The Brothers (12 page)

“Are you in school?” Larry asked. He was always worried about kids staying enrolled—though he had never seen any reason to worry about Jahar.

“Yes.”

“Are you wrestling?”

“No.”

Larry was surprised.

“It’s a lot harder than I thought, this second year,” said Jahar.

Perhaps Aaronson sensed a lost quality in Jahar; perhaps he imagined it later. There was nothing in the boy’s demeanor or dress that seemed to have changed. Larry suggested Jahar could come to him for help with his studies, and Jahar seemed happy at the offer—and when he seemed happy, he always seemed genuinely happy. He never called.

From Cambridge, Tamerlan stayed in touch with his friends back in Dagestan by Skype. Skype has a special place in many Chechen immigrants’ homes. Those who have arrived in the United States after broadband Internet connections became widely available often maintain a semipermanent link with relatives at home, creating a close approximation of daily life still lived as a clan, with news and gossip exchanged while chores are done and meals are consumed or even virtually shared. Tamerlan now had his own connection to “back home.” He showed Mohammed Gadzhiev his daughter and the long beard he had grown as though on behalf of his brothers in Dagestan: they could never wear a beard that ostentatious without being identified, arrested, and likely executed for supposedly being Wahhabis.

Tamerlan boasted of his growing outspokenness. He had twice raised his voice in mosque—in fact, he had twice either staged a walkout or been removed from mosque for objecting to the imam’s acknowledgment of non-Muslim holidays. First it was Thanksgiving, and then Martin Luther King, Jr., Day in January. Gadzhiev reacted with his familiar mix of approval and condescension: Tamerlan was still acting like a big baby—speaking up against the imam in mosque is not a done thing—but on the other hand, his heart was clearly in the right place, even if his intention was still muddled.

On January 23, Tamerlan filed his petition for naturalization as a United States citizen. The form asks applicants if they want to change their name—an option many people take to Americanize their first names and to simplify spellings that have often been copied from foreign-issue documents. Tamerlan wrote that he wanted to change his first name to Muaz, presumably in honor of Emir Muaz, an insurgent killed in Dagestan in 2009. The emir’s name at birth had been Umar Sheikhulaev, and he had been the anointed leader of Dagestan in an aspirational greater Chechen state called the Caucasian Emirate.

•   •   •

ONE EVENING
in late February or early March, Azamat, Dias, and the girls were cruising for some weed. The search naturally led them to Jahar. He said he had something else in mind, and everyone got into a car—some people were in the BMW and some were in the car Jahar was driving. He had banged up his green Honda Civic a bit and had given it to Tamerlan to fix, so somehow he had a black Camaro on loan, which gave the evening a tinge of gangster glamour. He led the group to the banks of the Charles River, where he got a black backpack out of the trunk and some fireworks out of the backpack and set them off. Then everyone got back into the cars and drove back to New Bedford, where there was pot to be smoked. It had been pretty. It had also been cold. Fireworks, unless set off by professionals as part of a licensed display, are illegal in Massachusetts. But then, so is the sale of marijuana.

•   •   •

IN EARLY MARCH,
Tamerlan was calling Musa Khadzhimuratov in New Hampshire to arrange a time to drop in: Musa’s mother-in-law was visiting from Chechnya, and custom dictated that every Chechen in the area stop by to pay his respects. The matter was urgent because the old woman’s stay was coming to an end. Tamerlan wanted to come on a weekday—he wanted to bring his family, and Karima worked weekends. Musa had endless medical appointments during the week, so he resisted. In the end, Tamerlan and Karima figured out a way to visit on the last weekend of March, which also happened to be the old woman’s last weekend in the country.

Musa’s mother-in-law thought they were a gorgeous family, and attempted to tell Karima as much in Chechen.

“Mama, she doesn’t understand.”

The old woman switched to Russian.

“Mama, she doesn’t understand that, either.”

“What’s such a beautiful boy doing with a girl who doesn’t understand anything?”

Everyone laughed.

Tamerlan made mistakes, as always: he picked up Zahira, in violation of a custom that prohibits Chechen men from picking up children in front of elders. Musa ribbed Tamerlan about being more Dagestani than Chechen. Tamerlan said he still thought of himself as more of a Chechen but regrettably had no family in Chechnya. (Jamal, though he was often there, maintained his home base in central Russia now.) He said his aunt Malkan had recently sold her place in Central Asia to move to Chechnya—maybe he would be able to visit there more often now.

•   •   •

OVER A MEAL IN MARCH,
Jahar told Dias and Azamat that he knew how to make a bomb. He said he had learned it in chemistry class. He also said there were things, perhaps some things in the Koran, that were worth fighting for, using force. His friends did not think anything of it: they spent a lot of time together, and a lot of things were said. Jahar was no Muslim fanatic—Dias and Azamat had both seen a couple of those, and Azamat thought maybe Tamerlan was one when he foisted some book on him during the one night Azamat spent at Jahar’s place in Cambridge. Jahar just had a way with random pronouncements. Like, on New Year’s Eve he tweeted, “I meet the most amazing people, spent the day with this Jamaican Muslim convert who shared his whole story with me, my religion is the truth.”

