“House of Cards,” Netflix’s first original series, starts streaming

By 2013, Netflix had already fundamentally changed the way Americans consumed movies and television. The service offered unlimited DVD rentals—and, starting in 2007, direct streaming of many of its titles—for a flat monthly fee, a wildly popular model that almost single-handedly drove Blockbuster and other video rental stores out of business. In February of 2013, Netflix introduced House of Cards, the first major TV show that ran exclusively on a streaming service. It was another Netflix innovation that would alter the media landscape.

Director and producer David Fincher began developing an American version of the British political drama House of Cards in 2011. Cable and premium channels like HBO and AMC, which had experience with “prestige TV” programming, were in talks to pick up the show, but Netflix outbid them, hoping to begin its foray into original content with a bang. Academy Award-winning actor Kevin Spacey was announced in the lead role the same year, and buzz built around the show.

House of Cards’ first season was released all at once rather than episode-by-episode, another first. The show was a hit, garnering nine Emmy nominations, a first for a streaming-only program. House of Cards ran for five more seasons and received a total of seven Emmys and 56 nominations, ending with a final season that focused on Spacey’s character’s wife, played by Robin Wright, after a series of sexual misconduct allegations against Spacey became public.

Netflix had another major hit with Orange is the New Black, which premiered a few months later, and its original shows have numbered among the most popular in the country ever since. Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and other streaming services have made a concerted effort to produce original content in the years since House of Cards debuted, and 60 percent of Americans now subscribe to at least one streaming service. In 2018, Icarus became the first Netflix production to win an Oscar, taking home the award for Best Documentary Feature, and the following year Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma won three Academy Awards.

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The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter first appears, sparking a movement

Outraged and saddened after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the Florida man who killed a Black teenager in 2012, Oakland, California resident Alicia Garza posts a message on Facebook on July 13, 2013. Her post contains the phrase “Black lives matter,” which soon becomes a rallying cry and a movement throughout the United States and around the world.

Garza said she felt “a deep sense of grief” after Zimmerman was acquitted. She was further saddened to note that many people appeared to blame the victim, Trayvon Martin, and not the “disease” of racism. Patrice Cullors, a Los Angeles community organizer and friend of Garza, read her post and replied with the first instance of #BlackLivesMatter.

As the hashtag became popular on Facebook and Twitter, Garza, Cullors and fellow activist Opal Tometi built a network of community organizers and racial justice activists using the name Black Lives Matter. The phrase and the hashtag were then quickly adopted by grassroots activists and protests all across the country, particularly after the subsequent killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and a number of other African Americans at the hands of police officers or would-be vigilantes like Zimmerman. 

Simple and clear in its demand for Black dignity, the phrase became one of the major symbols of the protests that erupted after Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. While polling showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of the Black Lives Matter movement when it first began, in the years following, support for its central arguments grew. 

After the May 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis unleashed a nationwide protest movement against police brutality and racism, support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased by a 28-point margin in two weeks—almost as much as it had in the preceding two years, according to the New York Times

Perhaps more than any other phrase since “Black Power,” “Black Lives Matter” became a singular rallying cry for the American and global racial justice movements.

READ MORE: Black History Milestones: Timeline 

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Prince George, first child of Prince William and Kate Middleton, is born

Year
2013
Month Day
July 22

Weighing in at a healthy 8 pounds, 6 ounces, the first child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (more informally known as Prince William and Kate Middleton), is born on July 22, 2013, at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, England.

The new prince’s birth had been a highly anticipated event, with reporters camping out outside the hospital to get the first glimpse of the new arrival. Though the official birth announcement came, according to tradition, via a statement posted on a gilded easel outside Buckingham Palace, the Duke and Duchess put a more modern spin on things by appearing outside the hospital to introduce their baby to the world.

