[fnord]

They released photos of the real perps at 5:00 PM Thursday. They received names within an hour, but don’t think they knew before then.

I would have thought they would have spotted the perps on video/pics within a very few hours. They knew the exact moments and locations to start looking.

Maybe they had a tactical reason for not releasing what they knew earlier but finally were stumped and asked for help, for real this time. Minutes later the public provided their solution (similar to how they finally captured #2).

[Alberta's Child]

I posted a few items on FR back on Tuesday and Wednesday about this. I had come across various links to websites that had posted high-resolution photos of the scene around the finish line just before and after the bombs detonated, and one thing that became obvious to me as I looked through them was that there were literally dozens of people who would fit any objective description of a "person of interest" in the case (younger male wearing a jacket or sweatshirt and carrying with a backpack or gym bag).

Heck -- it was a cool spring day in Boston, and it was the day of the Boston Marathon. You'd have to round up tens of thousands of people if you wanted to talk to everyone who fit that description.

[Alberta's Child]

I'm speculating that the younger brother was much easier to identify because he wore his cap backwards and had no sunglasses on, and that within minutes of posting his photo the police were getting calls from people who knew exactly who he was.

Remember -- he appeared in any number of photos from the area of the bombings, so anyone who knew him and recognized him from those photos earlier in the week would likely have assumed he was an innocent bystander just like thousands of other people on the scene. He may have even told his friends and classmates some compelling story about what it was like to be there.

The whole story changed once he was identified as an actual suspect.