by Masha Gessen
• • •
WHAT EXACTLY Ibragim Todashev did to get himself killed was not clear then and is not clear now. By the day of his death, he had been what the FBI called “interviewed” three times. The first time, on April 20, began with Ibragim on the ground on the condo complex’s bucolic lawn, with armed men crowded around him: this was the manner in which the FBI first ID’d him, though he was never arrested and all his conversations with the FBI were, technically, voluntary. From that point on he was under constant overt surveillance. In addition, the FBI took all of his electronics—but returned them a day later. At least at some points, the FBI appears to have had a drone follow him. And on May 16, his girlfriend, Tatiana Gruzdeva, was arrested.
The other women in Ibragim’s life seem to have had varying levels of awareness of Tatiana’s existence: Elena thought Tatiana was Ibragim’s roommate, and Reni thought she was the girlfriend of Ibragim’s best friend, Khusein Taramov. In any case, Tatiana was arrested for alleged visa violations, leaving Ibragim living in the apartment alone.
On May 21, Ibragim got a call from the FBI agent he had seen a few times over the preceding month. He said that a group of agents from Boston had come to Orlando and wanted to talk to Ibragim—and that this would be the last interview. Ibragim still did not want to make the trek downtown to the FBI offices, so the agents agreed to come to him. He wanted to meet at a hookah bar; they eventually settled on talking in his apartment. Ibragim was apparently scared of the FBI at this point: he asked Khusein, who was also from Chechnya, to come to his place and stay there during the interview.
The team from Boston consisted of one FBI agent and two state troopers. A Justice Department report later described them as a homicide team. They were in Orlando to investigate the triple murder in Waltham in September 2011, the one in which Tamerlan’s best friend, Brendan Mess, and another Rindge and Latin graduate were killed. Khusein was not allowed to be in the apartment; a Florida FBI agent kept him in the parking lot, talking. Ibragim lived in one of those Orlando planned communities that look like they have been airlifted from a place that never existed. The condos are small vertical affairs, but each has its own entrance and two levels. The facades are a combination of cheap texture paint and equally cheap siding, but the backs feature double-height windows and sliding doors that open onto a lake with bridges and a fountain. Khusein and the Florida FBI agent stayed in the working-class front; Ibragim spent his last hours sitting by the sliding door, looking out onto the aspirational back. At seven-thirty in the evening, the homicide team from Massachusetts began questioning Ibragim, just as the FBI agents in Atlanta and Savannah began questioning Reni and Elena. After the interviews in Georgia ended, the one in Florida went on—and on.
According to the report, around ten-thirty Ibragim slowly began confessing to having been Tamerlan’s accomplice in the triple murder. In another hour, he agreed to write a statement about it. Around midnight, one of the state troopers went out to the parking lot to get Ibragim’s phone from Khusein. While he was out of the building, something happened. Early reports had the remaining two officers saying, variously, that Ibragim had grabbed a broomstick and charged the officers with it, and that he had run to the kitchen area to grab a knife. The final official report said that Ibragim jumped up from the mattress on which he had been sitting composing his confession, threw a coffee table up in the air, knocked the FBI agent out of his chair, ran into the kitchen area, grabbed a metal utility pole, raised it over his head with both hands, and charged the trooper, who raised his hands to his face to protect it. The FBI agent fired seven shots at Ibragim, killing him.
• • •
IT WAS THE BOSTON GLOBE that first reported that law enforcement seemed to be investigating Tamerlan’s possible connection to the September 2011 triple murder. The newspaper’s source was a relative of one of the victims, who had been questioned by police following a months-long lull during which the investigation seemed to have gone dormant.
In the spring of 2011, after nearly a year of marriage, Reni had demanded that Ibragim find a way to make money. He went to Boston that summer and worked as a van driver for an adult-care center. According to the law enforcement narrative that eventually emerged, he left the city immediately after the killings.
