From Reuters:
Police Officer Shot to Death at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is total off the wall 100% fact free speculation on my part, but let me toss out a couple of words regarding possible motivation for the recent Boston events: Aaron Swartz.
Here is the page on Reddit on the battle in Watertown, MA. (Coincidentally, Reddit was co-founded by Swartz.)
Live video from Watertown, MA. One man on the ground, one shot and taken to hospital (different guys? -- no, apparently same guy who is now dead, cops are searching for another suspect) lots of cops running with guns drawn. (There will be some heavy police overtime bills!)
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| The late Aaron Swartz, not Suspect No. 2 |
Or is all this just a coincidence?
Updates: "THESE ARE THE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING SUSPECTS" --Boston's Channel 7 at 3:01 EDT.
So, the answer to my question about the MIT shooting is: Yes, the MIT shooting is relevant to the Boston bombing.
Channel 7 in Boston 2:33 AM EDT: One suspect shot and killed, second on the run.
No names yet.
From the Boston Globe:
Breaking News An official with knowledge of the investigation said a Marathon bombing suspect is in custody 9 minutes ago
It would seem like a possible contradiction between a bombing suspect being in custody versus one suspect in MIT killing/carjacking/robberies dead and one uncaught -- can you be both dead and in custody? -- but things are confused.
Update: Now, the cops are saying "One suspect is accounted for." So my pedantic quibble about being both dead and in custody apparently occurred to the cops, too.
A second cop, a transit officer, was shot and is in serious condition.
Update: From the New York Times:
Two young men, armed with guns and explosives in what appeared to be backpacks, engaged in a violent standoff with dozens of police on a street in Watertown, Mass., Thursday night, a resident said.
Andrew Kitzenburg, 29, said he looked out of this third floor window to see two young men of slight build in jackets shooting at dozens of police officers from behind a black Mercedes SUV. The officers and the men were 70 yards apart, he said, and engaged in “constant gunfire.”
A police SUV “drove towards the shooters,” he said, and was shot at until it was severely damaged. It rolled out of control, Mr. Kitzenberg said, and crashed into two cars in his driveway.
The two shooters, he said, had a large and unwieldy bomb. “They lit it, still in the middle of the gunfire, and threw it. But it went 20 yards at most.” It exploded, he said, and one of the two men ran towards the gathered police officers. He was tackled, but it was not clear if he was shot, Mr. Kitzenberg said.
"a large and unwieldy bomb"
Off topic, but I'm reminded a little of the 1997 North Hollywood bank robbery shootout.
Update: From the MIT Emergency website:
Friday, April 19, 2013 1:56 AM
MIT Police have determined that the suspect in this evening’s shooting is no longer on campus. It is now safe to resume normal activities. Please remain vigilant in the coming hours.
Friday, April 19, 2013 1:04 AM
Suspect remains at large. Please continue to stay indoors. Updates at emergency.mit.net
Friday, April 19, 2013 12:37 AM
Update on shooter situation. The shooter remains at large, police continue to search the campus. Please REMAIN INDOORS until further notice. ...
Thursday, April 18, 2013 11:41 PM
Update on shooter incident. Responding agencies continue to investigate the situation. The scene is outside of Building 32 (Stata) and 76 (Koch) near Vassar and Main Streets. Injuries have been reported. The situation is still very active and we ask everyone to stay inside. ...
Thursday, April 18, 2013 10:48 PM
At 10:48 PM today gunshots were reported near Building 32 (Stata) which is currently surrounded by responding agencies. The area is cordoned off. Please stay clear of area until further notice. Unknown if injuries have occurred.. Although the situation is considered active and extremely dangerous, an investigation is underway. Updates will be provided at this site when more information becomes available.
Almost certainly completely coincidental, but:
U.S. District Attorney Carmen Ortiz is helping lead the investigation regarding the bombings near the finish line at the Boston Marathon on April 15, helping the FBI and state investigators to find the individual or individuals who are responsible for the deaths of three people and the injuries of at least 176 others. ...
In office since 2009, U.S. Attorney Ortiz recently faced scrutiny for “prosecutorial overreach” in her office’s criminal case against internet entrepreneur Aaron Swartz. Two years after his arrest on federal hacking charges, the 26-year-old committed suicide in January 2013.
To flesh out the long-shot idea: Aaron Swarz was a charismatic Internet figure (a cofounder of Reddit) who killed himself in January when he was at risk of a huge stretch in prison for downloading JSTOR academic papers from a closet at MIT and putting them on the Internet for free. He's a hero to some of today's youth.
Carjacking, gunfight, explosions? A cop is dead. Area newscasters are noticeably shaken.
