More on the Boston Bombing Scene - Bomb Site #2

I’ve been studying the above photo, and there are a number of things I want to comment on. If any of this has been covered elsewhere, I apologize.

First, I wanted to determine where it was taken in relation to the two bomb sites in order to determine the direction that the suspects were walking, so I used the street sign as a guide and located Boyleston and Fairfield on a map. Here it is with the suspect’s location marked in yellow:

Next, I wanted to determine more precisely where in the photo the second bomb site was. To do this, I dug up the best shots I could find of bomb #2 going off, in order to locate any landmarks that I could coordinate with the first photo. Here’s the best two photos I have of the initial blast at site #2:

You can see in these two images that site #2 was just this side of the white building, which can be seen in the background of first photo as well. If you zoom in on that photo, you can see an American flag sticking out almost horizontally from this white building (see below). Looking at the first of the above two photos of blast #2, you can just make out the flagpole on the white building just behind the plume of smoke and fire. This gives a more exact idea of where site #2 is in the first photo.

 

The above image is a close-up of the area where site #2 is in the first photo. It’s pretty clear from this that bomb #2 hadn’t yet exploded when the photo was taken. The bomb is located on the curb just this side of the crosswalk (lower right corner).

Here’s another close-up with the approximate location of the bomb marked off with crosshairs:

We can see that a lot of people are on the sidewalk running away from the first bomb that has just gone off further down, and they’re passing directly through site #2 just as it’s about to go off, with the bomb on one side of them and the buildings on the other. There’s no one on the street anywhere near where the bomb should be. Take another look at the two photos of the explosion, and note that the flame extends out across the sidewalk where they are running.

We can see in the last image above that there seems to be something on the street at about the spot where bomb #2 is, but it’s unclear what. Here’s a view of the same area during the second blast, but from the opposite side:

 

Now we can see some things that weren’t clear in the previous images. The first thing to note is the ‘something’ on the street, and what appears to be debris from the bomb that extends in a narrow line out onto the street. This debris is in line with the mailbox and streetlight, but the smoke seems to be coming from somewhere a little further back and closer to the buildings. Also note that nobody is affected by any percussion from the blast, there are no smoke trails from jettisoned projectiles, and there is no disturbance of that ‘something’ on the street. The second blast appears to have been a carefully controlled one, just like the first.

This doesn’t mean that nobody was hurt. It just provides more evidence that #2 was a controlled explosion like #1. But considering the size of the initial flames, and the fact that people were running directly into them, I would assume that at least a few actually got hit by the flames and lost a few eyebrows.

Here’s a close-up of the crowded sidewalk at site #2 during the explosion. I’ve adjusted the image settings slightly to bring out the features as best as I can:

We can see that the sidewalk is quite congested, but nobody is taking to the open street, so there has to be a reason. If bomb #2 and resulting injuries were completely staged, then it would have been necessary to deal with the crowd running from bomb #1 so that they didn’t screw things up or see what they shouldn’t, so they were either stopped just before they reached site #2, or it was somehow triggered when there was a break in the crowd. The latter would be too chancy, so that leaves us with the only option that some people ran right through the explosion and suffered possible injuries from the initial flames. But that’s all, IMO.

I’ll continue with further analysis of the first photo in a later post, and focus on some other interesting details.

 

Anthony Forwood