Two days later, the royal family announced his full name: His Royal Highness Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge. His first name paid tribute to his great-great-great grandfather, King George V, as well as his great-great grandfather, King George VI. Alexander was seen as a possible nod to his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II (who was christened Elizabeth Alexandra Mary), or to Queen Victoria, whose full name was Alexandrina Victoria. Louis was thought to honor his great-great-uncle, Louis Mountbatten, who played matchmaker to the queen and her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and was very close to Prince Charles.

Prince George entered the world as third in the line of succession to the British throne. His paternal grandfather, Prince Charles of Wales, stands to inherit the crown from his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, while Prince William, Charles’s elder son with Princess Diana, is second in line. George’s birth marked the first time in more than 100 years—since Queen Victoria’s reign—that three generations of direct heirs were alive at the same time.

According to one estimate, between royal baby-themed goods and party supplies, Brits likely spent some £240 million (roughly $300 million) celebrating Prince George’s arrival. His birth kicked off a royal baby boom: His younger sister, Princess Charlotte, arrived in 2015, followed by a younger brother, Prince Louis, in 2018. In 2019, George’s uncle, Prince Harry, and his wife, Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, welcomed their first child, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor. 

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South African president Nelson Mandela dies at 95

On December 5, 2013, Nelson Mandela, the former activist who overcame a nearly three-decade prison stint to become president of South Africa, passes away after years of struggling with health issues. He was 95.

“Our nation has lost its greatest son. Our people have lost a father,” South African President Jacob Zuma said. “What made Nelson Mandela great was precisely what made him human. We saw in him what we seek in ourselves.”

Mandela was known as a freedom fighter, prisoner, civil rights leader, political leader and symbol of integrity and reconciliation not only for South Africa, but for the world.

His lifelong mission to end apartheid started when he left school early to join the the African National Congress (ANC). He rose quickly in the organization, and was elected president of the organization in 1950. It was in 1960 that Mandela’s efforts turned more militant, sparked when police opened fire on a group of unarmed protestors in the Sharpeville township, killing 69 people.

READ MORE: Key Steps That Led to the End of Apartheid 

Soon after, the ANC was outlawed, but that didn’t stop Mandela. After the ban, he went underground to form a new, armed wing of the organization named “Spear of the Nation.” Through this group, which was also known as the MK, Mandela helped plan attacks on government institutions, like the post office.

The violent turn was not one he took lightly. “It would be wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace and nonviolence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force,” he said about starting the more militant branch. “It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle.”

In 1962, Mandela secretly left South Africa, traveling around Africa and England to gain support. He also trained in Morocco and Ethiopia. When he returned, he was arrested and charged with illegal exit of the country and incitement to strike. He was then sentenced to life in prison for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government.

Instead of a testimony, he gave a four hours long speech, ending it by saying: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

While he was in prison, a “Free Nelson Mandela” campaign fueled the outcry against the regime.

In 1990, newly elected president F. W. de Klerk made a shocking move that broke from the conservatives of his party, lifting the ban on the ANC—and all other formerly banned political parties—and calling for a non-racist South Africa. That February, de Klerk unconditionally released Mandela. The then 71-year-old walked out of prison, fist held above his head. He had served 27 years in prison.

After his release, Mandela resumed his leadership of the ANC in its negotiations for an end to apartheid. Incredibly, just four years after his release, on May 10, 1994, he was inaugurated as South Africa’s first democratically elected President.

As president, Mandela introduced social and economic programs and presided over the enactment of a new constitution that established a strong central government and prohibited discrimination. He also discouraged black South Africans from seeking revenge for the apartheid period, preaching kindness and forgiveness instead. Mandela only served one term in order to set an example for future leaders, but he remained in the nation’s consciousness until his death.

Dozens of officials world leaders expressed their grief over Mandela’s passing. The funeral and burial cap took place over 10 days of national mourning. On December 15, tribal leaders clad in animal skins stood alongside officials in dark suits as Mandela’s coffin, which was draped with the South African flag, was buried in his childhood village of Qunu. 

READ MORE: Nelson Mandela: His Written Legacy

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Edward Snowden discloses U.S. government operations

Year
2013
Month Day
June 06

On June 6, 2013, Americans learned that their government was spying broadly on its own people.

