Did Watertown's top cop tell a big, big lie?

I'm not at all convinced that there was any larger conspiracy behind the Tzarnaev brothers. (Update: The FBI now says that there were others. More on that soon.) However, I'm increasingly convinced that some cops have conspired to cover-up their own itchified trigger fingers.

Many news articles have stated -- are still stating -- that elder brother Tamerlan was shot dead by the cops. But now we are supposed to believe a new story, which holds that Tamerlan was killed by his younger brother Dzhokhar.

The police chief, Edward Deveau, describes how cops nearly apprehended the older suspect, and were placing handcuffs on him in the middle of the street Thursday night, when the younger suspect came at officers in a carjacked SUV. The cops were able "to dive out of the way," and the younger suspect then continued to drive directly over his brother and dragging him through the street. That's how the older suspect died, according to the police chief.

The younger suspect eventually dumped the SUV and ran into the darkness of the night, according to the police chief.

In the first place, why would a guy in an SUV ditch the vehicle to run from the cops? Would you do that?

More importantly, if Tamerlan was killed because a car struck him, then how can we explain the morgue photo that shows at least one bullet hole in his body? I don't want to reproduce so gruesome a photo on this site, at least not in its entirety; you can see the image here.

But I can show you a close-up of what is clearly a bullet entrance wound. You can see how he bled out from it -- the blood trails first in one direction then in the other.

(The morgue photo also shows a large gaping hole cut into the left side of his chest, apparently made post-mortem.)

In a statement made before the Boston cops issued their revised account, one doctor who worked on Tamerlan was very clear about the cause of death:

Police took Tamerlan ­Tsarnaev to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center about 1:10 a.m. Friday. He was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m. Dr. Richard Wolfe said the suspect had been hit by shrapnel from an explosion and that he had died from “a combination of blasts” and “multiple gunshot wounds.”

But after the cops issued their "Dzhokhar did it" yarn, the medical witnesses suddenly became frustratingly vague:

Dr. David Schoenfeld said 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev was unconscious and had so many penetrating wounds when he arrived at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center early Friday that it isn't clear which ones killed him, and a medical examiner will have to determine the cause of death.

The second bombing suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was in serious condition at the same hospital after his capture Friday night. The FBI has not allowed hospital officials to say any more about his wounds or condition.

Why not?

"From head to toe, every region of his body had injuries," he said. "His legs and arms were intact – he wasn't blown into a million pieces" – but he lost a pulse and was in cardiac arrest, meaning his heart and circulation had stopped, so CPR, or cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, was started.

Schoenfeld did not address police's assertion that Tsarnaev was run over by a car driven by his brother as he fled the gunfire.

Way I see it, even one bullet wound in Tamerlan's body damages the new "Dzhokhar did it" story. Do Boston's police officials actually expect us to believe that Dr. Wolfe was wrong when he spoke of multiple bullet wounds? How could a doctor examining a body possibly be mistaken about so basic a fact?

Recall that the initial reports held that Tamerlan had been captured alive -- a story which stayed in place for at least an hour. Several news outlets even published a photo of a naked man (allegedly Tamerlan) in police custody; we were later told that this was another fellow entirely.

The claim that Tamerlan was struck by bullets was made by journalists who spoke with police at the scene. Example:

Tamerlan went down fighting, hit by police bullets. According to the police he was wearing a suicide vest.

How could a cop know about the vest but not know about the guy being dragged down the street by an SUV?

There is no photographic evidence to substantiate the tale that one brother ran over the other, even though police cars often have video cameras, as do civilian cell phones. Journalists were on the scene; NBC had video of the firefight. Under those circumstances, how is it possible that we could be learning of so dramatic a development only now?

Let me once again make myself clear: I am not making any grand conspiratorial claims about the bombing itself. The comments above concern the conduct of the police -- nothing else. Perhaps I'm wrong; perhaps Deveau has an explanation that addresses all of the concerns raised above. Right now, though, I don't see how he can account for the photo of the bullet hole, and I don't see how he can brush aside the statement by Dr. Wolfe.

Other questions: Why was the MIT cop killed? If the brothers had no car, then how did they get to that location? Why does this report say that they stole the cop's cruiser and drove it to commit the 7-Eleven robbery -- a robbery which cops now say was committed by someone else? If they stole a cop car, why did they later hijack an SUV?