Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (6 page)

Anzor and Zubeidat both scaled back their professional ambitions as they struggled to build a life in the United States. Although Zubeidat said to many that she had trained as a lawyer, she began providing home health care and would eventually switch to cosmetology, providing facials and skin care at a nearby spa and then in her apartment. Chris Walter, owner of Yayla Tribal Rugs in Cambridge, allowed Anzor to work on cars in a space behind his shop. Able to earn up to $100 a day—ten times what he said he could make back home—Anzor was thrilled at first. As time went on, though, he lost affection for his adopted country. “Life here was tough,” Walter said. “Anzor always said, ‘America, America is a great country.’ But it was sort of a joke. You had to work so hard here.”

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A
fter a couple of years in America, Tamerlan had pounded out a steady record of wins in the ring, becoming one of the better boxers in the region. Among other nicknames, he was known as “The Russian.” A gifted athlete and sought-after sparring partner, he had an unorthodox style. He did handstands and cartwheels in the ring. Sometimes he showed up with his keyboard and performed an elegant sonata. Then there were the clothes, which were anything but the typical gym-rat wardrobe: silver high-tops, skintight jeans, a white scarf, and his trademark furry hat. He drove a sleek white Mercedes, apparently a perk of his father’s side business in used cars. On special occasions, he was known to sport snakeskin pants and a shirt unbuttoned to the waist. At a Boston gym where he trained, he was teased about his flashy garb. One training partner jokingly called him “Eurotrash.” Tamerlan joked right back.

Tamerlan’s boxing prowess was one of the few bright spots for the Tsarnaev family. With all of them, at times, under one roof, the household began sagging under its own weight. Anzor developed more health problems. His stomach and head hurt constantly. He sought out acupuncture, consulted with a Chinese herbalist, and even swore off his beloved cognac. Both of his daughters’ marriages, meanwhile, ended in divorce. The one thing that buoyed Anzor’s spirits was seeing Tamerlan in the boxing ring.

Both Tamerlan and his father were hopeful that Tamerlan’s boxing skill would take him to the big time, possibly even the Olympics. His prospects were otherwise cloudy. After graduating from high school in 2006, Tamerlan had enrolled at two community colleges but attended fitfully. Eventually he had dropped out. Although he was a voracious reader—his personal library included Sherlock Holmes and the writings of Gandhi—school did not come easy. Much of the time he spent smoking pot and listening to music with friends. Dzhokhar, meanwhile, was increasingly left to make his own way. He found community in the social scene at his high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin, developing a diverse group of friends who seemed destined for good things. Cambridge was a famously welcoming environment. Immigrant success stories were many.
One of the few cracks came around his junior year, when he was sitting with friends at a local restaurant. They were talking about religion, Islam, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Dzhokhar suggested that acts like that were sometimes justified by US actions around the world. Cambridge harbored plenty of dissenting views of American foreign policy, but Dzhokhar’s more extreme opinions stood out. In school, he took honors classes and worked hard at wrestling. At home, he was largely an obedient child and often agreed to watch his sisters’ babies. Underneath, however, Dzhokhar was a freewheeling teenager, smoking marijuana regularly and drinking more than ever.

Concerned about her children, Zubeidat decided to act. She confronted Tamerlan first, the Koran in her hand. As with many Muslims from the former Soviet Union, the Tsarnaevs had practiced a relaxed form of their Muslim faith at home and attended mosque only occasionally. But as the stress of life in their adopted country began to take its toll, the family turned to religion with mounting fervor, Zubeidat the most forcefully. Only Anzor, the patriarch, remained stubbornly secular. Tamerlan, sometimes accompanied by his brother, occasionally attended the Friday service at the Islamic Society of Boston’s small blue-and-silver mosque in Cambridge, a short walk from their house. Tamerlan eventually gave up drinking alcohol, although he continued to smoke weed. He also began poring over Islamic websites, and began to moralize to his brother. If Dzhokhar announced that he was going out, Tamerlan would get on his case, insisting that he stop drinking and come home early.