Reni told me Ibragim had actually left Boston earlier and was not there on September 11, the day the three men were murdered. She said she could see that from the records of their joint checking account: the charges Ibragim was making using his debit card showed he was elsewhere. Reni has the kind of memory and attention to detail that make her quite certain of things like this. But the bank, she said, had already deleted records for 2011 by the time she tried to get proof of Ibragim’s alibi.
Nearly a year after Ibragim’s death, the confession he did not finish writing would be leaked to the media. Written in slanted Russian-style cursive on a pad of white ruled paper, it said:
My name is IBRAGIM TODASHEV. I wanna tell the story about the robbery me and Tam did in Waltham in September of 2011. That was [illegible] by Tamerlan [illegible] went he [illegible] to me to rob the dealers. We went to their house we got in there and Tam had a gun he pointed it [illegible] the guy that opened the door for us [illegible] we went upstairs into the house [illegible] 3 guys in there [illegible] we put them on the ground and then we [crossed out] taped their hands up
This short description contains four details that are inconsistent with what little is known about the murders. First, it was clearly not a robbery: five thousand dollars in cash and even more in marijuana had been left behind. Second, if Tamerlan had a gun, why did he not use it to kill the men instead of slashing their throats? Third, two of the bodies had signs of struggle, while this confession seems to describe them as lying down on the floor and allowing themselves to be immobilized without resisting. Finally, the men were not found with their hands taped up—nor were they found all together: the bodies were laid out in separate rooms and their blood had pooled there, suggesting that those were the rooms in which they were killed.
There may be explanations for all of these discrepancies. Tamerlan may have, for example, initially told Ibragim that the crime he was planning was a robbery. Indeed, he may have done this in order to persuade Ibragim to help. It is conceivable that Tamerlan had a gun he could not or did not want to fire, for reasons either technical or conceptual. The struggles may have occurred when the men were being taken to different rooms. And the killers may have removed the tape after the victims were dead. Alternatively, the confession may have been written, or dictated, or both, by someone who lacked specific information about the murders.
Two things are certain. One, Reni is quite sure that the handwriting is Ibragim’s: the document is genuine. And two, Ibragim is dead and so is Tamerlan, which means it is virtually impossible that the facts of the Waltham murders will ever be fully known.
• • •
WHEN SHE WAS at last able to leave the base, Elena had to drive to Savannah to change into civilian clothing. Then she drove the two hundred fifty miles to Atlanta, straight to the Holiday Inn. Reni was in one of the hotel rooms with the FBI agents and her manager; she was afraid to be alone with the agents. “I kept saying to them, ‘Show me what you say he wrote with his own hand,’” Reni told me. “They kept saying, ‘We don’t have anything here.’”
That afternoon Elena drove her daughter the four hundred–plus miles down to Orlando. Reni’s phone kept ringing, and she kept trying to tell people what she knew but finding herself unable to speak. She’d cried and screamed so much that morning that she still had not regained her voice. She phoned Ibragim’s mother, whom she called Mama. “Mama, they have killed him.”
In Orlando, they met up with Khusein, who told them what he knew. They drove to the medical examiner’s office. “When I asked them how many bullets,” Reni told me, “I sure didn’t expect to hear that kind of number. I fell facedown on a table and I wailed. I said, �
��I want to see the body.’—‘Are you sure?’—‘I’m sure.’ They wheeled him in on a gurney, he had a sheet covering him up to his neck. They had us standing on the side where you couldn’t really see the wounds. His eyes were still open, and they were this murky gray color. His upper jaw looked clenched but the mouth was slightly open. And I started saying, ‘Mama, why isn’t he getting up? When has this ever happened that we are all standing around him and he is not getting up?’ It was like I knew everything but I couldn’t believe anything.”
