Outgunned and out of his depth

IT FOLLOWS - Open The Door Clip

Who brings a BB gun to a firefight?

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did.

Continue reading below

He paid 62 bucks for a Smith & Wesson replica BB gun at a Dicks Sporting Goods and that was the gun the cops found with his prints on it in the middle of Laurel Street in Watertown after the shootout that left his big brother Tamerlan dead.

That testimony, on Tuesday in federal court, is actually good for the defense because it follows the narrative of Dzhokhar being more of a moron than a martyr.

But the prosecution got its licks in Tuesday, too, no more so than when they played a video taken from a surveillance camera at a gun range in Manchester, N.H., where on March 20, 2013, less than a month before the Marathon bombings, Dzhokhar and big brother Tamerlan went to practice shooting.

They rented two 9mm Glocks, the same caliber as the Ruger used to shoot MIT police Officer Sean Collier and shoot at the Watertown cops that cornered them later. And they bought four boxes of ammo to fire. They spent an hour there. And the whole shooting match, so to speak, was on Dzhokhars dime.

He paid for everything, $170.75, according to a receipt that FBI agent Matthew Riportella obtained from the firing range.

So much for Dzhokhar being the follower, the reluctant partner of his domineering older brother. He wasnt just going to drop a backpack with a pressure cooker bomb on Boylston Street and walk away. He was preparing for battle. And he was paying the tab.

On his check-in card at the firing range, he characterized himself as an intermediate level shooter. Nice.

But then youre left with the incongruous, positively ludicrous image of a self-styled jihadi, thinking hes on the cusp of paradise, standing on Laurel Street, taking aim at advancing police officers with a ... BB gun?

Christopher Donahue, a fingerprint expert for the Massachusetts State Police, said he got a partial palm print and fingerprint that matched Dzhokhars on the box of Winchester 9mm hollow point bullets recovered from the shootout scene in Watertown. Thats good for the prosecution, which has suggested Dzhokhar helped his brother reload during the firefight.

But Judy Clarke, one of Dzhokhars lawyers, had Donahue repeat for the jury that the prints left on the bullets themselves, and on the magazine that held the bullets, were Tamerlans. So thats good for the defense, right?

Dzhokhars prints, meanwhile, were found on the trigger of the BB gun that was found on Laurel Street after the firefight with the cops.

We finally got an idea of the intensity of that firefight.

Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant David Cahill said they recovered 56 shell casings from the Ruger that Tamerlan was firing at cops on Laurel Street, before he finally ran out of bullets and threw the gun at Watertown police Sergeant Jeff Pugliese.

Cahill said there were 210 other shell casings, all from weapons fired by law enforcement.

The testimony of Miguel Colon, one of the Watertown cops involved in the firefight, allowed the prosecution and defense to engage again in what has been a recurring waltz about the significance of Dzhokhars escape route in the Mercedes SUV he and his brother carjacked.

Colon repeated the assertions of other police officers on the scene Pugliese, Sergeant John MacLellan, and Officer Joe Reynolds that Dzhokhar could have driven off, away from them, and that even after he made a three-point turn and headed at them, he had plenty of room to drive around them. Instead, they said, he gunned the engine and ran over his brother after the cops who were trying to subdue Tamerlan rolled out of the way.

The defense, in the person of Tim Watkins, keeps hinting that there was something on that far end of Laurel Street, by Quimby Street, that led him to turn around and head in the other direction.

Just what that was, the defense hasnt said.

Of course, the defense could explain it away by just saying their client is stupid.

After all, who brings a BB gun to a firefight?

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com

Source: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/24/outgunned-and-out-his-depth/4YJuw0VugSN71Iqvc8A1VK/story.html