Monday: Death toll raised to three in Boston Marathon bombing
BOSTON — Plucking a couple of faces in baseball caps out of a swarming crowd, the FBI zeroed in on two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing and shared surveillance-camera images of them with the world Thursday in hopes the public will help hunt them down.
The somewhat blurry but still detailed photos and video depict one young man in a dark cap and another in a white cap worn backward, both wearing backpacks and one walking behind the other on the sidewalk near the finish line as marathoners run by.
The man in the white hat was seen setting down a backpack at the site of the second explosion, said Richard DesLauriers, FBI agent in charge in Boston.
The man in the dark hat was dubbed Suspect 1 by the FBI and appeared to be wearing sunglasses. The other, in the white hat, was labeled Suspect 2. Both appeared to be wearing dark jackets. The FBI did not comment on the men’s height, weight or age range and would not discuss their ethnicity.
“It would be inappropriate to comment on the ethnicity of the men because it could lead people down the wrong path potentially,” said FBI agent Greg Comcowich, a spokesman for the Boston FBI office.
The enlarged pictures of white-hatted Suspect 2 in profile and head-on were blurry but still remarkable in their detail — and more revealing than those of Suspect 1.
While authorities said the information on the men began coming together over the previous day or so, agent Daniel Curtin said the FBI did not release the photos earlier because “it’s important to get it right.”
Distribution of the images brought both encouragement and unease to some Bostonians.
Jennifer Lauro of Topsfield, Mass., worried that the photos might breed fear and suspicion.
“It just looks like a college kid, so I think that’s going to make people feel vulnerable,” she said. “Because it could be anybody. It looks like any kid from Boston College or Boston University or any other school.”
Judy and Marc Ehrlich watched the marathon from a spot between miles 25 and 26 on Monday and felt the ground shake when the bombs exploded. The couple said it was creepy to see images of the suspects who were there at the same time, walking around. But they were comforted that the FBI had come up with suspects.
“Unless they kill themselves, they’re going to get found,” Marc Ehrlich said. He added: “There’s nowhere in the world to hide.”
James Kallstrom, who headed the FBI office in New York City in the 1990s, said “you get a million phone calls” when the public is asked for help. But “that’s why you have 1,000 people working for you.”
“The key is to have a good filtering system. There’s going to be a whole bunch of these things you just disregard,” he said.
At the Cathedral of the Holy Cross earlier in the day, Obama saluted the resolve of the people of Boston and mocked the bombers as “these small, stunted individuals who would destroy instead of build and think somehow that makes them important.”
“We will find you,” he warned.
Seven victims remained in critical condition. Killed were 8-year-old Martin Richard of Boston, 29-year-old restaurant manager Krystle Campbell of Medford, Mass., and Lu Lingzi, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China.
The large volume of video and photos gathered as part of the investigation is being examined and enhanced by a special FBI unit. Investigators are looking at video frame by frame — a laborious process, though one aided by sophisticated facial-recognition technology and other software, forensic specialists said.
Investigators can set the software to search for certain types of objects or people matching a height and weight description. The software can also spot patterns that human analysts might not notice, such as a certain car that turns up in different places, said Gene Grindstaff, a scientist at Intergraph Corp., a Huntsville, Ala., company that makes video analysis software used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
“Back in the days of 20 years ago, you were lucky if you had video and it was probably of poor quality and it took a tremendous amount of enhancement. Today you have a completely different issue,” Grindstaff said.
Watch a video of the suspects in the bombing on YouTube.