Wednesday, January 07, 2015

Stills of notorious Forum video with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev passing the patio

This post is an update of my last blog entry

Still 1

Still 2

                                                                                                                                              





















These two pictures were published by the FBI on April 18th, 2013. In my preceding blog post, I featured the right picture (Still 2) and pinpointed it at the sidewalk in front of the Forum. I referred to it incorrectly as "FBI photo" - it has turned out to be a video still. Still 1 is obviously taken from the same video footage.

The FBI webpage doesn't reveal the origin of the stills, but it is possible to determine it with the help of photos of the Forum (source). It is a surveillance camera at the restaurant, positioned above a glass door right beside the entrance of Boylston Street 755. You can see it on this photo in the upper right corner:


Here is another photo:



At first, it looks like an outdoor lamp with a shade, but a closer look reveals the typical tinted hemisphere of a surveillance camera. As there is no other device visible as an alternative candidate, this camera definitely recorded the famous and notorious Forum video which so many people want to see and so few were able to see, and the two pictures are taken from it. I have been told by Boston residents that there's still a surveillance camera at the same place.

In Still 1, Dzhokhar passes a group of spectators at the barriers. These people are also visible in Still 2 in the upper right corner. So the pictures must have been taken within a short time, maybe 2 or 3 seconds. This would correspond to a distance of about 10 feet covered by Dzhokhar. The following diagram illustrates the situation (the location of Still 2 is slightly adjusted in relation to an earlier version):


The C on red represents the surveillance camera.
The dotted white lines represent the camera's central alignment for the respective stills.
The DTs represent Dzhokhar's position in Still 1, Still 2, and the place where he dropped his bag.
The dotted black line represents Dzhokhar's path in the Forum video.
The yellow explosion symbol represents the location of the pressure cooker bomb.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has never entered the Forum patio. His bag was not the second bomb.