The Reddit sleuths who named an innocent student a Boston bombing suspect
The bombs went off at 2:49 p.m., about four hours into the race.
Two pressure-cooker bombs, placed in backpacks, exploded near the finish line on Boylston Street.
Three people were killed. More than 260 were injured.
Within days, the search for the bombers moved online.
Amateur sleuths on Reddit and other platforms began crowdsourcing the investigation.
They examined photos. They examined videos. They examined grainy frames of the crowd.
They named innocent people as suspects.
One of those wrongly accused was Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student.
Tripathi was missing at the time.
His family was subjected to harassment.
The exact timeline of when Reddit first named Tripathi is not in the record.
What is documented is the weight of the accusation.
The FBI, meanwhile, was working from surveillance footage and images from the bombing scene.
Not from social media.
The public's response was a massive manhunt and a citywide lockdown.
It was also a digital dragnet.
An innocent student was caught in it.
He was later found dead by suicide.
His family has spoken publicly about the harm of online speculation.
How did this happen?
How did a missing person become a suspect?
How did crowdsourcing turn into accusation?
That would require evidence.
The record shows the FBI identified the Tsarnaev brothers through surveillance footage.
The record shows the online sleuths identified Sunil Tripathi.
One identification was correct. The other was not.
THE BOMBS AND THE MANHUNT
The explosions occurred at 2:49 p.m., about four hours into the race.
They were the deadliest attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.
The bombs were placed in backpacks and detonated remotely.
The FBI, led by Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers, asked the public to submit photos and videos.
The public responded.
On April 18, the FBI released images of two suspects.
That night, the brothers shot and killed MIT police officer Sean Collier.
Then they carjacked a man, who later escaped and alerted police.
A shootout followed in Watertown.
Tamerlan was killed.
Dzhokhar escaped.
A massive manhunt began.
The city of Boston and surrounding areas went into lockdown.
On the evening of April 19, Dzhokhar was found hiding in a boat in a Watertown backyard.
The pressure was on investigators.
It was a pressure they invited, with their request for public help.
It is a pressure the record does not fully account for.
The specific role of social media in the FBI's investigation is not in the record.
What is in the record is the timeline: the bombs, the images, the shooting, the carjacking, the shootout, the capture.
What is in the record is that the identification of the brothers came from surveillance footage and images from the bombing scene.
The crowdsourced hunt was happening at the same time.
It was fast. It was public. It was wrong about several innocent people.
But the official identification did not come from Reddit.
It came from the footage.
THE TWO SUSPECTS
The FBI identified the Tsarnaev brothers through surveillance footage and images from the bombing scene.
Not through the threads. Not through the crowdsourced maps. Through the footage.
The public had been asked to submit photos and videos, and the FBI released images of two suspects on April 18, 2013.
The official identification was a matter of evidence, frame by frame.
Reddit, by contrast, named Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student missing at the time, and Salaheddin Barhoum, a high school student.
Both were cleared.
The crowdsourcing effort was fast. It was public. It was wrong about several innocent people.
It is a contrast that holds: official evidence versus public speculation.
Which one held up?
The footage did.
The record does not establish the brothers' exact motivations beyond self-radicalization.
The investigation revealed that the brothers had self-radicalized, though no foreign terrorist organization was proven to have directed them.
The prosecution, led by U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, charged Dzhokhar with 30 federal counts.
Conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. Bombing a public place. Murder.
The defense, led by Judy Clarke, argued that Dzhokhar was influenced by his older brother Tamerlan.
It was an argument about influence, not innocence.
The evidence was fingerprints, DNA, and a note written on the boat's interior.
The note was found where Dzhokhar hid.
The public's speculation had named the wrong people; the official case named the brothers.
That would require evidence.
The crowdsourcing effort had no such evidence.
It had images and guesses.
The FBI had the footage.
The footage held.
THE VIRAL ACCUSATION
Reddit had a thread for it. So did 4chan, Twitter, and every comment section in reach.
They called it crowdsourcing. The public was asked to submit photos and videos, and the public submitted everything.
Amateur sleuths examined frames, compared backpacks, matched jawlines. They identified several innocent people as suspects.
One was Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who was missing at the time. Another was Salaheddin Barhoum, a high school student.
Neither was involved. Both were cleared.
The record is plain on this point: the FBI identified the Tsarnaev brothers through surveillance footage and images from the bombing scene. Not through Reddit. Not through any thread.
Richard DesLauriers, the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge, publicly announced the arrests and the evidence. The footage held. The guesses did not.
Tripathi was later found dead by suicide. His family was subjected to harassment.
The exact extent of that harassment is not detailed in the record. What is documented is that the family has spoken publicly about the harm of online speculation.
They said the speculation spread faster than any correction. They described the weight of a name attached to a bombing with no evidence attached to the name.
Barhoum’s name was also cleared. He was a student. He was wrong.
The FBI released images of two suspects on April 18, 2013. The brothers were identified from surveillance footage, not from a viral post.
It is a fact that the crowd guessed. It is a fact that the FBI watched.
One was documented. One was not.
The family of Sunil Tripathi still carries the public record of that. The record shows what the FBI did. It also shows what the crowd did.
The crowd did not find the bombers. The crowd found a missing student.
That would require evidence. The footage had it. The threads did not.
AND THE STORY STILL ISN'T OVER
The trial judge imposed the sentence in June 2015.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty on all 30 counts in April 2015.
In 2020, a federal appeals court overturned the death sentence.
The court cited insufficient jury screening.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death sentence.
Tsarnaev remains on federal death row at U.S. Penitentiary, Florence, in Colorado.
He awaits execution. His appeals continue.
The outcome of those appeals is not in the record.
Denise Richard wrote a public letter in 2015.
She asked for life in prison instead of death.
Not because she forgave. Because the sentence, she wrote, would spare her family further pain.
The Richard family has since advocated for the death penalty to be carried out.
The city of Boston holds an annual remembrance on April 15.
"Boston Strong" continues as a symbol of resilience.
The crowd that named a missing student has no memorial.
The record of what they did is part of the story now.
It is a story that is not over.
The legal saga continues. The public's reckoning continues.
The footage did what the threads could not.
That was true in 2013. It remains true now.
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