• Boston cops who cuffed bomb suspect: 'No time to be afraid'

    Transit police SWAT officers who made the boat arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev detail the dramatic events that ended the hunt for the alleged Boston Marathon bomber.

    By Tracy Connor, Staff Writer, NBC News

    The Boston transit cop who put the cuffs on marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said it was a "good feeling" to arrest him — and later deliver the news to an officer gravely wounded in a firefight.

    "We got him," Patrolman Saro Thompson said he told fellow cop Richard Donahue when he visited him in the hospital Monday.

    Donahue, 33, was shot early Friday during a clash with the suspect and his older brother in Watertown, Mass. Tsarnaev, 19, escaped but was spotted in a boat in a backyard as dusk approached.

    Transit SWAT officers arrived at the scene after Tsarnaev, who had also been wounded in the earlier gun battle, had already fired on other cops.

    An FBI negotiator had convinced the accused bomber to surrender, but Thompson and other team members said they weren't sure he would do it.

    Mass. State Police via Reuters

    Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is searched by law enforcement officers after his arrest in Watertown, Mass.

    "We had no idea if the boat was rigged with explosives," Patrolman Jeff Campbell said at a press conference Monday evening. "He could have done anything."

    When they began moving in, they could see their target lying on his side in the boat, one leg and one arm hanging out of it, possibly unconscious.

    They were about 10 to 15 yards away when Tsarnaev suddenly sat straight up.

    "You don't really have time to be afraid," Sgt. Sean Reynolds recalled.

    "At a time like that, training kicks in," Thompson added. "We don't have emotion going into something like that."

    Thankfully, the suspect put both his hands up, and when the cops saw they were empty, they ran to him.

    "We pulled him down and put the cuffs on him," said Thompson, the arresting officer of record in an operation that involved hundreds of cops over the course of the day.

    Authorities say Tsarnaev had wounds to his head, neck, legs and hand.

    "I don't think he had the energy to say anything," Thompson said. "He was going in and out of consciousness."


    Tsarnaev was taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, where he was charged Monday with using a weapon of mass destruction for the double-bombing that killed three people and wounded 170.

    Donahue was at Mount Auburn Hospital, slowly improving. Transit Police Chief Paul MacMillan said he was breathing on his own but "there is a long road ahead."

    The SWAT team said they were glad they could tell him that the surviving suspect -- his brother was killed in the gun battle with Donahue and others -- was in custody.

    "It's a good feeling ... to know what happened to one of our officers and to put the cuffs on the guy and taken him down," Thompson said.

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  • Swarming police response in mall shooting highlights 'paradigm shift' since Columbine

    Steve Dipaola / Reuters

    Police move with an armored vehicle at the Clackamas Town Center shopping mall near Portland, Ore., on Tuesday. The sheriff says officers arrived at the shooting scene about a minute after the initial 911 call.

    By Elizabeth Chuck and James Eng, NBC News

    A gunman wielding a stolen semi-automatic rifle and several fully loaded magazines opens fire inside a shopping mall teeming with as many as 10,000 people. Yet, only two people are killed and one wounded. Sheer luck, or were authorities and mall officials well-prepared?


    Probably a bit of both, say law enforcement and security experts, some of whom credit new police tactics and better security training at schools and public venues for helping to minimize the casualties at the Clackamas Town Center near Portland, Ore.

    "I want to say that we were … well-prepared for this incident because we had practice in active shooter techniques at the Clackamas Town Center this past year for this type of situation," Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts said at a news conference Wednesday.

    It's not known what prompted the Tuesday afternoon attack. The sheriff said only that the shooter, identified as Jacob Tyler Roberts, 22, of Portland, appeared to be on "a mission" to kill.

    But he added that the first officers arrived about one minute after the first 911 calls and immediately separated into teams to head into the mall.

    Mall gunman: Personal setbacks, friends' disbelief

    Jacob Tyler Roberts is suspected of killing two people at an Oregon shopping mall. NBC's Jay Gray reports.

    "Law enforcement has learned from past tragedies throughout this country that we can't wait for SWAT teams, and teams need to deploy immediately," Roberts said. "So we trained and equipped each of our individual officers to form up in teams as they arrive and move immediately into engaging the threat, wherever it might be."

    That's a tactic that many law enforcement agencies began instituting in the aftermath of the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, where two young gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, shot to death 12 students and a teacher and injured 21 others before killing themselves.

    At Columbine, law enforcement followed traditional tactics of surrounding the building and waiting for more heavily armed units to arrive. Crucial minutes ticked away, during which Harris and Klebold killed and wounded more people.  

    Many agencies now train their officers to go after an "active shooter" immediately rather than wait for tactical squads.

    That rapid-deployment response is exactly what happened in the mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., theater on July 12 that left a dozen people dead. Aurora police got the first call at 12:39 a.m. Seven minutes later, suspect James Eagan Holmes was arrested.

    "Ever since Columbine, there's been a paradigm shift," said Mark Lomax, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association. "In the past, it was the standard protocol if there was a shooting incident or a barricade suspect or a hostage situation, the first responder would secure and contain the crime situation until the SWAT team or negotiators or bomb techs would arrive."

    Girl, 15, shot in Ore. mall cheats death twice

    School shootings highlighted a need to teach first responders to handle situations before those specialized units' arrival, Lomax said.

    "It takes a while for a fully equipped SWAT team or hostage negotiation team to get to the scene. We've realized over many sad incidents that time is of the essence when it comes to saving lives and that those first responders should be fully knowledgeable with how to handle those situations. They won't be the experts, but they need to have enough training and equipment to do exactly what they did in Portland," he said.

