BLOOMING GROVE, Pa — They searched for him in impenetrable woods and forbidding caves, in schools and vacation homes and even in a roadside clothing donation bin, all the while hoping that ambush suspect Eric Frein wouldn’t take a potshot at them from some unseen, distant perch.

For 48 tense days, hundreds of law enforcement officials fanned out across the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania in a grueling manhunt for the 31-year-old survivalist armed with high-powered weaponry and explosives.

In the end, Frein surrendered meekly around 6 p.m. Thursday to a team of U.S. marshals who stumbled across him near an abandoned airplane hangar some 30 miles from the rural barracks where he allegedly opened fire Sept. 12, killing a trooper and seriously injuring another.

Authorities placed him in the handcuffs of slain Cpl. Bryon Dickson and put him in Dickson’s squad car for the ride back to the Blooming Grove barracks.

“He has been stripped of his guns, his bombs, and now his freedom,” Sam Rabadi, chief of the Philadelphia office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said at a late-night news conference.