A FUNERAL HOME has claimed the body of one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a gunbattle with police after an intense manhunt.
Department of Public Safety spokesman Terrel Harris said a funeral home retained by Tsarnaev’s family had picked up the 26-year-old’s remains.
Authorities are now closer to being able to make public the cause of Tsarnaev’s death.
The medical examiner determined the cause of death on Monday, but officials said it wouldn’t be disclosed until his remains were released and a death certificate was filed. It was unclear whether the death certificate had been filed.
Tsarnaev’s widow, Katherine Russell, who has been living with her parents in Rhode Island, learned this week that the medical examiner was ready to release his body and wanted it turned over to his side of the family, her attorney Amato DeLuca said days ago.
Tsarnaev’s uncle Ruslan Tsarni, of Maryland, said Tuesday night the family would take the body.
“Of course, family members will take possession of the body,” Tsarni said.
After a hearse believed to be carrying Tsarnaev’s body departed Boston, television stations reported that their helicopters followed it to the Dyer Lake Funeral Home in North Attleboro.
About 20 protesters gathered outside the funeral home. An Associated Press photographer later saw a hearse leaving the home escorted by two police cars.
Dyer-Lake Funeral Director Tim Nye told The Sun-Chronicle newspaper that the body was only brought to his funeral home temporarily and was transported to another facility, but he didn’t say where.
“He is not at our funeral home and we won’t be handling final arrangements,” Nye said.
Tsarnaev, who had appeared in surveillance photos wearing a black cap and was identified as ‘Suspect No. 1′, died three days after the bombing.
The April 15 bombing, using pressure cookers packed with explosives, nails, ball bearings and metal shards near the marathon’s finish line, killed three people and injured more than 260 others.
Authorities said Tsarnaev and his younger brother later killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer and carjacked a driver, who later escaped.
Authorities said that during the gunbattle with police, the Tsarnaev brothers, ethnic Chechens from Russia who came to the United States about a decade ago, set off another pressure cooker bomb and tossed grenades before the older brother ran out of ammunition.
Police said they tackled the older brother and began to handcuff him but had to dive out of the way at the last second when the younger brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, drove a stolen car at them. They said the younger brother ran over his brother’s body as he drove away from the scene to escape.
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