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I
t was Team New England’s last fight of the night. Tamerlan had just landed a crushing blow in the first round of his bout. His opponent, Lamar Fenner, fell to the ground as the crowd let out a roar of approval. But Fenner rose to fight on, and when it was all over, the judges at the 2009 national Golden Gloves boxing tournament delivered a stunning verdict: They named Fenner the victor in his division. After a moment of shocked silence in the Salt Palace Convention Center, the crowd booed loudly. A year later, Tamerlan would become the New England Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of the year for the second time. It should have earned him a second chance at the national title he had been denied a year before in Salt Lake City. But because of a change of rules that prohibited noncitizens from participating in the Golden Gloves national tournament, Tamerlan was blocked from continuing. With that, another door slammed shut. Tamerlan’s once-promising boxing career had come to an abrupt halt, and with it the family’s hopes for his Olympic success. Rudderless and uncertain what was next, Tamerlan sought grounding in his faith. It would not, however, set him back on course.

The family’s downward spiral accelerated. Tamerlan had been charged with assaulting a girlfriend. During a separate altercation with patrons at a Boston restaurant, Anzor was severely injured when he was struck in the head with a steel pole. With Anzor unable to work full-time because of his health problems, the family was granted food stamps for the next couple of years and, for ten months, cash assistance from the government. Even with that, money was always tight. A bright spot was Katherine Russell, a young woman from Rhode Island whom Tamerlan had met at a downtown club. Raised a Catholic, Katie was already questioning her faith in light of the clergy sex abuse scandals; she found herself intrigued by Tamerlan’s commitment to Islam. For Tamerlan, dating a woman who was neither Chechen nor Muslim was problematic. When he decided to move in with her, it caused considerable distress in the family. But when Katie became pregnant, Anzor and Zubeidat warmed to their son’s mild-mannered girlfriend. The family was pleased when Katie agreed to convert to Islam and take the name Karima. In June 2010, the couple married in a brief ceremony at the Masjid Al-Qur’aan mosque in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. Not long afterward, their daughter, Zahira, was born. The young family moved into the Norfolk Street apartment. Katie supported them with her work as a home health aide. Tamerlan’s job was to care for Zahira.

Like her husband’s, Zubeidat’s romance with America had soured. Her chaotic household became even more unsettled as her husband’s health problems worsened. Anzor’s stomach pain had been diagnosed as possible cancer, and his anxiety provoked night terrors. Many nights he screamed into the darkness, making sleep impossible for everyone. In August 2011, the Tsarnaevs began divorce proceedings. A few months later, Anzor departed for Dagestan. With his father gone and both Zubeidat and Katie working long hours, Tamerlan often found himself alone. He spent hours cruising the Internet for websites associated with Islamic militants in his homeland. Around this time, Tamerlan posted, on Facebook, a link to an article from an online Chechen news agency, which claimed that US leaders were engaged in an “
all-out war against Islam” and urged Muslims to fight against America. By this point,
Tamerlan’s apparent radicalization had drawn the attention of the FBI, whose agents had probed his Internet activity, investigated potential associations with militants, and interviewed him and his parents. Investigators concluded that he posed only a minimal threat.

For his part, Dzhokhar had graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin in June 2011, one of forty-five students granted a $2,500 city scholarship for college. He was named to the National Honor Society. He was also awarded the MVP trophy by his high school wrestling team. While each of the other team members who received awards was accompanied by a family member or friend, Dzhokhar had neither. His coach was not surprised. During the three years that Dzhokhar had wrestled, his family members had not come to watch him compete. Nearly a decade after they had arrived in the United States, the Tsarnaev family had come apart, adrift in a culture to which they never fully adapted.

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I
n January 2012, Tamerlan traveled to Dagestan, where his father and other close relatives lived. But his true purpose seemed to be more personal: He was looking to immerse himself further in his faith—and possibly to make contact with its radical followers. He found the southern Russian republic in the midst of an Islamic revival. Friday prayers drew crowds of worshippers, which spilled out into the street from dozens of new mosques. The revival had its violent side, too. The Islamic insurgency that failed in neighboring Chechnya had moved to Dagestan, where a jihadist underground was staging deadly raids on police and the secular government they protect. Police responded, at times, with summary executions of suspects, human rights advocates charged. The clash of cultures was apparent in the frenetic capital, Makhachkala, where Tamerlan stayed. Heavily armed police checkpoints separate streets dotted with wireless cafes, sushi bars, and glistening shopping hubs. Everyone knows someone, or knows
of
someone, who has been shot passing through these checkpoints on suspicion of being part of the underground. Young women in dark veils walk the city hand in hand with friends in short skirts and designer sunglasses, past walls with warnings scrawled in red paint:

Fear Allah, cover yourselves!

