The jury hearing the Boston Marathon bombing trial on Wednesday will hear more evidence about what FBI agents found when they searched Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's college dorm room days after the deadly attack.
Tsarnaev, 21, is accused of killing three people and injuring 264 with a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the race's crowded finish line on April 15, 2013, and with fatally shooting a police officer three days later as he and 26-year-old brother Tamerlan tried to flee. Tamerlan died hours after the shooting, following a gunfight with police in Watertown, Massachusetts.
His lawyers opened the trial early this month by bluntly admitting the defendant committed all the crimes of which he is accused, but contending Tamerlan was the driving force behind the attack with Dzhokhar going along out of a sense of subservience.
Witnesses this week have detailed jihadist writings found on Tsarnaev's computers and evidence related to a trip to a New Hampshire shooting range a month before the attack as signs that he was a motivated and willing participant.
Kimberly Franks, a supervisory agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is due back on the witness stand on Wednesday. On Tuesday she testified that investigators recovered a $62.10 receipt from Dick's Sporting Goods for a pellet gun, as well a box of BB pellets when they searched Tsarnaev's dorm room at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
Investigators recovered a BB gun as well as a rusty 9 mm pistol on the street in Watertown where the Tsarnaevs fought a heated battle with police three days after the attack.
Agents also recovered the white Polo Ralph Lauren cap that prosecutors say Tsarnaev wore to the marathon, Franks said. When the FBI first released surveillance video of the Tsarnaevs near the marathon finish line, they did not know the brothers' names and identified them only as "white hat" and "black hat."
That release of photos, and a plea for the public's help in identifying the suspects, prompted the duo to shoot Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, in an unsuccessful attempt to steal his gun as they prepared to flee the city.
The bombing killed restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, graduate student Lingzi Lu, 23, and 8-year-old Martin Richard.
