iPhones, Girls, and One Smart Hostage: Inside the Tsarnaevs' Wild Carjacking

The Boston Globe managed to track down the carjacking victim from last Thursday's thrill ride that ended with one of the Boston bombing suspects dead and the other in custody.

The Boston Globe managed to track down the carjacking victim from last Thursday's thrill ride that ended with one of the Boston bombing suspects dead and the other in custody. Now, that hours-long car chase wrecked a lot of people's night. With news junkies glued to the police scanner and bloggers to their keyboards, it was an ordeal! But after reading the account of 26-year-old Chinese entrepreneur "Danny" who spent 90 minutes staring down the barrel of a gun while the Tsarnaev brothers ran from the Feds. So no matter how bad your night was, we can guarantee you one thing. Danny's night was worse.

It's a gripping story, even if you've read about the carjacking before. You should read it in full, especially since we've heard little else from the carjacking victim other than to say he was spared "wasn't American" — and apparently to tip off investigators about that would-be Times Square plot. Some details of his new accounting have been reported elsewhere, but there's definitely some new information to be had. What's perhaps more interesting among the many revelations is how the normal the Tsarnaev brothers were while driving around with their hostages. Comparing the chase to a Tarantino movie, the Globe's Eric Moskovitz recounts how the two young men were chatting casually about the usual stuff: "Girls, credit limits for students, the marvels of the Mercedes ML 350 and the iPhone 5, whether anyone still listens to CDs."

That's right. In between blowing up two bombs at the Boston Marathon and going down in a hail of gunfire, these two guys were talking about Apple rumors. The ride was not all calm, though. The brothers did have a gun and they did make scary threats. At one point, when Danny thought he was about to die, his life flashed before his eyes. Or at least he though about "his burgeoning startup and about a girl he secretly liked in New York," thinking he'd never see her again. Then came the "cash only" moment at the Shell station in in Cambridge:

When the younger brother, Dzhokhar, was forced to go inside the Shell Food Mart to pay, older brother Tamerlan put his gun in the door pocket to fiddle with a navigation device -- letting his guard down briefly after a night on the run. Danny then did what he had been rehearsing in his head. In a flash, he unbuckled his seat belt, opened the door, stepped through, slammed it behind, and sprinted off at an angle that would be a hard shot for any marksman.

And so, against all odds, we now have a love story amidst the madness that is the Boston bombing. The Hollywood blockbuster movie script continues to write itself.