Slain MIT police officer Collier had worked in Lincoln

Sean Collier

By Alice C. Waugh

Several members of the Lincoln Police Department were directly involved in the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect—and they had extra motivation to find him, because slain MIT Police officer Sean Collier had worked with Lincoln police.

Collier, 27, was allegedly shot and killed by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev near the MIT campus in Cambridge last Thursday night, triggering a daylong multi-city lockdown as hundreds of area police did a house-to-house search in Watertown for the killer. Shortly after Collier was shot, Lincoln Police Chief Kevin Mooney, a Watertown native, was called in to assist by Watertown Police Chief Edward Deveau, and Mooney brought six more Lincoln officers with him.

The Lincoln officers all knew Collier, a Wilmington native who had worked as a special-duty police officer for the town from February 2011 to February 2013, Mooney said. Collier had interviewed for a job with the Lincoln Police after graduating from the police academy, and though there were no openings in town at the time, “we could just tell he had a lot of qualities we liked,” Mooney said. Collier worked in Lincoln intermittently on private police details and times when extra manpower was needed, such as July 4 and Halloween.

Collier had worked for the MIT Police since February 2012 and was soon expected to join the Somerville Police Department as a full-time officer. “That was his dream,” Mooney said.

“Besides this being absolutely heart-wrenching, it’s also a tremendous loss of a huge talent,” MIT Police Chief john DiFava told the Boston Globe.

“He just had a good way about him,” said Mooney, recalling Collier’s work helping direct traffic at Lincoln road construction sites. “He could handle those frustrated drivers who had to be rerouted. He was respected and well liked. He was smart and computer-savvy, but he was also a good person, just a very trustworthy kid.”

One of the Lincoln officers, Officer Robert Surette, was mobilized right after the Patriots Day bombing as a SWAT team member doing house-to-house searches. Surette went into action as a Lincoln representative of the Northeastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council (NEMLEC), a law enforcement resource-sharing organization with 54 member towns.

Although the second bombing suspect has been captured, Surette and others from NEMLEC were still on duty yesterday and today for the wake and private funeral for Collier in Stoneham. He’ll also be working on Wednesday for an MIT memorial service for Collier that’s expected to draw thousands of people.

The MIT service is just one aspect of the campus’s outpouring of grief—earlier today, students and others formed a human chain between the Stata Center (the MIT campus building at which Collier was shot) and MIT Campus police headquarters on Vassar Street. MIT community members also set up an impromptu memorial at the site of the shooting.

Of the chaotic manhunt scene in Watertown, “I don’t think any of us had been involved in anything like that before, Mooney said, “It was unreal. There were spent shells in the street, ambulances, bomb units—it was like a war zone.

“Terrorism has hit home,” Mooney said.