CBS News senior correspondent John Miller reports that investigators believe Sean Collier was killed because the Tsarnaev brothers needed a second gun for the younger brother. Problem is they couldn’t unholster it:
“The original question is they walked up to that car and appeared they shot the officer in the head unprovoked, that it was an assassination. But why? How did that fit into their plan? The operating theory now in the investigation is they were short one gun. The older brother had a gun. They wanted to get a gun for the younger brother and the fastest and most efficient way they could think of doing it was a surprise attack on a cop, to take his weapon and go. Officer Collier had a locking holster, it’s like a three-way lock. If you don’t know how to remove the gun, you’re not going to get it out. There was apparently an attempt to yank it and they couldn’t get it and left.”
They also report on the conversation between the jihadi brothers and their car-jacked victim:
Chilling new details also came out Monday from the victim who was carjacked during Friday’s rampage.
“They basically said we did the Boston Marathon bombing, but the rest of their conversation is in Russian,” Miller said. ”Now, the carjack victim doesn’t speak much English and he doesn’t speak any Russian. So, he was debriefed very carefully about ‘what else could you hear they said?’
“He said the only word I recognized was Manhattan. That tripped a lot. That’s why we saw last week stopping the trains from Boston to New York, searching the trains, and the NYPD flipped on it’s network of license plate readers at all of the bridges and tunnels coming into the city and loaded all of the license plates associated with these guys, because if they were headed to New York, they wanted to make sure that that tripped before they got in.”