That’s when The Guardian and The Washington Post published the first of a series of reports put together from documents leaked by an anonymous source. The material exposed a government-run surveillance program that monitored the communications records of not just criminals or potential terrorists, but law-abiding citizens as well.

Three days later the source unmasked himself as Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor. But the question remained: Was he a whistleblower or a traitor?

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the perceived need for heightened national security, the U.S. government relaxed its rules around surveillance. The first story published in The Guardian revealed that the NSA was collecting and monitoring the telephone records and the texts of citizens. Days later, The Washington Post and The Guardian reported that the U.S. government was tapping into the servers of nine Internet companies, including Apple, Facebook and Google, to spy on people’s audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs, as part of a surveillance program called Prism. Later articles revealed that the government was even spying on leaders of other countries, including Germany’s Angela Merkel.

In the same month, Snowden was charged with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence. Facing up to 30 years in prison, Snowden left the country, originally traveling to Hong Kong and then to Russia, to avoid being extradited to the U.S.

In the wake of the leak, President Obama assigned two five-person teams to investigate the nation’s surveillance policy. The result: several new laws and regulations were enacted to limit things like how long U.S. citizens’ data could be held or how data accidentally collected on Americans through the surveillance of foreigners could be used. While the changes resulted in greater transparency, many experts say the regulations improved the surveillance practices only slightly and did not address the question of invasion of privacy.

“From a big-picture analysis, there’s been a lot of developments without a whole lot of movement… These reforms just feel like gestures,” Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s program on liberty and national security, told PBS’ Frontline.

Since the first leak from Mr. Snowden, journalists have released more than 7,000 top-secret documents, but some think that’s only a fraction of the entire archive. It’s unclear exactly how many he downloaded, but intelligence officials testified in 2014 that he accessed 1.7 million files.

In July 2013, a petition was started to have Snowden pardoned, but the government rejected it in 2015. Lisa Monaco, then-President Obama’s Advisor on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, said Snowden should return home to be “judged by a jury of his peers—not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime,” and stop “running away from the consequences of his actions.”

In 2017, Moscow extended Snowden’s right to asylum until 2020. He released a memoir, Permanent Record, in 2019. 

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Gunman kills 12 in D.C. Navy Yard massacre

Year
2013
Month Day
September 16

On September 16, 2013, a 34-year-old man goes on a rampage at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., killing 12 people and wounding several others over the course of an hour before he is fatally shot by police. Investigators later determined that the gunman, Aaron Alexis, a computer contractor for a private information technology firm, had acted alone.

Shortly after 8 a.m., Alexis used his security pass to enter Building 197 at the Navy Yard, a former shipyard, dating to the early 1800s, and weapons plant that now serves as an administrative center for the Navy. At approximately 8:16 a.m., Alexis, armed with a sawed-off Remington 870 shotgun and dressed in a short-sleeve polo shirt and pants, shot his first victim. Over the course of the next hour, he moved through the 630,000-square-foot, multi-level Building 197, the headquarters of the Naval Sea Systems Command, gunning down more victims and exchanging fire with law enforcement officials. Alexis was shot and killed by police at 9:25 a.m. The shooting spree caused officials to put part of Washington on lockdown due to initial suspicions that other gunmen might have been involved in the incident; however, by the end of the day, authorities determined that Alexis had acted alone.

A Navy reservist from 2007 to 2011, Alexis began work as a computer technician at the Navy Yard on September 9, 2013. Five days later, at a gun store in Virginia, he purchased the Remington 870 and ammunition used in the attack. Investigators found no evidence that any specific event triggered the deadly massacre, and they believed Alexis shot his victims at random. The shotgun he used (he also took a handgun from one of his victims) was etched with several phrases, including “Better off this way” and “My ELF weapon,” and the FBI announced there was a variety of evidence indicating Alexis was under the “delusional belief” he was being controlled by extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves. In August 2013, Alexis told police in Rhode Island, where he was working, that he was hearing voices. The private IT contracting firm employing Alexis took him off his assignment for a few days then let him back on the job; weeks later, he went to work at the Navy Yard.

