Manhunt’s Turning Point Came in the Decision to Release Suspects’ Images

By that afternoon, however, the promising leads had collapsed, and officials confronted a risky decision: proceed without the help of the public to avoid tipping off the suspects or publicize images of them and risk driving them deeper into hiding or worse.

F.B.I. officials, who had been debating all week whether to go to the public, were ultimately convinced that they had to release the photographs because the investigation was stalling and bureau analysts had finally developed clear images of the suspects from hours of video footage.

“We were working the videos, and the footage was getting better and better as the week went on, and by Thursday we got a good frontal facial shot,” a senior law enforcement official said. “That tipped it.”

The official added: “With that type of quality photo, there was no doubt about who they were. We had these murderers on the loose, and we couldn’t hold back, and we needed help finding them.”

The decision — which involved Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I. — was one of the most crucial turning points in a remarkable crowd-sourcing manhunt for the plotters of a bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 170.

While the decision to publicize the suspects’ identities resulted in the arrest of one of the men, it set in motion a violent string of events that lasted for 26 hours. Over that time, a police officer was killed, one of the suspects died, several officers sustained life-threatening injuries and one of the country’s major cities was shut down.

On Saturday morning, the younger of the two suspects, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, remained in serious condition at a Boston hospital. His brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died early Friday after a shootout with the police.

The authorities knew that broadly distributing the images — some captured by ubiquitous surveillance cameras and cellphone snapshots and winnowed down using sophisticated facial-recognition software — would accelerate the digital dragnet, but they did not realize the level of chaos it would create.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials said the authorities in Boston weighed the risks of some mayhem against their growing fear that time was slipping away and that heavily armed and increasingly dangerous men, and possibly accomplices, could wage new attacks in the Boston area or beyond.

Federal authorities involved in the case had briefed administration and Congressional officials on their hopes to arrest the suspects early Thursday without revealing their hand. But those plans vanished by that afternoon.

“We thought we had good leads,” the senior law enforcement official said. “We were working on some stuff, and we got to a point where it leveled off, and then there was nothing imminent, so we moved with what we thought would result in identifying them.”

The authorities first developed information about the suspects’ whereabouts late Thursday when one of them was seen in video footage that was being reviewed from a convenience store in Cambridge that had just been robbed.

Shortly after the suspects left the convenience store, the authorities received a report that a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had been ambushed and killed.

And then, for two hours, there was no sign of the suspects.

It was only after the suspects decided not to kill the owner of a sport utility vehicle that had been carjacked and instead threw him out of his car around 1 a.m. — a decision that ultimately undid their plans to elude the authorities — that they re-emerged on the authorities’ radar.

“If he stayed in the car, they could have tried to drive to New Hampshire or something — it would have added some real time to things, which would have been bad and who knows what they would have done,” the law enforcement official said. “They were desperate and acting pretty crazy.”

Turning Over Manner-of-Death Records Not Discretionary

Pennsylvania's Coroner's Act does not give a county coroner the discretion to deny a request for immediate disclosure of someone's manner of death, the state Supreme Court has ruled.

Chinese Drywall Lawsuits at a Turning Point

While she was not thrilled with the move, Ms. Stephens explained, “We would have rather lived in a tent in our backyard than put our kids back in our house.”

The bigger house had been renovated with Chinese-made drywall, and Ms. Stephens contends that it reeked and made her family sick. She filed a lawsuit seeking damages in 2009, but so far, she hasn’t received a cent, in part because of the complexities of suing a manufacturer from China.

But decisions in state and federal courts in recent weeks involving the company, a major Chinese manufacturer of drywall, could signal a turning point for thousands of American homeowners like Ms. Stephens, according to lawyers representing homeowners and homebuilders.

The Chinese manufacturer, Taishan Gypsum, argues that its drywall was not defective and that courts in the United States have no jurisdiction over the company since its drywall was sold in this country by other companies.

But a federal judge in Louisiana ruled last month in a drywall case that Taishan Gypsum was responsible for its drywall sold in Florida, Virginia and Louisiana. The ruling by United States District Court Judge Eldon E. Fallon followed a similar decision on Aug. 31 by a state judge in Florida.

Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Joseph P. Farina ruled that the plasterboard company that exported the drywall to Florida was wholly owned and controlled by Taishan Gypsum, and therefore it was subject to the court’s jurisdiction.

The judge also noted that Taishan Gypsum “actively targeted the Florida market by courting Florida companies, mailing drywall samples to Florida, selling large amounts of drywall to Florida-based companies.”

Taishan Gypsum is appealing both rulings, and the company’s lawyer, Joe Cyr of Hogan Lovells, said he was confident his client would prevail. Mr. Cyr said American distributors came to China looking for drywall in 2005 and 2006.

“Taishan Gypsum did not ship any drywall to the U.S.,” he said, adding that Taishan “strongly disputes any claim that the drywall is defective.”

But lawyers representing homeowners and homebuilders suing over the suspect drywall suggested the rulings could have broad implications. In all, the lawyers said, about 7,000 to 10,000 homes suffered damage because of defective Chinese drywall installed in the aftermath of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina and during a building boom in the South.

“This opens the door for courts to look to Chinese manufacturers to stand behind their products,” said Hilarie Bass, a lawyer with Greenberg Traurig in Miami who represents several builders, including Lennar Homes, which she says spent more than $40 million replacing defective drywall and is now trying to recover money from Taishan Gypsum.

The drywall dispute underscores the complexities of sorting out legal claims in an increasingly interconnected world. As Jacques deLisle, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania put it, “Products move very easily across borders. Legal judgments, not so much.”

With the exception of the members of the European Union, countries rarely recognize court judgments from other nations. But often the problems are resolved in other ways. For instance, businesses from different countries include binding arbitration agreements in their contracts, said Stephen C. Yeazell, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Or, instead of pursuing a foreign-based company, plaintiffs often sue the American subsidiary of a foreign manufacturer or a major distributor. In the case of the defective drywall, lawsuits were filed against the entire supply chain — builders, installers, distributors — but none had enough money to pay the claims, said Arnold Levin, a Philadelphia lawyer representing homeowners in the case before Judge Fallon in Louisiana.

“Only the manufacturer can make this right,” he said.