The gun battle early Friday morning occurred near the intersection of Laurel Avenue and Dexter Street in Watertown.

The suspect, leaving his brother behind, then drove west on Laurel Avenue, past School Street, where Laurel turns into Spruce Street. He then drove up Spruce as it curves towards the northwest. In total, he drove about 4/10ths of a mile from the gun battle, around a bend in the road, and then parked the car near the intersection of Spruce and Lincoln Avenue. This is where the empty SUV was found.

The suspect then ran away on foot. It's not clear what route he took, but it seems unlikely that he would continue walking northwest on Spruce. The most direct route from the Spruce/Lincoln intersection to his eventual hiding place was to go west on Lincoln, cross over Walnut Ave, and then head down Franklin Avenue (or parallel to it), eventually finding the boat at 67 Franklin.

In the Escape Route link below, point A is the site of the gun battle, point B is where the SUV was abandoned, point C is where the suspect was found:

Escape Route

The distance from the Spruce/Lincoln intersection to 67 Franklin Street is only 2/10ths of a mile. Google says it's about a 4-minute walk.

In the On Foot link below, point A is where the SUV was abandoned. Point B is where Tsarnaev was found by a resident the next night:

On Foot

So the suspect traveled 6 or 7/10ths of a mile from the gun battle, by SUV and on foot, and ended up only 2/10ths of a mile from the SUV. Why wasn't he found during the manhunt?

I couldn't find a map of the 20-block search perimeter anywhere. According to some news reports, however, the perimeter was bordered by two major streets: Mount Auburn Street on the north and Arsenal Street on the south (since Mount Auburn runs toward the southwest, these two streets eventually intersect).

It turns out that, according to someone who claims to have been listening to a police scanner, the eastern boundary of the perimeter was School Street, which runs north and south. These three streets (Mount Auburn, Arsenal and School) form a right triangle, roughly the shape of New York State, with the right angle being the intersection of Arsenal and School.

In the Search Perimeter link below, look for the right triangle around point A (the SUV) and point B (the famous backyard boat):

The Search Perimeter

Is this the 20-block perimeter? The streets in this area don't form a grid, so it's difficult to count the blocks. But it seems to be in the vicinity of 20 blocks, if you average them out (some of the blocks are relatively small and some are relatively large).

It seems plausible that this triangle is the perimeter. For one reason, it's boundaries are major streets -- perhaps the police thought that the suspect wouldn't have been able to cross any major streets on foot, given all the officers in the area. For another reason, the intersection of Lincoln and Spruce is roughly near the center of the triangle. It makes sense to establish a perimeter around the place where the suspect started running away on foot.

What's remarkable about this perimeter, however, is that 67 Franklin Street is also near the center of the triangle (which makes sense, since it's only 2/10ths of a mile away from where the SUV was found).

Yet during the post-capture press conference, when a reporter asked the officer in charge how the suspect was able to escape the manhunt, the officer said that 67 Franklin Street was "just outside the perimeter".

Is it possible that someone was supposed to search around 67 Franklin and simply missed the suspect? Is it possible that the suspect hid somewhere else and eventually found his way to 67 Franklin, after that address had been searched? Is it possible that there was a trail of blood from the SUV to the boat that nobody noticed? Could dogs have been used to track the suspect?

And how could smoke have obscured suspect #2's escape if he simply drove down Spruce Street after the gun battle, getting out of the SUV 6/10ths of a mile away? Did anyone actually pursue suspect #2 after the gun battle or was everyone (understandably) tending to suspect #1 and the officer who was wounded?

None of this is clear, but neither is the explanation given by the police.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter what actually happened, so long as the suspect was caught. But there was something that didn't make sense and now, to me anyway, it does.

Postscript:

Late last night, after reconstructing the events above as best I could, I noticed that Wolf Blitzer had done another interview on CNN with the Watertown police chief. The headline on the interview suggested that the chief would lay out the details of the events in Watertown.

So I wondered if the chief had admitted that the manhunt failed to find its target even though that famous backyard boat is near the center of the 20-block search perimeter, a few blocks from where the suspect dumped his getaway car.

Oddly, when Blitzer got to the point of discussing the manhunt, he quickly moved ahead to the capture ("let's fast forward"). Maybe he knew that it would be embarrassing for the chief to discuss the police's failure to find the suspect.

The story we're being told about the Boston bombing is that the police did a wonderful job protecting the citizens of Boston. Many police officers were clearly very brave and did their jobs efficiently and at the risk and even the loss of their own lives.

But the fact that they couldn't find a 19-year old college kid, possibly wounded during the gun battle, hiding a couple of blocks from where he left his getaway car, doesn't fit the narrative. (It's also part of the narrative that it was reasonable to shut down a city of 4 million people in order to protect it.)

We are supposed to admire and be grateful to the people who protect us, whether it's the police, the FBI or the U.S. Marines. Most of us feel that way, up to a point. For some, however, stories that reflect poorly on our protectors should be avoided, if at all possible. Too often we behave or are treated like children who must not question the competence or good faith of our parents.

In the video below, Wolf asks how the suspect escaped at 10:18 and "fast forwards" at 11:28, not having received much of an answer:



http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/...

(Note: I first wrote about this subject here. An earlier post here includes a few links to sites where I found information: http://whereofonecanspeak.com/ )

Additional postscript on 4/23:

I appreciate the comments regarding speculation, and there was an element of speculation to what I wrote on Sunday, but I don't think it was pure or rampant speculation. I didn't imply that there was any kind of conspiracy involved, aside from the possible and typical kind in which people in the news often don't tell the whole truth and reporters often let them get away with being self-serving.

It certainly appears to be the case that Tsarnaev was found a short distance from where he parked his getaway car (the SUV). Someone on another site has suggested that the police might have set up the perimeter at Walnut Street and searched mainly east of the SUV. Maybe they got a tip that led them in that direction. I still think it would have been odd that such an intensive search didn't include areas closer to the abandoned SUV. Searching a 20-block area east of Walnut would mean that the search was seriously skewed away from the SUV. Given where Tsarnaev was captured, reporters should have asked about this by now, or the police should have explained their decision without being asked.

Maybe some journalist is writing a book about these events already, and it will all become clear one day. But it's reasonable to expect an explanation now, given that the police performed an intensive search of the neighborhood, telling people to stay in their houses, and the suspect was found shortly after a resident was told it was relatively safe to come outside (although it was still relatively dangerous, considering who was in his backyard).

Since the media weren't talking about this, it wasn't easy to find out what actually happened. These are the main sites from which I got information on Saturday night (accurate or not) regarding the manhunt and the locations involved. I apologize for not including these links in this diary sooner:

"gun battle at Dexter and Laurel Streets":

http://www.boston.com/...

"Abandoned SUV at Laurel and Spruce St":

http://twitchy.com/...

"20-block perimeter bordered by Arsenal Street and Mount Auburn Avenue":

http://amestrib.com/...

"Perimeter: Mt. Auburn to Arsenal St. to School St.":

http://muckrack.com/...