Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (5 page)

Two brothers in descent

T
he voice had begun speaking to him again.

It was 2012, almost a full decade after Tamerlan Tsarnaev had arrived in the United States with his family. He was about twenty-six and living in Cambridge, an unemployed immigrant from southern Russia with an intensifying interest in Islam. He was going nowhere. And the voice inside his head—the one that had first spoken to him years earlier—was growing more adamant. He never knew when it would come, but when it did, he alone was privy to its commands. As a young man, he had felt like there were two people inside his head, or so he told his mother. The voice, Tamerlan explained to a friend, had become more demanding with age, ordering him to do things, though he never said what. “He was torn between those two people,” said Donald Larking, sixty-seven, who attended mosque with him and spoke to the
Boston Globe
about a side of Tamerlan never previously reported. “He said that several times.”

Once, Tamerlan had embodied the hopes of his immigrant parents. He’d been a gifted boxer with Olympic dreams. His mother had doted on her oldest son, convinced he would bring honor to the family. That was all buried in the past. The family had collapsed. His parents had split and fled the country. Tamerlan had been unsuccessful at virtually every one of his endeavors in America. He had been blocked from participating in national Golden Gloves boxing events. He hadn’t found work. He’d dropped out of college before earning a degree. With thirty not too far in the distance, the tall, muscular young man who once seemed confident and focused now looked increasingly angry and unmoored, spending hours watching Islamic YouTube videos on his computer.

In November 2012, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Tamerlan sat listening to a guest imam at the family’s Cambridge mosque. The imam said that Muslims were permitted to celebrate certain secular holidays, including Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. Tamerlan was outraged. He leapt to his feet, angrily denouncing the imam. After the service, mosque elders sat with him. “He was listening, but he was pretty emotional,” said one of the men, Ismail Fenni. “He was standing by his views.” Not long after that, Tamerlan reacted with similar outrage to a sign posted at the nearby Al-Hoda Market, a Middle Eastern grocery that specializes in halal meats, which are prepared according to Islamic law. The sign advertised halal turkeys for Thanksgiving; Tamerlan demanded to know why Muslims were being encouraged to participate in an American holiday.
A few months later, in January 2013, he erupted again at the mosque. At a Friday prayer service shortly before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he shouted at the imam for holding up the late civil rights icon as a worthy example to follow. Others in the room told Tamerlan to stop. “Leave,” they ordered the angry young man. “Leave now.” Tamerlan stormed out of the building.

More instability loomed. The family’s landlady, Joanna Herlihy, had decided, after long giving the Tsarnaevs a break on the rent, that she needed to charge a higher rate for their third-floor apartment in Inman Square. The apartment had been the one constant in the Tsarnaevs’ ten turbulent years in America, and now Tamerlan was on the verge of losing it. Herlihy told him that he needed to move out by June. He was shaken, but he understood. The apartment had once hummed with the noisy, crowded ambitions of his volatile family. By this point, in early 2013, it was a shell of what it had been, long emptied of any constructive aspirations. When Tamerlan went there now, there was only a computer screen to keep him company. Losing the place was all but a formality. The home the Tsarnaevs had built—or had tried to build—was already gone. In its wake, one lost, isolated young man remained. Or perhaps there were two.

 • • • 

H
e joined the crowd near Copley Square on that April afternoon, another youthful face among the happy masses. He was there to hang out with a friend and cheer on the runners like everyone else. The Boston Marathon was one of Boston’s signature public events, and in the spring of 2012, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wanted to be part of it. On a typical April Monday, Dzhokhar, whom friends knew as Jahar, would be in one of his freshman classes at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. But this was Patriot’s Day, which meant no school. So he and his best friend, Steve, had headed up to Boston. They had arrived too late to see the top finishers, but in plenty of time to cheer on the rest, grab some pizza, savor the sunshine, and, as was often the case with Dzhokhar, smoke a joint. He had two essays due by noon the next day, but those could wait. “We were just chilling,” Steve said.

