Bursts of gunfire erupted Friday evening as police surrounded a boat where the Boston Marathon bombing suspect was believed to be holed up, law enforcement sources said.
The dramatic turn of events began unfolding soon after police told residents they could leave their homes even though suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was still on the run despite a door-to-door search.
Just before 7 p.m., an unsettling barrage of gunfire was heard on Franklin St. in Watertown, Mass., and dozens of police and armored vehicles sped to the area.
Officials said a woman in the area reported seeing blood leading to a boat in her yard, and thermal imaging from helicopters had located someone in the vessel.
A senior police official told NBC News the person was believed to be the accused bomber.
"Probably been there all day," the official said.
"He has a full tank of gas on the boat," a police source said.
About an hour after the first barrage in Watertown, Mass., after night fell, more shots were heard. The boat was later reported to be on fire.
Police appeared to have Tsarnaev cornered less than an hour after they announced at a 6 p.m. briefing that they were lifting a lockdown order because the all-day manhunt had turned up no sign of him.
Just before the briefing, police released new details about the scope of a bloody overnight rampage that began with the death of a campus security officer and ended with the death of Tsarnaev's 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, with a bomb strapped to his body.
Hours after the FBI put out their photos Thursday night, the brothers exchanged 200 rounds with police during a stunning pre-dawn firefight and left behind seven homemade explosives, officials said.
The violence led to an extraordinary shutdown of transportation, schools and businesses in Boston and its surrounding suburbs, with police warning more than a million people to hunker down behind locked doors while SWAT teams fanned out looking for the younger suspect.
Investigators searched all day for Tsarnaev, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Chechen origin who grew up in Cambridge after his family moved here a decade ago, seeking asylum.
AP
Suspect #1 (Tamerlan Tsarnaev) pictured in a photo from The Sun of Lowell provided by AP and Suspect #2 (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) in the Boston Marathon explosion is pictured in this undated FBI handout photo.
Still, officials said residents could venture outside and the subway system was going back on line. They said patrols would be beefed up in Watertown, where the suspect was last seen, but state police tactical units were pulling back.
People began leaving their homes, some of them cheering. SWAT units were still on the scene when the shots were heard just before 7 p.m.
It was a rapid turn of events after a night of violence that police said included the slaying of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology patrol officer in his car in Cambridge, a carjacking and a half-hour hell ride for a man who was eventually released unharmed, before the gun battle with police.
The drama began at MIT about five hours after the FBI released surveillance photos of two "extremely dangerous" men suspected of planting two bombs near the finish line of Monday's Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding 176.
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