ReplyDeleteThis ish is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-ANAS
There are apparently grenades and explosions going of in watertwon,m ass. A white male in pajamas is one of the two suspects.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cnt4g/just_heard_gunshots_in_watertown_heavy_police/
Homeland Security is involved.
ReplyDeleteA dirty little secret of the parts of Cambridge near MIT is that is where a large number of the city's housing projects are located---still rather grouped together in that 1960s style that magnified the violence of the black ghetto later on (Cabrini-Green, anyone?). Most modern project planners work to spread the ghetto around and separate them---prevents large gangs and riots from happening.
ReplyDeleteHarvard's end of Cambridge, meanwhile, has none, and a lot of nice housing for professors. MIT got the shaft there. But maybe the ghetto was designed back in the Cold War to keep Russian spies from wandering around MIT's military research facilities at night.
More seriously, an MIT cop getting shot so close to the Marathon is suspicious, but more likely one of Obama's sons got hot at his local housing project and went looking for trouble.
The interwebs is speculating that this guy might be suspect #2.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/25/sunil-tripathi-missing-brown-university_n_2947997.html
They say he has some chemistry background and went missing a few days after a number of homemade bombs were found near Brown University. He's family lives in MA. It's not confirmed that he's a suspect in the homemade bombs, but there's a lot of coinkodoinks.
He took a leave of absence from Brown due to severe depression, bombs were found near Brown just days before he disappeared, FBI is searching for him as a missing person (do the FBI get involved in adult missing persons when no foul play is apparent?), nose and body resemblance, etc.
I don't know much more about this than you do since I left there in 1967, but as long as we Californians are guessing, I'll guess neighborhood sleaze.
ReplyDeleteCrossed my mind too. And one reason it did is that suspect #2 looks kind of like Aaron Swartz.
ReplyDeleteThere's no connection, but the guy in the white hat is a dead ringer for Swartz
ReplyDeletehttp://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/thelede/posts/suspect-number-2.JPG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aaron_Swartz_profile.jpg
Until they shut it down. you could listen to the Boston police scanner tonight. They were looking for a dark and a light skinned middle eastern suspects. They carjacked a black mercedes and had the driver drive them for about 30 minutes until they escaped. Then they gassed the vehicle and fled. Short;y after the police pursued. I believe they shut down the scanner shortly after the suspects threw grenades at the pursuing police care. Again all of this was clearly explained and discussed over Boston police scanners.
ReplyDeleteThe way this has all gone down is just funny.
ReplyDeleteAt first you had CNN (correctly) reporting a Boston police department BOLO that the suspect was 'darker-skinned'
The FBI then release blurry images in which one of the suspects is 'darker- skinned,' and the other look like a white male.
Then Dave Green's high res photo of the white hat suspect surfaces, in which the white hat suspect does not look white at all!
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/thelede/posts/suspect-number-2.JPG
And at every step of the way, liberals and conservatives have gloated that the suspects look like their political enemies.
Who knows what will happen next...
whoresoftheinternet has the geography right, but usually the ghetto-dwellers make trouble in residential neighborhoods, not near MIT where there are campus cops around. The exceptions are often the... er... less diverse ghetto-dwellers. The striking thing (to me) about the Boston ares that there are predominantly white areas that are just as shitty as the black ghettos. Gone Baby Gone really nailed them. Of course, it's like Anna Karenina: the shitty white areas have a different feel than the shitty black areas, but they are just as shitty.
ReplyDeleteCarjacking, gunfight, explosions? A cop is dead. Area newscasters are noticeably shaken.
ReplyDeleteAnd that isn't even mentioning all the market craziness of the past week and the preview of what the TPTB have in mind for all of us provided by the Cyprus situation.
One thing I'll always remember from 1989 is that when the wheels start coming off, it happens faster than anyone would ever have expected.
That isn't to say it is happening now, but things definitely do seem to becoming more unstable.
Forewarned is forearmed...
Of course, it's like Anna Karenina: the shitty white areas have a different feel than the shitty black areas, but they are just as shitty.
ReplyDeleteNo they aren't. Given the choice of being plopped down defenselessly, or your daughter being plopped down defensively, in the shittiest black area of the world or the shittiest white area of the world at, say, 2 am in the morning, holding bags with dollar signs on them like in the cartoons, 90% (or more) of the people in the world, of any race, will choose the shitty white area.
Yours was a typical egalitarian marxist comment seeking benediction from the gods of PC.
"the guy in the white hat is a dead ringer for Swartz"
ReplyDeleteSimilar nose.
Probably no connection, but all very weird.
Regarding marathon bombing suspect number 2, the guy with the big nose who wore his white cap backwards....the only reason I can think of that he would have worn his hat that way, exposing his recognizable profile, is narcissism, the Clebold-Harris kind. After all, each had to know about the cameras. Of course, it's weird that his buddy was well covered. If it was important to me to escape capture after committing a crime, I'd not allow my accomplice to allow himself to be so facially visible to the cameras.