Three weeks later, he tweeted, “To be honest, I don’t care for those people that wanna commit suicide, your life b, do what you think will make you happy. #selfishbastards.”

And in another month he tweeted, “Share the love, the knowledge and the wealth.”

On April 9, he posted several videos on his VK.com page, including one about the carnage in Syria that ended with the line “Syria is calling. We will answer,” and one about a blind boy who spends all his time studying the Koran.

And on April 12 he tweeted, “Now we ain’t come here to start no drama, we are just looking for future baby mamas.”

And eight minutes later, “Dreams really do come true, last night I dreamt I was eating a cheeseburger and in the afternoon today, guess what I’m eating . . .”

He used his Facebook page that week to advertise some Ed Hardy clothes for sale, new with tags.

And among all that, there were hundreds of tweets and posts about girls, food, sleeping habits, the drudgery of college, and a couple of sophomoric jokes in Russian thrown in. Who knew what could come out of the guy’s mouth?

•   •   •

ONLY THREE STATES
in the union observe Patriots’ Day, the anniversary of the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord. Massachusetts is the only one of those states that has actual celebratory practices for the holiday: the battles are reenacted; the Red Sox play their home opener at Fenway Park; schools and state offices are closed; and the Boston Marathon is run. It is like Massachusetts’ own big American holiday. Though if you have never lived anywhere in America outside Massachusetts, you might just think Patriots’ Day is a big American holiday, period. Kind of like a second Fourth of July.

Patriots’ Day 2013 fell on April 15, tax day—an ironic coincidence for a big American holiday. At 2:49 p.m. that day, a couple of hours after the winner completed the Boston Marathon, when runners were crossing the finish line in a steady stream, two bombs went off near the end of the route, killing three people and injuring at least 264 others, including sixteen who lost limbs.

THEY ARE US

I
n the immediate aftermath of the bombing, police scanned the crowd for people who looked suspicious, which is to say Muslim, which is to say darker than Boston-white. A twenty-year-old man from Saudi Arabia was among the walking wounded—the dozens of people with burns, scratches, and bruises from being thrown who were making their way, with the assistance of uninjured runners, to the assembled ambulances. Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, an English-language student who had been on his way to meet friends for lunch and decided to get a glimpse of the marathon on the way, had been thrown by the second explosion. He had burn injuries on his head, back, and legs. His jeans were torn. He was covered in blood, most of it other people’s. A police officer directed Alharbi, along with other victims, toward the waiting ambulances—but when the student boarded one, several officers followed him into the vehicle. At the hospital, more than twenty police officers and FBI agents surrounded his bed. At 4:28 in the afternoon, less than two hours after the bombs went off, the
New York Post
reported that law enforcement were talking to a suspect in the bombing. By evening, the media had his name and address, and the FBI had his Facebook password. By Tuesday morning, the
Post
had published a picture taken in the street in Revere, the Boston suburb where Alharbi lived, Fox News had reported his name, and other media had published a mistranslation of a Facebook post of his: “God is coming to the U.S.” In fact, he had written, “Thank God I arrived in the U.S. after a long trip.” CBS stated that a spectator at the marathon had seen Alharbi “acting suspiciously” and tackled him. Other media reported that he had had burns on his hands, pointing to the probability that he was the bomber.

Alharbi was exonerated by the FBI within twenty-four hours of the bombing, but by this time he had no home—his address was now so widely known that he felt he would be unsafe there—and no money: the FBI never returned his wallet. The Saudi embassy provided Alharbi with food and a hotel room.

After Alharbi came Sunil Tripathi, Salaheddin Barhoum, and Yassine Zaimi. The last two were Moroccan immigrants, a seventeen-year-old high school track competitor and his twenty-four-year-old coach, who had been fingered by amateur online detectives. On Thursday, April 18, the
Post
published a photograph of them on the cover, with the banner headline
BAG
MEN: FEDS SEEK THESE TWO PICTURED AT BOSTON MARATHON
. The evidence, as analyzed by the online crowd: one of the men was wearing a black backpack—and a black backpack, or what remained of it after a bomb exploded inside, had been found at the scene. Plus, they looked dark and were indeed Muslim.

Sunil Tripathi was a brown-skinned American student at Brown University who had disappeared almost a month before the bombing. This suspect too came courtesy of Internet amateurs, but the social network Reddit gave it such traction that for a day or two those following the case were all but certain this young man was the prime suspect. In fact, he had been dead for weeks—his body was found another week later.