The 12 men and women murdered during the September 16th rampage ranged in age from 46 to 73. They were memorialized by then-President Barack Obama at a September 22, 2013, ceremony in which he remembered them and also issued a call to tighten America’s gun laws. That call largely went unheeded, and the number of mass shootings in the U.S. has continued to rise. 

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Pope Benedict resigns


Year
2013
Month Day
February 28

On February 28, 2013, less than three weeks after making the unexpected announcement that he would step down, 85-year-old Pope Benedict XVI officially resigns. Citing advanced age as the reason for giving up his post as the leader of the 1.2 billion-member Roman Catholic Church, Benedict was the first pontiff to relinquish power in nearly 600 years. Two weeks after Benedict resigned, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected pope.

The son of a policeman, Benedict was born Joseph Ratzinger in the village of Marktl in Bavaria, Germany, on April 16, 1927. During World War II, he was drafted into the German military, which he deserted toward the end of the war. He was held as a POW by Allied forces for a short time in 1945. Ratzinger went on to be ordained into the priesthood in 1951. Afterward, he served as a professor of theology at several German universities until 1977, when he was appointed the archbishop of Munich and Freising; later that year he was elevated to cardinal. From 1981 to 2005, Ratzinger headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a powerful Vatican office responsible for enforcing Catholic doctrine. In that role, he earned the nickname “God’s Rottweiler.”

On April 19, 2005, following the death of Pope John Paul II, the 78-year-old Ratzinger was elected the 265th pope. During his eight-year papacy, Benedict championed a conservative agenda while also contending with scandals involving clergy sex-abuse and corruption at the Vatican Bank.

On February 11, 2013, Benedict, the oldest person elected to the papacy since the 18th century, announced he would resign, saying he no longer had the mental and physical strength required to lead one of the world’s largest religious organizations. The move was all but unprecedented, as until that point all popes of the modern era had remained in office until death. The last pope to resign, Gregory XII, did so in 1415 to end a civil war in the church called the Great Western Schism. Prior to that, in 1294, Pope Celestine V quit after just five months in the job (he hoped to return to his life as a hermit but instead his successor had him imprisoned and he died in captivity).

On March 13, 2013, white smoke from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel indicated that a conclave of Catholic cardinals had elected a new pope, the 76-year-old Bergoglio. Six days later, in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, he was inaugurated as the Catholic Church’s 266th pontiff. The first South American to helm the church and the first non-European to do so in more than 1,200 years, he also was the first pope to take the name Francis and the first member of the Jesuit order to become pontiff. Francis soon distinguished himself for his humble style (among other things, he opted to live in a Vatican guesthouse rather than the regal papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace, where, for more than a century, his predecessors resided) and for his vision for a church focused less on divisive social issues and more on serving the poor and oppressed.

After retiring, Benedict, whose title became pope emeritus, moved into a former convent inside Vatican City.

READ MORE: 8 Things You May Not Know About the Papal Conclave

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Wallenda makes Grand Canyon crossing on high wire

Year
2013
Month Day
June 23

On June 23, 2013, 34-year-old aerialist Nik Wallenda becomes the first person to walk a high wire across the Little Colorado River Gorge near Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Wallenda wasn’t wearing a safety harness as he made the quarter-mile traverse on a 2-inch-thick steel cable some 1,500 feet above the gorge. In June of the previous year, Wallenda, a member of the famous Flying Wallendas family of circus performers, became the first person to walk a tightrope over Niagara Falls.

Nik Wallenda learned to walk on a wire as a young boy, and made his professional debut as an aerialist at age 13. He went on to set a number of Guinness World Records, including the longest tightrope crossing on a bicycle and the highest eight-person tightrope pyramid. In 2011, Wallenda hung from a high-flying helicopter above Branson, Missouri, by his teeth. That same year, he and his mother successfully completed the high-wire walk in Puerto Rico that had killed Karl Wallenda.

