DZHOKHAR TSARNAEV, 18, his face a blank, stood with his head bowed and his hands clasped as the guilty verdicts tolled one after another for what seemed like an eternity: Guilty of using weapons of mass destruction, guilty of bombing a place of public use, guilty of conspiracy and aiding and abetting. Guilty, guilty, guilty: The word was spoken 32 times.

    Yes, the jury said, Tsarnaev caused the deaths of Krystle Campbell, Martin Richard, Lu Lingzi and Sean Collier. Yes, it was murder. And so, the word “yes” was spoken 63 times, each time making Tsarnaev eligible for the death penalty.

    From start to finish, it took 26 minutes for the jury to announce its verdict in the Boston Marathon bombing trial: Tsarnaev didn’t skate on a single charge. He now stands guilty of all 30 counts, 17 of which could send him to death row.

    If hearing the verdicts seemed overwhelming, that paled in comparison to seeing and hearing evidence behind them: awful images and sounds. The jury saw bombs explode and tear people apart. They saw streets splashed crimson with blood and littered with severed limbs and body parts. They heard the cries of the injured, and witnesses told them how people tended to the dying and gravely injured, unaware of their own injuries as they tied belts around the mangled limbs of friends and strangers alike.

    They heard a prosecutor explain why this was done: Tsarnaev was punishing Americans and sending a message to the holy warriors of radical Islam to rise up.

    Wednesday’s verdict was a major step in the trial, but the toughest legal battles may be yet to come.

    The trial will resume, possibly early next week, for a second phase to determine Tsarnaev’s punishment.

    The jury’s next assignment: deciding whether the man should pay with his life.

    It took the jury of seven women and five men 11.5 hours of deliberations to reach their verdict. Tsarnaev, 21, didn’t look at jurors as their decisions were read.

    “Obviously we are grateful for the outcome today,” bombing survivor Karen Brassard said after the verdict was announced. “It’s not a happy occasion, but it’s something that we can put one more step behind us.”

    Jeff Bauman, who lost his legs in the bombing, said he was relieved.

    “Today’s verdict will never replace the lives that were lost and so dramatically changed,” he said, “but it is a relief, and one step closer to closure.”

    U.S. federal prosecutors are now focusing on the trial’s upcoming penalty phase, said Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. “We are gratified by the jury’s verdict and thank everyone who played a role in the trial for their hard work,” Oritz said, declining to comment further.

    In the next phase of the trial, jurors will hear evidence of what makes Tsarnaev’s crimes so heinous he should be executed. The defense will try to soften his actions by painting him in a more sympathetic light.

    Tsarnaev’s attorney, Judy Clarke, is one of the foremost experts in the United States on keeping clients off death row.

    For weeks, Clarke has been laying the groundwork for her argument to persuade the jury to spare Tsarnaev’s life.

    Prosecutors said Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev steeped themselves in writings and lectures of top al-Qaida leaders who urged young men to avenge injustice to Muslims by waging holy war against the enemies of Islam, including the United States.

    The militant literature promised paradise and other awards to any warrior who died as a martyr for jihad.

    The plan to bomb the marathon was hatched a year earlier, prosecutors alleged. The brothers chose the event because “all eyes would be on Boston that day,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Aloke Chakravarty said.

    The brothers took their war from an 800-square-foot (74.3-square-meter) apartment in Cambridge to Boston’s Boylston Street shortly before 3 p.m. April 15, 2013.

    The videos showed the brothers carrying the bombs in backpacks and moving through the crowd near the marathon finish line. It was, the prosecutor said, “a coordinated attack.”

    The defense disputes little about what happened and instead focused on why it happened. Lead defense attorney Judy Clarke all but conceded that Tsarnaev is guilty, and has focused instead on persuading jurors to spare him from the death penalty in the trial’s next phase.

    Clarke disputed the prosecutors’ arguments that their client was bent on becoming a holy warrior, although she acknowledged the horror the bombs caused and said her client’s actions were “inexcusable.”

    She asked jurors to keep their minds open to what is to come — a case based heavily on the Tsarnaev family’s troubled history and the control and influence Tamerlan Tsarnaev held over his younger brother. Tamerlan was the mastermind of the bomb plot, Clarke said. He bought the pressure cookers and built the bombs. He researched the marathon as a possible event to attack. He shot and killed Collier at MIT.

    Prosecutors used computer searches to show that both brothers were steeped in jihadist writings and lectures. They acted calmly and with purpose, believing they were right, Chakravarty said.

    He also told jurors they had to look no futher than Tsarnaev’s manifesto, written with a pencil on the side of a boat where he hid during the manhunt. It showed, more than anything else, how he had adopted the beliefs of the jihadists as his own.

    The prosecutor displayed a photograph of the writing on the sides of a boat pocked by bullets and streaked with Tsarnaev’s blood, and read the manifesto in its entirety.

    “I am jealous of my brother who has received the reward of (paradise.) ... I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive. God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions.”

    He asked God to make him a martyr so he could “be among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven.”

    Then he lashed out against America: “The U.S. government is killing our innocent civilians, but most of you already know that. As a Muslim, I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished. We Muslims are one body. You hurt one, you hurt us all.”

    He wrote that the Muslim nation is beginning to rise, along with the soldiers of the holy war. “Know that you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven. Now, how can you compete with that? We are promised victory and we will surely get it. Now I don’t like killing innocent people. It is forbidden in Islam. But due to (bullet hole), it is allowed.”

    He was not yet finished. He carved another message into a wooden slat inside the boat: “Stop killing our people and we will stop.”

    Chakravarty said Tsarnaev wanted to be “a terrorist hero.” He was making a statement. He was proud of the choices he made.

    And, while he hid in that boat and the police closed in on him, the prosecutor said, Tsarnaev “was negotiating the terms of death with the people of America.”

    Tsarnaev was born in Kyrgyzstan. As a child, he emigrated with his family to Russia and then, when he was 8 years old, to the United States under political asylum. The family settled in Cambridge and became U.S. permanent residents in March 2007.

    Tsarnaev enrolled in the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, with a major in marine biology. He said that he hoped to become a dentist.

    Tsarnaev was described as “normal” and popular among fellow students. His friends said he sometimes used marijuana, liked hip-hop, and did not talk to them about politics. He volunteered in the Best Buddies program. Many friends and other acquaintances found it inconceivable that he could be one of the two bombers at first, calling it “completely out of his character.” He spoke English well, easily fit in socially, and was described by peers as “[not] ‘them’. He was ‘us.’ He was Cambridge.”

    (SD-Agencies)