At five o’clock on Thursday, the FBI called a press conference at a Sheraton hotel in Boston. Within half an hour media had released pictures of another pair of young men: one older, one younger, one wearing a white baseball cap and the other a black one—oddly, all of this was also true of the two Moroccans, and in some quarters confusion persisted. The pictures were taken from surveillance tapes; the FBI believed the two men to be the bombers, and was asking the public for help in identifying them.

•   •   •

LARRY AARONSON
is the sort of person who engages with everything that happens in his city and feels responsible for everyone he has ever known. This time his personal investment was overwhelming: he knew three of the people who lost limbs. One was the son of a fellow Rindge and Latin teacher, a special boy who had been doing relief work in war zones. Another was the daughter of a teacher. A third was a teacher who was dating a former student. Aaronson felt personally injured, and he was glued to Facebook, where friends and strangers were exchanging the latest news and rumors. His own suspicion was that the bomber was a rogue Tea Party member who had chosen the coincidence of Patriots’ Day and tax day to protest the government by killing amateur athletes.

But then he saw reports on the Saudi student, the Moroccans, and the boy who looked Sri Lankan. They seemed no more and no less absurd than any other possible suspect. Then he saw the picture of the men the FBI said were suspects. One of them looked uncannily like Jahar. As Thursday evening wore on, the pictures Aaronson was seeing on his screens became more and more clear: as the resolution went up, the bombers were coming into focus.
Man, this is looking a lot like Jahar,
he was thinking.
I should call him and tell him, “You better go to the police, because they are showing pictures of this kid who looks just like you.”

Ginny, a receptionist at a Cambridge hospital, recognized Tamerlan right away. She had the day off, so, like many people in the Boston area, she was home in front of her television set when the pictures were first shown. “That’s the fucking guy who used to come in and talk to me!” Ginny shouted to her husband. “He delivered for Mona Lisa!” Mona Lisa was the pizza place down the street from the hospital, just across from Rindge and Latin. It was owned by two brothers—Ginny was pretty sure they were Brazilian (they were actually Egyptian)—and Tamerlan had spent a couple of months delivering for them. On one of his first deliveries, he’d asked the receptionist her name, though he never introduced himself. From then on, he would come in, always dressed in jeans and a hoodie, and say, in his strong accent, “I’m from Mona Lisa. How you doin’, Ginny?” Her first thought on seeing his photo on television was,
He knows my name!
She barely considered going to the authorities: “I was scared. I didn’t want to become a target.”

•   •   •

OVER AT
the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth campus, just about every television set had been on for three straight days. Sixty miles’ distance from Boston made it all feel a bit like a video game. Few of the students were familiar enough with the multimillion-dollar town houses and luxury shops of Back Bay to have the sort of visceral reaction to the television footage through which the brain and the body tell each other,
This is us, it is our home that is under attack
. The kids at the UMass campus fielded calls and messages from family, affirmed that they were well and far from the scene of the attack, and commenced watching what felt like a reality TV show on the bombing. And then they saw Jahar.

Unlike Larry Aaronson, many of the UMass students saw Jahar several times a week, or even daily. They did not think that television was broadcasting the picture of a kid who looked like Jahar: there was no doubt in their minds that this
was
Jahar. And then again, there was doubt.

Very soon, many of Tamerlan’s and Jahar’s friends would be telling the FBI and the media that it was impossible that the brothers were the bombers—there had been no sign. Surely, the friends would say, if the two had been plotting something so huge and horrible, they would have seemed distracted. Or emotional. Or pensive. Or somehow, clearly, not themselves. But this assumption was a misconception. The psychiatrist and political scientist Jerrold Post, who has been studying terrorists for decades, writes, “Terrorists are not depressed, severely emotionally disturbed, or crazed fanatics.” Political scientist Louise Richardson, an undisputed star in the tiny academic field of terrorism studies, writes of terrorists: “Their primary shared characteristic is their normalcy, insofar as we understand the term. Psychological studies of terrorism are virtually unanimous on this point.”

Nor do terrorists tend to behave out of character just before committing an act that, to them, appears perfectly rational and fully justified. One of the September 11 hijackers called his wife in Germany on the morning of the attacks to tell her he loved her; she apparently heard nothing extraordinary in his voice. Having made the decision to commit an act of terrorism, the future bomber—even a suicide bomber—develops, it would appear, a sort of two-track mind. On one track, life goes on exactly as before; on the other, he is preparing for the event that will disrupt his life or even end it. It is precisely the ordinary nature of the man and the extraordinary effect of the act about to be committed that ensure the two tracks never cross.

