O happy town beside the sea, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called Boston, whose roads lead everywhere to all. Friday would have saddened him. Oliver Wendell Holmes preferred to call Boston the hub of the solar system. But while the planets spun in their orbits, the hub fell ominously silent, its roads as empty as the day after Armageddon.

(PHOTOS:Images of Bostons Massive Manhunt)

Silent, that is, but for the throbbing of military helicopters through otherwise vacant skies, and the whine of police sirens. An entire city, one of the great citiesa hive of finance and technology and commerce and culturewas made eerie and ghostly in the blink of an eye. And somewhere in the midst of this unnatural, perhaps unprecedented, scene, the cause of it all lay hidden.

A teenage boy.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ruiner of so many promising lives, including his own, had vanished after allegedly participating in his second spree of terror in four days. The accused Boston Marathon bomber, a slim, doe-eyed athlete of 19, was flushed from anonymity on Thursday evening, when the FBI released images from surveillance videos that placed him with his brother, Tamerlan, at the scene of Mondays mayhem. The hunted pair apparently left their apartment in Cambridge, killed a campus policeman nearby, stole a car, and fought a little war with their police pursuers in the nearby suburb of Watertown. Some 200 shots were exchanged, and the brothers lobbed homemade grenades. Tamerlan was mortally wounded in the battle, while his younger brother ran into the night.

When dawn approached and the fugitive still had not been found, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino decided to shut down the city. They started with public transportation. Commuter trains and subways were switched off. Bus service was suspended. Amtrak stopped running, and ferries remained at their piers. As Richard A. Davey, secretary of transportation for the Bay State, explained: We did not want to have customers potentially put in harms way. And we didnt want to give this suspect the opportunity to get out of the city using public transit.

(MORE:Brothers in Arms: Sibling Psychology and the Bombing Suspects)

Spots of blood on the Watertown pavement suggested that the second suspect was still nearby. Officials took the larger step of asking citizens throughout Boston to hunker down in their homesshelter in place, in the lingo of this awful age of terror. Citizens would be safer behind locked doors, they reasoned, and if the streets were empty, police would be free to focus their efforts on the hunt. Lights went out in the offices of businesses great and small. Guards locked the spinning doors of downtown skyscrapers. School was cancelled. At Fenway Park, the Red Sox game was postponed; ditto the Bruins game at the Garden.

Behind bolted doors, Bostonians saw through their windows things never before seen on a warm Spring day in Beantown. Normally snarled and honking thoroughfares like Summer Street and Commonwealth Avenue were empty. The Boston Common and Quincy Market were deserted. The winding streets of the North End had hardly any map-squinting tourists blocking the sidewalks. No racing shells skimmed along the Charles River; the lawns of Harvard were quiet and lonely; no pot smoke scented the Square.

(MORE: Manhunt Ends As Bombing Suspect Is Captured in Watertown)

Excerpt from:
Freedom From Fear: Boston is Liberated As Suspect is Captured