Sgt. Sean Murphy was incensed by what he saw as the glamorization of the suspected Boston Marathon bomber on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
So the Massachusetts State Police officer decided to take action. Murphy, a tactical photographer, made public for the first time a series of behind-the-scenes photos documenting the night of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s capture in Watertown, Mass.The images, published Thursday by Boston Magazine, vividly show details of the capture, from the movements of police to Tsarnaev’s bloodied condition.
“Murphy wants the world to know that the Tsarnaev in the photos he took that night — defeated and barely alive, with the red dots of sniper rifles lighting up his forehead — is the real face of terrorism, not the handsome, confident young man shown on the magazine cover,” wrote John Wolfson, the editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine.
In one photo, a trooper kneels with a printout of the suspect’s mug shot tucked under his arm. In another, a window frames the covered boat that served as Tsarnaev’s hiding place, an orange sherbert-colored sky in the backdrop.
Another shows Tsarnaev, 19, emerging from the boat with a police laser trained on his forehead. He is raising a bloodied right hand.
“I hope that the people who see these images will know that this was real. It was as real as it gets,” Murphy wrote in a posting on the magazine’s website. “This may have played out as a television show, but this was not a television show.”