Dzhokhar’s soft features and mop of hair only added to his relaxed aura. But it was a façade. He was no ordinary, aimless college boy. He was a young man who, like his older brother Tamerlan, was in the midst of a troubling transformation. Dzhokhar, eighteen, a former high school honor student and wrestling team captain, was foundering in his studies and losing his sense of direction. He had, soon after arriving on the Dartmouth campus, become the leader of a small group of friends who shared interests in global affairs, thrill-seeking, and getting stoned. He had also established himself as a high-volume pot dealer, pulling in about $1,000 a week, and sometimes more, according to several college friends. The money helped pay for luxuries previously out of his reach—designer shoes, trips to New York clubs, Cîroc vodka, and psychedelic drugs. He liked to court danger, and occasionally carried a gun to protect his valuable stash. He sold drugs out of his dorm room with the door propped open. He was as brazen as he was charming. He was the one friends relied on to sweet-talk campus police out of getting them in trouble. He was beginning to skid in college, but he seemed nonchalant, or perhaps in denial. If his future held any promise, it was hard to discern. It was not yet too late for him to right his life’s wayward course. But he seemed to lean into his downward slide instead, picking up dangerous momentum as he went.

 • • • 

N
ew Jersey was their first stop in America. They landed on a raw spring day in 2002, just the Tsarnaev parents and their youngest son, a quiet boy of eight named Dzhokhar. The other three children, for the time being, stayed behind with relatives. In his pocket, the father, Anzor, carried the phone number of Khassan Baiev, a prominent Chechen surgeon who lived in Needham, west of Boston. “He called me and said, ‘Please, can you help me. There is no one here to meet us,’” Baiev said. The Tsarnaevs stayed with the Baievs for a month and then moved into the apartment in Cambridge. Anzor started fixing cars, building himself a livelihood. Cruising around town in his battered van, he befriended both merchants and customers. He soon developed his own clients, many of whom were drawn to his competitive prices and spirited nature. “Anzor was tough as they come,” said Joe Timko, a supervisor at Webster Auto Body in Somerville, where Anzor did body work for several months. “He’d change a transmission right there on the street. I mean, he was a stone. But he was also very emotional. He always came right up and gave you a hug.”

The Tsarnaevs joined a loose-knit social scene made up of the few Chechen families in the Boston area. They’d arrive at picnics in their humble used Hyundai, the gaggle of children in the back. But the appearances of the two parents, Anzor and Zubeidat, spoke of grander visions. “She was very glamorous, very fancy, like she was going to walk down the red carpet,” said Anna Nikaeva, a Chechen who runs a senior care facility outside Boston with her husband. “Anzor was also dressed finely and he was most handsome. They had big plans for their kids in America.”

Their American dreams had taken root years earlier in the chaos of Anzor’s homeland of Kyrgyzstan. The Tsarnaev clan had lived for generations in the foothills of the Caucasus in Chechnya, but they were forced out in 1944 when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin viciously exiled the Chechen people to Central Asia and Siberia. Tens of thousands starved or froze to death along the journey. Anzor’s father, Zaindy, just eleven years old at the time, was one of those who made it. He built a life in Tokmok, a rambling provincial city in what is now Kyrgyzstan. Like many others trying to scrape by, Zaindy scavenged in a local dump nicknamed the “Golden Pit” for items or scrap to sell. One day in 1988, he threw some promising metal objects into his car, unaware that live ordnance was among them. The car exploded, killing the father of seven—Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s grandfather.

Like his father, Anzor learned to work with other people’s wreckage and fix junked cars. It gave him a way to make a living, and to support his wife, Zubeidat, whom he had met in the mid-1980s, and their four children. Theirs was an unlikely union: the exotic, dark-haired young woman was an ethnic Avar; her people, from Chechnya’s neighbor to the east, Dagestan, historically had a tense relationship with the Chechens. Zubeidat had already fled an arranged marriage, a shockingly unconventional act in that tradition-bound time and culture. But Anzor and Zubeidat both were strong-willed, and they paid no attention to gossip. She was a dramatic beauty, prone to excess. He was a strapping former boxer and talented raconteur. More than a few envied their seemingly passionate marriage.

