this. You have to be realistic and a bit optimistic," said Chait. "You have to understand what kind of suffering goes with a person that disappears. It is immeasurable."

     

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