Watertown Police Officers Recount Harrowing Encounter with the Bombing Suspects

Officer Joseph Reynolds saw them first, and he barely had time to turn his cruiser around before the battle began with the Boston Marathon Bombing suspects. 

Reynolds and four of the Watertown Police officers who shot it out with Tamerlan and Dzhohkar Tsarnaev at the intersection of Laurel Street and Dexter Avenue shared their stories with MSNBC and WCVB-TV. 

Reynolds received a report to be on the lookout for a stolen, black Mercedes SUV. He had orders not to stop the vehicle, so he tried to approach without spooking the Tsarnaevs.

“(Tsarnaev) stopped his vehicle, and I was about 10-15 yards away,” Reynolds said in an interview on MSNBC’s The Last Word on Tuesday. “And Tamerlan jumped out and he just started walking toward my cruiser and started firing at me.”

When Sgt. John MacLellan arrived he saw a police cruiser backing up toward him.

"As I came around the corner onto Laurel, I see Officer Reynolds in reverse and I hear him say 'shots fired,'" MacLellan said in an interview with WCVB. "I look down range, as he's backing up, I'm throwing it into park and a round comes through my windshield."

MacLellan ducked down and went to grab the AR-15 rifle from his car, but in the chaos it took a few attempts to retrieve it, he told MSNBC. MacLellan got behind a tree and told Reynolds to take cover behind a fence.

Then, they saw a large object flying at them. Reynolds said, "Sarge, we have to move!" 

Seconds later the object exploded.

Officer Miguel Colon arrived during the middle of the shooting and he got a good view of the explosion.

“I’ll never forget that big explosion that went off there,” Colon said during the MSNBC interview. “It’s a dark street as it is, and the whole area just lit up. And everything - a huge cloud of white smoke covered the whole area ... My only fear was that they were using [the bombs] to advance on us.”

The Tsarnaev brothers, however, remained behind their vehicle.

Even after the bullets began flying, the officers told WCVB they did not know they were up against the Boston Marathon Bombing suspects.

"It never crossed my mind who they were, I just thought it was a vehicle that was carjacked and a couple of people who didn't want to get caught," MacLellan said during the WCVB interview.

Speeding to the Scene

When the shooting began, Sgt. Jeff Pugliese dropped the paperwork he was doing at the station and sped toward the scene - about two miles away. "I covered the last mile and a half in thirty seconds," he in the MSNBC interview.

Pugliese had been working a detail assignment so he didn't make the drive in a police cruiser, but rather in his family's minivan, according to WCVB. 

Rather than join his two fellow officers, Pugliese decided to flank the suspects. He ran through back yards and hopped fences on Laurel Street. He stopped about 25 feet to the left of the suspects.

He tried firing straight at them, but could not hit the Tsarnaev brothers as they crouched behind the SUV. Then he tried to ricochet bullets and still did not hit them, he told MSNBC.

The suspects spotted Pugliese and Tamerlan began rushing at him firing, and came less than 10 feet away.

"We were exchanging gunfire at each other. My pistol ran out of ammunition, had to do a reload while he was firing at me," Pugliese told WCVB. "Then something happened to his pistol. I don't know if he ran out of bullets or he had a malfunction or what but I remember him stopping, looking at the gun, getting frustrated and throwing the gun at me. I holstered my weapon and chased after him and tackled him."

Pugliese escaped without being hit by Tamerlan, but Tamerlan had been hit by nine rounds, Pugliese told MSNBC.

“It’s not like the movies where you shoot somebody and they get thrown ten, fifteen feet back,” Pugliese said on MSNBC. “That’s not reality. People can take the bullets and keep on fighting.”

As Pugliese was securing Tamerlan, he suddenly saw the SUV coming at him.

"I grabbed Tamerlan by the back of the pants and I tried to drag him out of the road, I moved him maybe a half a foot. The headlights were right in my face, I rolled back, I think they missed me with that vehicle by an inch or so," Pugliese said on WCVB.

Danger Not Over

After Dzhokhar left the area in the Mercedes, it seemed that it was over but then they realized an officer had been hurt. 

"I took a breath and said did this really happen? And then I heard, officer down, officer down," Reynolds told WCVB.

Menton and Reynolds assisted MBTA Officer Richard Donahue, who had been hit by a bullet. Another Menton, Tim's brother Patrick, came to Donahue. Patrick and fellow Watertown firefighter James Caruso helped stop Donahue's bleeding before he was sent to hospital.

As the shooting came to an end, officers from other departments reached the residential intersection in East Watertown, MacLellan told MSNBC. He said it was somehow fitting that the other departments came to aid local police officers, and the Watertown officers helped save one of them.

"So [Officer Donahue] comes to save our lives, and [Officers Reynolds and Menton] end up saving his life, which is a perfect circle as far as I’m concerned. That’s the Super Bowl of police work: saving another officer’s life,” MacLellan told MSNBC.

Colon recalled the fear he had for his fellow officers.

"I know all these guys, I know their families, the fear that I had that one of them was going to get hit was unreal," Colon said on WCVB.

MacLellan told WCVB that he was proud of how he and the other Watertown officers handled a harrowing situation.

"I'm very proud we were able to stop them," said MacLellan. "Obviously it was a very dangerous situation but we're police officers and that's what we do."