ReplyDeleteI guess another reason the white hat guy might have not cared is that he was convinced he was leaving the country before any visual of himself would be known by the authorities.
Sooooooo weird--who the hell are these guys. The new photos people sent to police of suspect two are really clear. These guys must have wanted to get caught.
ReplyDeleteBoston Globe is reporting one suspect in custody:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04/18/mit-police-officer-hit-gunfire-cambridge-police-dispatcher-says/4UeCClOVeLr8PHLvDa99zK/story.html
If Larry Auster were still with us I wonder what he'd say about the Backward White Hat Bomber.
ReplyDeleteWell, steve, conservatives are off the hook. We ain't responsible for this (look at the new FBI photos).
ReplyDeleteFBI just released more pics of the two--really clear. They both have big noses. Looks like suspect 1 could be the older brother, possibly even a young father of suspect 2.
ReplyDeleteThe stupid phase of this news story has lasted longer than I expected but we're definitely still in it. Freetard activists? Sorry, that's about as believable as the income tax protester of lore. Thanks to the global village everything happening everywhere is being used for narrative grist, even a routine fertilizer disaster.
ReplyDeleteCould the suspect be a Brown University student on deferment? Very interesting.
ReplyDeletedeferment*
ReplyDeleteI'm writing from within yards of where the shootout in Watertown happened. I was just getting to sleep when I heard hundreds of rounds fired in bursts, single shot, staccato, at least three different calibres from the sounds and also what sounded like grenades or IEDs (maybe pipebombs). I will say that Watertown is home to many Muslim immigrants, most of whom are great neighbors and fine people. But I've heard teenage punks sound off late at night in trhe local 24 hour store about Jihad, I suspect mostly to epater le kafir. BUt I'm now leaning to the conclusion that a couple of these punks may have become over-intoxicated by their own rhetoric and caused all the havoc of the past five days. I agree with other posters that the MSM and feds have done everything in their power to pin this on a couple of white, right-wing loons yet to be found (white Islamics, white Hispanics, WTF). But to my eye the suspects' pictures look a lot like many of my muslim neighbors from various parts of the Balkans, Levant, and Middle East. Color me prescient if I'm right. Call me a hateful right-wing, racist loon if I'm wrong.
ReplyDelete"FBI just released more pics of the two--really clear. They both have big noses."
ReplyDeleteso it was the mossad? i called it! you all saw it!
"I'm writing from within yards of where the shootout in Watertown happened."
ReplyDeleteThanks.
Keep your head down until they round up the other suspect or suspects.
Even if this case were related to swartz, what would the connection be beyond physical resemblance?
ReplyDelete"Even if this case were related to swartz, what would the connection be beyond physical resemblance?"
ReplyDeleteMartyred hero to today's youth?
ReplyDeleteMartyred hero to today's youth?
youth who look like him?
Sorry, you can't blame the Jews for this one. First of all, Aaron Swartz has no motive to blow up the Boston Marathon. Second, this isn't his MO--he's a hacker, not a bomber. Third, he has a great alibi--he's dead.
ReplyDeleteSorry, Ex Sub, whoresoftheinternet is correct. Maybe it's just a Boston thing, but I feel no safer in Southie than I do in The 'Bury.
ReplyDeleteThe tech and nightlife scene around Kendall and Central Squares has pushed the trash back a little, but it's still a dicey area.
One thing I'll always remember from 1989 is that when the wheels start coming off, it happens faster than anyone would ever have expected.
ReplyDeleteI've been saying this for years. That when and if things do break, events will subsequently move far more quickly than most people expect. Everyone's going to be very surprised at how rapidly things go down, and attitudes change.
When things are forced into the background/underground, it's really hard to track them. They build up pressure for a long time, and when they finally break out into the open, they do so with a suddenness that surprises people who weren't paying attention to all the pressure building up. The dam would always hold. Bob and Sue would always be together. The USSR would always creak along. American-Americans will always be the glue that holds the center.
Hahaha, just saw the photo of one of them at Drudge. Man does he ever look Jewish. I guess I sorta got half of the wish I expressed to Sirota.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how long his mug will be plastered on the TV. Will they keep it up forever, like they would if he looked like McVeigh? Or will they retire it ASAP? Or will they split the difference, and hunt up a photo where he doesn't look anything like his spitting image of a record producer self?
BIDEN: 'President already lining up additional executive actions'...
ReplyDeleteYeah, yeah. So sayeth every kid who ever got his ass kicked. *Sniff* "I'm gonna get you..." He's butthurt over finally being slapped off and now he's got to tell the whole playground what he's gonna do. Sorry; his sidekick's gotta tell us what he's gonna do.
STFU, empty suit.