On June 15, 2012, Nik Wallenda became the first person to walk directly over Niagara Falls on a high wire. He crossed an 1,800-foot-long, 7-ton wire from the U.S. side of the falls to the Canadian side at a height of around 200 feet in about 25 minutes. Because the event was televised around the world, broadcast officials required the famous funambulist to wear a safety tether in case he fell.

The following June, Wallenda made his Grand Canyon traverse. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt and holding a 43-pound balancing pole, he prayed out loud as he walked untethered across a 1,400-foot-long, 8.5-ton cable suspended 1,500 feet above the Little Colorado River. It was the highest walk of his career up to that point, and he completed it in just less than 23 minutes.

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Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, dies

Year
2013
Month Day
April 08

Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom, dies in London at age 87 from a stroke on April 8, 2013. Serving from 1979 to 1990, Thatcher was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century. She curbed the power of Britain’s labor unions, privatized state-owned industries, led her nation to victory in the Falklands War and as a close ally of U.S. President Ronald Reagan played a pivotal role in ending the Cold War. A polarizing figure, Thatcher, nicknamed the Iron Lady, was credited by her admirers with championing free-market, conservative policies that revitalized the British economy, while critics charged these initiatives hurt the nation’s lower classes.

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on October 23, 1925, in Grantham, a town in northeast England. Her family lived in an apartment above the grocery store owned by her father, who also was a local politician. After graduating from Oxford University in 1947, the future prime minister worked as a research chemist. In the early 1950s, she twice ran unsuccessfully for parliament as a Conservative Party candidate. After marrying Denis Thatcher (1915-2003), a well-off businessman, in 1951, she studied law and gave birth to twins in 1953. That same year, she qualified as a barrister.

In 1959, Thatcher was elected to the House of Commons from the Finchley district in north London. She rose through her party’s ranks, and when the Conservatives came to power under Edward Heath in 1970, she was named secretary for education. In that role, Thatcher was vilified by her Labour Party opponents as “Thatcher the Milk Snatcher” after she made cuts to a free-milk program for schoolchildren. In 1975, with Labour back in power, Thatcher, to the surprise of many, defeated Heath to become head of her party, as well as the first woman to serve as opposition leader in the House of Commons.

In 1979, with Britain’s economy in poor health and labor union strikes rampant, the Conservatives returned to power and Thatcher was elected prime minister. Her government lowered income taxes but increased taxes on good and services, slashed or eliminated government subsidies to businesses and implemented other austerity measures. Unemployment soared and Thatcher’s approval ratings plummeted. Then, after Argentina invaded the British-ruled Falkland Islands in April 1982, she sent troops there and by June the Falklands had been recaptured. The victory helped Thatcher win re-election as prime minister in 1983.

READ MORE: How the Falklands War Cemented Margaret Thatcher’s Reputation as the ‘Iron Lady’

During her second term, Thatcher’s government defeated a bitter, yearlong miner’s strike and passed legislation restricting the rights of trade unions, while also privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises, selling off public housing and de-regulating the financial industry. In 1984, Thatcher survived unscathed a bomb attack by the Irish Republican Army at a Conservative Party conference in Brighton, England; the blast killed five people and injured more than 30 others.

In foreign affairs, Thatcher, an opponent of communism, had a close relationship with Ronald Reagan, who served in the White House from 1981 to 1989, and with whom she shared a number of conservative views. Yet she also forged ties with Mikhail Gorbachev, who led the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991. Thatcher famously said after meeting him, “I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together,” and her leadership played an important role in helping to end Cold War tensions between America and the Soviets. In other foreign policy issues, Thatcher, controversially, spoke out initially against international efforts to impose economic sanctions on apartheid South Africa, arguing such sanctions wouldn’t work.