Allah sees all!

Know, you dogs, there will be jihad before judgment day!

Tamerlan hooked up with members of the Union of the Just, an organization of young Muslims led by a third cousin on his mother’s side. Some members follow a strict interpretation of Islam, believing in the establishment of an Islamic state governed by sharia law that would span the region. They are sharply critical of US interventions in Muslim countries and believe the US government condones the burning of Korans. They do not openly espouse violence, but their beliefs have drawn accusations from Russian authorities that they belong to an outlawed Islamic group. Tamerlan arrived with many questions about Islam; he wanted to learn how to better express his faith. He spent time praying, studying the Koran, and playing soccer with Union of the Just members. “He was at the beginning of his path,” said Mukhamad Magomedov, deputy leader of the group. “He was mostly a listener, a searcher. He was looking for answers.”

But if Tamerlan was hoping to fit in, he did not succeed. Part of it was, yet again, his curious appearance. He wore a long shirt of the type favored by Pakistanis. He combed his hair with olive oil and darkened his eyes with kohl shadow, practices of devout Sunnis in some cultures, but not in Dagestan. He also began praying at a mosque attended by Salafi Muslims, a strict, orthodox Sunni sect whose members, authorities believe, often aid the armed insurgency. It was there, Russian authorities would later contend, that Tamerlan met with the insurgents he had come seeking, though that assertion would be questioned and a
Globe
investigation found strong reason to doubt such a connection ever occurred. Tamerlan left Dagestan in the summer of 2012, just as two members of the insurgency were killed by security forces. He promised to come back.

On his return to Cambridge, Tamerlan was a changed man. His face was covered by a thick beard. Gone were the silver boots and fur hat. In their place were dark clothing and a woven white prayer cap worn by Muslims. His prayers in the corner of the Wai Kru gym, which once took minutes, now lasted up to half an hour. “He had really dialed up the religion thing,” his training partner recalled. “The days of joking about his appearance, the Eurotrash—that kid was gone. In his place was a quiet, intense individual.” Tamerlan’s anger over American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq had also escalated. He railed about Muslims being killed overseas. He launched a YouTube account with a username that combined a name given him by his Union of the Just comrades and the phrase “the sword of God.” In one video in his playlist, called “Terrorists,” a speaker wearing camouflage, flanked by armed men wearing masks, holds an assault rifle and says in Russian, “There will always be a group of people who will stick to the truth, fight for that truth . . . and those who won’t support them will not win.”

As their relationship grew closer, Tamerlan confided in Donald Larking, his friend from the mosque, about the voice inside his head, which he said he had been hearing for some time. “He believed in majestic mind control, which is a way of breaking down a person and creating an alternative personality with which they must coexist,” Larking said. “You can give a signal, a phrase or a gesture, and bring out the alternate personality and make them do things. Tamerlan thought someone might have done that to him.” Just as he had once described it to his mother, Tamerlan told Larking that it was like having two people inside him.

Dzhokhar, meanwhile, had begun his freshman year at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in the fall of 2011. He joined an intramural soccer group, made other acquaintances playing video games and watching TV, and posted jokes on a newly opened Twitter account. He was generous with favors. Mostly, though, he was recognized for a different venture—selling notably strong marijuana. “He was known for having the best bud on campus,” said one longtime friend. He also took his reckless tendencies to new limits. A lit cigarette in hand, Dzhokhar loved to imitate race-car drivers, pushing his 1999 green Honda Civic up to nearly 120 miles an hour, according to several close friends. Other times he would turn corners with the steering wheel between his knees, leaving his hands free to roll a joint. If partying was a priority, schoolwork was not. As Dzhokhar’s wallet thickened with cash and his sense of invincibility grew, he was rarely spotted studying at the library or student lounges.