It's over: Boston bombing suspect in custody

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By Pete Williams, Richard Esposito, Michael Isikoff and Tracy Connor, NBC News

The Boston Marathon bombing suspect was captured Friday night after police found him in a boat in a suburban backyard following a bloody rampage and daylong manhunt, law enforcement sources said.

Cheers went up from a crowd of police gathered at the scene in Watertown, Mass., where bursts of gunfire had been heard over the course of two hours.

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.

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 Tsarnaev, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Chechen origin who grew up in Cambridge after his family moved here a decade ago.

"Probably been there all day," the official said.

About an hour after the first barrage in Watertown, Mass., after night fell, more shots were heard. The police threw so-called flash-bang grenades designed to disorient and brought a negotiator to the scene.

The boat later caught fire.

The capture ended a manhunt that had the city of Boston and its suburbs on total lockdown -- following a rampage that included the slaying of a campus security officer, a carjacking and the death of Tsarnaev's 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, in a firefight with cops.

The overnight violence had triggered 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.

The brothers' bloody last stand began 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.