In the early 1990s, Anzor took the family to Chechnya, a province of Russia that had declared its independence. In late 1994, the Kremlin sent in Russian troops, in an attempt to put down the rebellion. Tens of thousands died and hundreds of thousands fled. The Tsarnaevs were among them, landing back in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan. Anzor returned to the business of refurbishing cars. His three sisters and one of his brothers earned law degrees at a university in the capital, Bishkek, according to school records. Anzor would later say that he, too, earned a law degree, but the university had no record of it. He did work in a district prosecutor’s office in Bishkek, likely in a role akin to an unpaid internship. The connection provided Anzor with something perhaps more valuable than a law degree—an ID card from the prosecutor’s office. This credential helped him evade corrupt officials and extortion gangs who sought to muscle in on his true livelihood: “shuttle trading” (moving consumer goods in the ruins of the Communist economy). Anzor and his uncle transported tobacco from a factory in southern Kyrgyzstan to buyers elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. It was a good but risky business.

Their primary motivation for leaving their homeland for America remains murky, but according to a story his wife would tell an associate years later, Anzor had drawn the wrath of the Russian mob. She said her husband had played a role in the prosecution of some mafia members involved in illegal trading. After the case was over, according to Zubeidat’s account, the mob kidnapped Anzor for a week, tortured him to the brink of death, and then dumped him from a truck in the middle of nowhere. Zubeidat said she knew, when she went to the hospital and saw how badly he’d been beaten, that it was time to leave the country. But the mob’s henchmen weren’t finished yet. Before Anzor could leave the hospital, she said, someone took the family’s German shepherd, cut off its head, and left it on the Tsarnaevs’ doorstep. A longtime family friend would later say that Anzor, to win escape from Kyrgyzstan, concocted false stories about persecution of the Chechen people. That would give him political asylum—the status he needed to stay in the United States, a place the Tsarnaevs had idealized from afar. They had watched their share of Hollywood movies. The country looked so beautiful, the life there so promising. “Let’s go to America,” Anzor once told a friend, Bakhtiar Nurmenov. “Why should we sit here and rust?”

 • • • 

T
heir building stood out for the noise. By 2008, five years after the family of six—Anzor and Zubeidat, along with their sons, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, and two daughters, Bella and Ailina—had reunited in the United States, the Tsarnaevs were an even larger clan. Their apartment, in a multifamily house packed in among many others on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, near Inman Square, was now as loud as it was cramped. At varying times there were one or two babies—the children of the Tsarnaevs’ two teenage daughters—in the apartment as well, all of them occupying eight hundred square feet of living space. Their shoes spilled down the stairway; their voices rang out from the windows. The babies cried day and night. When the older children were around, the place got even louder, especially when Tamerlan practiced his favorite hip-hop riffs on his keyboard. None of them, however, could match the sheer volume of Zubeidat, the matriarch of the household and a woman not known for restraint. Neighbors had to cover their ears at times to find peace.

In their early years in America, the family had plunged into their new life with gusto. Tamerlan, Bella, Ailina, and Dzhokhar attended local public schools. Dzhokhar thrived at his elementary school, the Cambridgeport School. Initially held back because of his deficiencies in English, he was reading so proficiently by the end of third grade that he was bumped up to fifth grade. His parents had deemed him the brains of the family, destined to be the first to earn a diploma from an American college. Anzor would boast to friends that Dzhokhar was Ivy League material.

It was their firstborn son, Tamerlan, though, who carried the family’s hopes for athletic distinction. Zubeidat was forever musing about his brilliant prospects as he became an accomplished amateur boxer. “Tamerlan was idolized,” Anna Nikaeva said. “Anything he said was right. He was perfect.” Except that he wasn’t. One day when the two women were talking, Zubeidat shared a disturbing secret with Nikaeva, something that Tamerlan had said. “He had told his mother that he felt there were two people living inside of him,” Nikaeva said in an interview with the
Globe
. “I told her, ‘You should get that checked out.’ But she just said, ‘No, he’s fine.’ She couldn’t accept the tiniest criticism of him.” If they never sought mental health care for their son, the Tsarnaevs regularly saw a psychiatrist themselves, a decision motivated by Anzor’s troubles. Alexander Niss, a psychiatrist now based outside Los Angeles, saw Anzor and Zubeidat during his residency at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston. Anzor told Niss that he had been captured by federal troops in Chechnya and repeatedly tortured. He told the doctor that his experience “was interfering with his daily life,” Niss said. “He had trouble sleeping, things like that. He was really a sick person.”