    Sgt. A.J. DeAndrea of the Arvada (Colo.) Police Department, who was among the elite team members who searched Columbine High the day of the shooting, says the tactic of going after shooters immediately has helped save lives. He told The Denver Post the first SWAT team didn't even enter Columbine until 38 minutes after the first call.

    "There are times when you cannot wait. It's an inherently risky job. Our job is to go in and protect innocent lives," he told The Denver Post in an interview earlier this year. 

    The Clackamas Town Center mall general manager Dennis Curtis says the mall had an emergency plan in place and regularly holds emergency drills. Watch entire comments.

    Many malls and other public venues now routinely practice responses to emergencies like the one that unfolded Tuesday in Oregon. Clackamas Town Center has a lockdown procedure in place.

    "Every mall that we own and manage has an emergency response manual and we rehearse for these things all the time. We go through those emergency response plans on a regular basis. We've done drills with the sheriff's office," said the mall's general manager, Dennis Curtis.

    "Basically, in a situation like this it's either stay right where you're at and lock yourself down or get to the nearest exit and get out of the building. I just have to commend all of the retailers and our security staff. They did an amazing job."

    Mall shooting victims: Hospice nurse, entrepreneur

    Sheriff Roberts noted that the gunman's rifle jammed at some point, and that stroke of luck may also have saved some lives. He also said a large number of police officers arrived on the scene very rapidly, curtailing the suspect's ability to move around the mall.

    Lomax said police departments across the country have been training for "active shooter" situations so they, too, can take down a suspect who has a weapon in a public area rather than waiting for backup or a tactical squad.

    "I believe that there are a lot of departments that are being very proactive on this type of training and equipping their patrol officers with automatic weapons and ballistic vests and shields to address these types of things," he said. "It only takes a matter of minutes to do a lot of mayhem out there, and these sheriffs and police chiefs understand that they need a very equipped and trained front line whenever it comes."

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  • One suspect dead after SWAT team in Washington state is fired on, police say

    By NBC News staff and wire reports

    UPDATED at 3:55 a.m. ET: Authorities searched for a possible second gunman early Monday after at least one shooter wounded one man, then opened fire on a SWAT team and police officers before being found dead during a manhunt in woods north of Seattle.

    The officers were fired upon Sunday afternoon as they responded to reports of a shooting in a driveway Arlington, Wash. They found a man with a non-life threatening injury.

    According to The Seattle Times, spokesman Steve Dittoe of Snohomish County Sheriff’s office said SWAT officers arrived within 10 minutes of the shooting and "our armored vehicle was hit several times" by rounds of gunfire.

    Linda Purtteman, who lives near the home in Arlington said a neighbor told her that people in the area were urged to stay indoors.


    She told the Times that she heard gunshots, but was unfazed by them.

    "I have a few neighbors who go shooting a lot out here, so I didn't think anything of it," she said.

    Complete US News coverage on NBCNews.com

    "We were told to stay away from the windows, but the whole front of my house is a window," Purtteman told the newspaper.

    Precautionary search for possible second suspect
    A man later was found dead and a weapon was recovered, Snohomish County Sheriff's spokeswoman Shari Ireton said late Sunday. But nearby residents were told to leave their homes as a precaution as authorities searched for a possible second suspect, Ireton said.

    Vehicles were found with bullet holes on more than one side, the Times reported.

    "At this point, we're still assuming there's a second suspect. We are combing through property and buildings just to double-check before we start letting people back to their houses," Ireton told The Associated Press.

    About 70 people at a Sons of Norway camp at nearby Riley Lake were in lockdown late Sunday, according to King 5, NBC News’ Seattle affiliate.

    Read KING 5's reporting on the incident

    "We all just banded together and made sure that we let everybody know what was going on. and told everybody to get out of the pool and the lake and not be out in the open field and everybody's just been kind of waiting to hear updates," camper Berit Kuchs told King 5.

    There were no reports of other injuries. Arlington is about 50 miles north of Seattle.

    The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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  • New Jersey cop surrenders after 10-hour standoff with police

    View more videos at: http://nbcphiladelphia.com.

    By Danielle Johnson and Cydney Long, NBCPhiladelphia.com

    An armed, off-duty police officer who fired shots at officers and a SWAT team after barricading himself inside his estranged wife's home in Pennsylvania surrendered to police late Sunday, according to NBCPhiladelphia.com.

    Richard Klementovich, 42, a Clifton Township, N.J., officer, gave himself up shortly before midnight at the house in Bittersweet Drive, Doylestown Township.

    Police said the suspect was holed up in the house for nearly ten hours. Klementovich was the only person inside the home during the standoff, authorities said.

    Klementovich was arraigned early Monday morning on 13 counts of attempted homicide.

    Read more from NBCPhiladelphia.com

    Police were called to the residence around 1:44 p.m. Sunday to break up an alleged dispute between neighbors.

    It escalated into a standoff and a SWAT team moved armored tanks into the backyard.

    Investigators said the off-duty cop began shooting from the windows at police officers.

    “It was just like pow, pow, pow…it was like a rifle. I must have heard 50 shots,” said Dawn Keely, who is a neighbor.

    One officer was injured by metal shrapnel. The shots struck two patrol cars and an armored car.

    Officers warned other residents to lock themselves in the basement or leave immediately. About a dozen residents were displaced.

    Klementovich and his estranged wife are involved in a bitter divorce, according to friends.

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