Plea guilty over gun with Tsarnaev link

BOSTON -- A man who once possessed the gun that prosecutors believe the Boston Marathon bombing suspects used to kill an MIT police officer pleaded guilty Friday to gun possession and drug charges.

Stephen Silva, 21, changed his plea in U.S. District Court. He initially pleaded innocent after he was charged in July with possession of a handgun with an obliterated serial number and seven counts of heroin trafficking.

Silva was a friend of marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who faces trial in January in the April 2013 attack that killed three people and injured more than 260 others.

A prosecutor said Silva possessed the Ruger pistol in February 2013 and gave it to another individual. That person was not identified in court, and no reference was made to the bombing or the fatal shooting of Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier.

"He has not been charged with having anything to do with the marathon bombing [or] having any knowledge that the gun, if it were used, was used in connection with the bombing or the aftermath," said Silva's lawyer, Jonathan Shapiro, after Friday's hearing.

Shapiro had confirmed earlier that authorities believed that the gun was the one Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, used to kill Collier, who was shot in his cruiser in Cambridge during the manhunt after the bombing attack.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev died later in a police shootout in Watertown. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has pleaded innocent to numerous charges, some of which carry the death penalty.

The accused bomber's lawyers said Thursday that they may seek to delay his trial because of new information received in the past 48 hours, without elaborating.

Shapiro refused to speculate on whether his client might testify in Tsarnaev's trial.

Silva's plea agreement with the government was sealed, the lawyer said, "because both parties have decided that there is information in it that shouldn't be made public."

Christina Sterling, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Boston, declined to comment on the plea when reached by phone.

Federal Judge Mark Wolf scheduled sentencing for March 17.

Silva told police he smoked marijuana every day because "my best friend was the bomber," according to court documents in a separate state marijuana case last year. He was a high school classmate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and for a time was enrolled at the same university as Tsarnaev.

Information for this article was contributed by Erik Larson of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 12/20/2014

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