Then began a month of paperwork. Reni did not cry anymore. She had to take her husband’s body home to Chechnya, and the process required so many steps, each of which required so many documents that she really did not have to think of anything but getting the right letters and certificates to the right people. The original death certificate indicated that Ibragim was to be buried in the USSR, a country that had been defunct for twenty-two years. The certificate had to be reissued. The new version had Ibragim’s mother’s maiden name where Reni’s last name should have been; it had to be reissued again, and Reni began to suspect that all of this was being done on purpose. Delta Airlines, which operated the only direct flight from Miami to Moscow, refused to take the body on board. Reni was terrified of flying with a layover because she was convinced something would go wrong. She called a Delta supervisor to beg and argue. The explanation she was given, she told me, had to do with Ibragim’s alleged association with Tamerlan. Eventually, the Russian carrier Aeroflot agreed to fly the casket. Ibragim’s father, Abdulbaki, came to Orlando to fly back with Reni and the body. At boarding, Reni was taken aside and subjected to a complete body search.
It was just before takeoff that it all hit Reni: “He and I had talked about going home together one day. And here we were, he and I, flying home. Except I’m in the passenger cabin and he is in baggage. I’d been working all month to bring this about, but it’s like it wasn’t seeping in. I hadn’t slept all month. And now it all came, the tears and everything.”
• • •
THEY CHANGED PLANES in Moscow and flew another couple of hours to Grozny. A group of men met them at the airport. Jamal Tsarnaev was among them: it seemed appropriate for the Tsarnaev family to be present, but it had not been clear if the Todashevs would want Anzor there.
The plane was late—it was almost four in the afternoon when they landed. It was the time of year when days are longest, but the men still thought they should hurry in order to bury Ibragim before sundown, in accordance with Muslim tradition. Tradition actually requires that people be buried by sundown on the day of death, and this was June 20, nearly one month later. With the coffin in a boxy Russian-made van, the men drove in a caravan to the Todashevs’ house to drop off Reni; women do not attend Muslim burials. Ibragim’s mother ran out of the house barefoot and rapped on the van door. One of the men let her in and she threw herself on the coffin, trying to grasp it in an embrace.
“Let me see him!” she wailed.
The men had discussed this earlier and decided that the coffin should stay shut to avoid traumatizing any of the women. The gunshot wound on Ibragim’s head had been stitched up, but they worried about the condition of the body after nearly twenty-four hours in transit.
“Then I want to be buried with him!” screamed his mother.
The men would open the casket later, at the cemetery, out of sight of the women—and later they would report that Ibragim looked fine, and even the smell of the embalming solution struck them as pleasant.
• • •
I MET RENI in July 2014. She was living in a village about three hours outside the city of Volgograd (once called Stalingrad), in the desolate Russian countryside, the land of hopelessness and depopulated villages. In Volgograd itself, there was a lot of new construction: the city was slated to host the European soccer cup in another four years, and stadiums and hotels were going up. I stayed at a brand-new Hampton by Hilton. Reni walked into my hotel room and scanned it with a professional’s skeptical eye: “I see. An electrical teakettle in place of a coffeemaker. The pad and pen are missing. Otherwise, not bad.”
She was out of the hotel business, though, and out of the United States. After the funeral, she did not return. “I’m never setting foot in America again,” she told me. “Everyone is getting either deported or killed. I’m sure I have a mark next to my name and if I went back I wouldn’t be able to find a job.” Nor, she said, did she want to live in America. The realization must have come to Reni when she was already in Russia, because she asked me to take a few things back to the States for her, including a key to the car her brother was now driving in Atlanta. A friend, the bike-loving former supervisor who had called her with the news of Ibragim’s death, had sold her motorcycle for her. Khusein, who had a green card, had not been allowed to return to the United States after a visit to Chechnya, and Tatiana had been deported. Reni waited out her year of mourning and remarried; her new husband’s name was Ibragim, and he was Chechen. She now lived with his family in the Russian village and spent her days helping with the difficult day-to-day of a farm, looking after cattle and milking. She stayed in touch with Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, who gave her updates after each of Dzhokhar’s weekly Wednesday phone calls: he generally reported he was doing well. “I don’t want to tell her this, but I don’t believe they’re going to let him live,” Reni said to me. Like Zubeidat, she was sure of the Tsarnaev brothers’ innocence—they were “set up,” both women kept saying. “At least I know Tamerlan is in heaven,” she said, meaning he had been innocent and he had been murdered, just as Ibragim had been.