When students at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth saw their classmate’s picture on television, their minds became the perfect mirrors of Jahar’s: on one track was the full knowledge that they were looking at a picture of their friend; on the other was the certainty that Jahar could not possibly be responsible for the marathon bombing. “I knew it was him because I recognized him, but I didn’t believe it was him,” Tiffany Evora said in court fourteen months later. Testifying at the same trial, Alexa Guevara could not force the words out and had to be coaxed by a lawyer.

“When you saw the images, you did not believe it was him, did you?”

“No,” she said, though she had acknowledged that she had recognized Jahar.

“You didn’t believe he was capable of something like that, did you?”

“No,” she said, and started crying.

Between the track that was telling these college kids that the person in the pictures on television was undoubtedly their friend, and the track that kept insisting this was impossible, they chose the middle road. Rather than go to the police or the FBI, as the voices on television kept imploring them to do, they went to Jahar’s dorm. Why? None of them could answer that question clearly in the aftermath, but it seems that in the hope of calming their exploding minds, they wanted to ask Jahar himself if he had set off the bombs.

The door to room 7341, with perhaps a lily pad and a turkey glued to it, was locked. Befuddled students came in a steady stream, tried the door handle, exchanged concerned glances, somber nods, and the occasional unconvincing reassurance, and ambled off, back to the screens in their own dorm rooms.

•   •   •

HAD ANY OF JAHAR’S
college friends gone to the police, they could have reported that they had seen Jahar in the days after the bombing—he had been on campus and he had been himself: just Jahar. Azamat could have said what he told the FBI later, that Jahar had not joined his friends for spring break in Florida in mid-March, and that when they returned he had apparently stopped smoking weed—though not necessarily selling it. That he did not see Jahar or text with him on Sunday, April 14—Jahar must have gone to Cambridge for the day or the weekend, which was hardly unusual. Monday was the holiday, another no-school day, and Azamat had texted Jahar, asking if he was around. “I ‘have’ to make my passport, so ‘tomorrow,’” was the response, with the emphasis quotation marks around two words. Then a friend from Kazakhstan had texted Azamat, asking him if he was all right—this was how Azamat found out about the bombing. Azamat texted Jahar, asking in turn if he was all right—and learned that he was. At 4:19, Azamat got another text from Jahar: “Don’t go thinking it’s me, you cooked bastard.” Azamat was thinking no such thing; the only odd thing about this message was that “cooked” means “stoned,” and Azamat never smoked.

On Tuesday, Azamat and Dias drove to Boston. The plan was to do some shopping, which was really an excuse to check out the state of Back Bay. They headed for Boylston Street, only to discover that all the stores there were closed. Dias dropped Azamat off in Cambridge, near Jahar’s house. Jahar came down and drove Azamat back to New Bedford in his green Honda Civic while Dias used the shared BMW with the
TERRORISTA#1
license plate to go see Bayan at Babson. Back at Azamat and Dias’s apartment on Carriage Drive, Jahar and Azamat played FIFA on Xbox for hours—except for a short break Jahar took to go into the bathroom and use his phone to Skype with Tamerlan. This was all normal enough. One of the three Kazakhs on the T-Mobile family plan—most likely Dias, who had lost his T-Mobile phone—had failed to pay his share of the monthly bill, and T-Mobile had suspended their account. Now none of them could use regular phone service: they used iMessage, an Apple program, to text, and Skype to talk on the phone, but they could do those things only when they had an Internet connection. There was nothing strange about Jahar’s wanting some privacy for his call with his brother—and Azamat knew whom he was talking to, so Jahar was not exactly being secretive.

That day Jahar also tweeted a bit, as usual. Among other things, he, like millions of other Americans, commented on a picture of a woman who had been injured in the bombings. The photograph had been circulating with a caption that claimed the woman’s boyfriend had been planning to propose to her the day she was injured—and that she had died. “Fake story,” wrote Jahar. It was.

On Wednesday, two days after the bombing, Azamat and Jahar went to the gym together in the evening. Afterward, they played FIFA until midnight. Sometime that evening Jahar also dropped by a soccer-team get-together at an Italian restaurant.

On Thursday Azamat ran into Robel on campus. They had not seen each other in over a month, while Robel was on suspension; now he was on campus for a hearing on his violation. It was around one in the afternoon and they were near the cafeteria, so they got lunch. Robel asked if he could spend the weekend at the apartment on Carriage Drive. Dias had the BMW that day, so after lunch Azamat texted Jahar, asking him for a ride home. Robel and Azamat walked over to Pine Dale Hall. They spent about half an hour in Robel’s friend Lino Rosas’s room. Lino always said he liked Robel the moment he saw him, at the beginning of freshman year, because he had “finally found someone skinnier than me.” Both boys were dark-skinned, well over six feet tall, and so thin they looked breakable and made Azamat seem positively roly-poly. Azamat hung around with them for about half an hour in Lino’s room, then tagged along as they went down to the parking lot, and sat in the back of Lino’s car as they got stoned with the windows rolled up.