After being elected to an unprecedented third term in 1987, the hardheaded Thatcher experienced dissent in her own party over her opposition to further economic integration between Britain and the rest of Europe, and her introduction of a widely unpopular poll tax system. In November 1990, at the urging of her fellow party members, she resigned as prime minister and was succeeded by John Major. When she departed 10 Downing Street, Thatcher was the longest continuously serving prime minister in more than 150 years.

She left the House of Commons in 1992, and was appointed to the House of Lords, with the title Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. She went on to pen her memoirs and travel the world giving lectures. Following a series of minor strokes in the early 2000s, Thatcher largely retreated from public view. Meryl Streep earned an Oscar for her portrayal of the former prime minister in the 2011 biopic “The Iron Lady,” which generated criticism from some Conservative politicians for its depiction of Thatcher’s decline into dementia during her later years. After Thatcher died in April 2013, more than 2,000 guests from around the world attended her funeral at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, which in 1965 was the site of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s funeral.

READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About Margaret Thatcher

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Three people killed, hundreds injured in Boston Marathon bombing

Year
2013
Month Day
April 15

On April 15, 2013, two bombs go off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three spectators and wounding more than 260 other people in attendance. Four days later, after an intense manhunt that shut down the Boston area, police captured one of the bombing suspects, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; his older brother and fellow suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died following a shootout with law enforcement earlier that same day.

The 117th Boston Marathon began in the morning from Hopkinton, Massachusetts, with some 23,000 participants. At around 2:49 that afternoon, with more than 5,700 runners still in the race, two pressure cooker bombs hidden in backpacks exploded within seconds of each other near the finish line along Boylston Street. Three people died: a 23-year-old woman, a 29-year-old woman and an 8-year-old boy. Among the scores of others who were injured, more than a dozen people required amputations.

On the evening of April 18, the FBI released photos of two male suspects sought in connection with the bombings. That night at around 10:30, Sean Collier, a 26-year-old police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was shot dead in his patrol car on the school’s Cambridge campus. Authorities would eventually link the murder to the Tsarnaev brothers, who spent parts of their childhoods in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan but had lived in the United States for about a decade prior to the bombings. Soon after Officer Collier was killed, Tamerlan Tsarnaev carjacked an SUV, taking the driver hostage and telling him he was one of the Boston Marathon bombers. 

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev followed behind in a smaller car before joining his older brother and the hostage in the SUV. The brothers drove around the Boston area with their hostage, forcing him to withdraw money from an ATM and discussing driving to New York City. When they stopped at a Cambridge gas station, the hostage escaped and called police, informing them the SUV could be tracked by his cellphone, which was still in the vehicle. Shortly after midnight, a gun battle broke out between the Tsarnaevs and police on a street in the Boston suburb of Watertown. One officer was seriously injured by gunfire but survived. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, also seriously wounded, was taken to a hospital, where doctors tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate him. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev managed to drive away from the shootout in the stolen SUV before abandoning it nearby and fleeing on foot.

That day, April 19, the Boston area was on lockdown, with schools closed, public transportation service suspended and people advised to stay inside their homes, as police conducted door-to-door searches in Watertown and military-style vehicles patrolled the streets. That evening, after police called off their search of the area, a Watertown man went outside to check on a boat he was storing in his backyard. When he looked inside the 24-foot vessel, he was startled to see blood and a person, who turned out to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, hiding there. Police soon arrived and took the suspect, who was wounded from the earlier gun battle, into custody.

At the time of the bombings, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, while Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a community college dropout and former amateur boxer with a wife and child. Investigators believe the Tsarnaevs were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs but planned and carried out the bombings on their own and were not connected to any terrorist organizations. The brothers allegedly used the Internet to learn how to build explosives.

In July 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty to the 30 federal charges against him, including the use of a weapon of mass destruction. He went on trial in January 2015, and was found guilty on all 30 counts. He was sentenced to death but appealed the decision.  Tsarnaev is currently being held at a supermax prison in Colorado.

READ MORE: The Boston Marathon Bombing

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