A lawyer with an organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations, with offices in Orlando, was, more than a year after Ibragim’s death, still working on a report and a possible lawsuit to be filed on the family’s behalf. In Russia, the Todashev family had also engaged a young Chechen Moscow-educated lawyer named Zuarbek Sadokhanov. I met with him in Grozny the day after the funeral; he was simultaneously jazzed and heartbroken at the prospect of going up against the FBI and the U.S. government itself. “When the state acts unlawfully, this destroys democracy,” he told me earnestly over espressos in a café in a city that had long been the capital of lawlessness in a profoundly lawless country. But this was precisely Zuarbek’s point: “I’m sad. I feel like I’m watching the last perfect justice system in the world destroy itself.”
• • •
ON MARCH 25, 2014—ten months after Ibragim Todashev’s death—the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and a Florida state attorney, Jeffrey Ashton, released separate reports, both of which concluded that the FBI agent who shot Ibragim had acted in self-defense and in defense of the state trooper, and that his actions had been justified.
The 161-page Florida report included detailed interviews with the FBI agents and the Massachusetts policemen as well as neighbors who had noticed something going on in Todashev’s apartment during the wee hours of the interview. The image of Ibragim that emerges from the report is radically different from the image of the gentle, innocent man painted by Elena: in the document he is frightening. More to the point, the officers were frightened of him. Before traveling to Florida they had viewed five videos of Ibragim’s fights, studied the physical traces the fights had left on his body—his broken nose and the “cauliflower ears” deformed from being repeatedly boxed. The fights they watched are indeed scary: filmed in poor lighting, from below, they show lithe, extremely muscular men attacking each other in a cagelike ring. The men wear shorts, boxing gloves, and nothing else, and what they do to each other looks as fierce as a street brawl, and as regulated as one. In one of the videos, Ibragim is knocked to the ground at the very beginning, then pounded by his opponent, but around minute three gets up as though possessed of some superhuman power—and the fight goes on for a couple of minutes more, until he loses.
The officers also viewed a video of the May 4 fight in the Orlando parking lot that had led to Ibragim’
s arrest, his second. Ibragim had already been under surveillance for two weeks. The Florida FBI agents filmed him beating up two men until the police arrived. Ibragim, for his part, knew he was being watched, if not filmed. The agents who showed their Massachusetts colleagues the video also explained that they had interviewed people at the gym where Ibragim trained and had been told that “they thought he might be retarded, ah, because of the level of force and, ah, injuries that he was taking and he wouldn’t submit.”
The officers were scared going in, but the interview went better than they could have expected. The report included text messages sent and received by one of the state troopers.
“He signed Miranda. About to tell is [sic] his involvement,” he wrote at 10:28.
“Amazing,” someone responded a minute later. An hour and twenty minutes later—four and a half hours into the interview—the trooper grew positively giddy.
“Okay he’s writing a statement now in his apt,” he wrote at 11:53.
And two minutes later: “Whos your daddy.”
And immediately after: “Whos your daddy.”
And: “???”
And half a minute later: “Getting confession as we speak.”
In seven minutes, his mood shifted drastically. He texted the FBI agent and the other trooper: “Be on guard. He is in vulnerable position to do something bad. Be on guard now. I see him looking around at times.”
In another minute, whatever it was that happened that night began happening. Ibragim had stopped writing the confession and had gotten up. The trooper, who had gone from giddy to worried, was now apparently so terrified that he fumbled with his holster. The FBI agent shot Ibragim three times, and he went down. Then the trooper saw exactly what he had seen in one of those fight videos: Ibragim, wounded and bleeding, rose again, like some sort of deathless monster. The FBI agent fired four more shots, one of them hitting Ibragim in the top of the head and three of them hitting him in the back.