Patrolman Javier Pagan gazed over the barricades on Boylston Street directly in front of Marathon Sports and LensCrafters. He had been ordered by his supervisor to stand at the end of the finish line, facing the crowd. There was a sea of people clogging the sidewalk. All had witnessed men’s division winner Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia and women’s division winner Rita Jeptoo of Kenya cross the finish line with times of 2:10:22 and 2:26:25, respectively. Their journeys toward the finish line had begun more than two hours earlier and 26.2 miles southwest in Hopkinton, where an estimated 23,336 runners from across the globe gathered for the start of the race. Before the loud crack of the starting gun, the competitors lowered their heads for a twenty-six-second moment of silence to remember the school children and faculty members killed during the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, five months prior. Organizers at the Boston Athletic Association had also dedicated Mile 26, the final mile of the marathon, to the families of the Sandy Hook victims. Several families had been invited by the BAA to sit in the VIP section at the finish line in Copley Square. Javier Pagan could identify — if only partially — with that unspeakable tragedy. His husband, Pedro Richard, was a retired New York City police officer who had responded to the attacks on the World Trade Center towers. The couple met at a gay officers’ banquet in 2005 in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Over time, Pedro shared his feelings of loss and pain with Javier, who did his best to comfort him. Pagan could scarcely imagine what it must have been like to have been an officer on patrol in New York the day nineteen hijackers turned passenger planes into missiles. The uncertainty — the panic. How could a cop maintain some level of control in order to help people when the city was under attack? Pagan hoped to God that he would never find out.
Mery Daniel had passed thousands of spectators on her way to her current vantage point in front of Marathon Sports on Boylston Street. She was proud of the fact that she had not spilled her cup of hot chocolate during the long walk from Commonwealth Avenue. Mery’s husband, Richardson, had dropped her off earlier that afternoon at the MBTA station between Massachusetts Avenue and Boylston Street. He would take their daughter, Ciarra, to run errands while she got to relax for a few hours. They promised to rendezvous later in the day for an early dinner. Mery began her morning on Newbury Street, the heart of Boston’s chic shopping district just one street over from Boylston. There she enjoyed a breakfast of pancakes before walking over to Commonwealth Avenue, where she watched the elite runners pass by on their way to the finish line. The atmosphere was electric and fun, and she could only imagine the excitement felt by those watching their friends and loved ones crossing the finish line. At that point, she decided to leave her spot on Commonwealth Avenue and began walking alone to Boylston Street, where Black Hat and White Hat were waiting.
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SAFE HAVEN
For every hour Anzor Tsarnaev spent fixing beat-up cars in a cold, open space that had been donated to him by the owner of a Cambridge rug company, he spent another two at the nearby Somerville Boxing Gym molding his eldest son, Tamerlan, into a contender and amateur champion. There was little doubt that the young man was talented. His trainers liked the fact that he could play both the violin and piano as it suggested to them a willingness to study and learn. Tamerlan was born with the physical tools also — a physique he had inherited from his father. He was tall and broad shouldered, which gave him a reach advantage over many of his opponents. He could also punch — hard. He fought in a straight-ahead style popular with Russians and eastern Europeans who were beginning to dominate weight classes in the professional ranks. Anzor saw greatness in his son and pushed, prodded, and yelled at Tamerlan until his voice echoed in the young fighter’s head. The father would routinely make a spectacle of himself — screaming and flailing his arms if he saw that Tamerlan was not working hard enough or if he thought a sparring partner was getting in a cheap shot. Anzor was such a disruption at times that he would be ordered to stand in the back of the gym and out of ear shot of the other fighters. The stubborn father would not stay at a distance for long, and would soon charge back toward the ring screaming instructions to his son. Anzor Tsarnaev had put his future — his family’s future — in the hands of Tamerlan. Glory in the boxing ring would make up for the misery and failure at home.
Anzor and Zubeidat were drifting farther apart as her views became more radicalized. While the father tried to embrace the American Dream, the mother pushed back by insulating herself deeper inside her religion. The couple’s other children were virtually hopeless. Their daughters, Bella and Ailina, had inherited Zubeidat’s beauty, and that led to trouble. First, Bella had fallen for a Brazilian boy in high school, which did not sit well with her parents. Anzor ordered Tamerlan to scare the teenager away, which he did by slugging him in the jaw. The parents would select a mate for their daughter and believed they had found the ideal suitor on the Internet. His name was Elmirza Khozhugov, and he was a twenty-year-old Muslim originally from Kazakhstan. Anzor announced that Bella and Elmirza would be married, but the daughter fought the idea. Deeply ashamed of the fact that he had lost control over his wife and now his eldest daughter, Anzor attempted to save face by offering Elmirza their other daughter, sixteen-year-old Ailina, as a consolation prize. The teenaged Ailina did not defy her father’s wishes as Bella had done. Ailina and Elmirza began dating, and he got her pregnant. The couple was married in 2007 just a few weeks before she delivered their child. Ailina Tsarnaev was now a wife and a mother, and she was still just sixteen years old. With a newborn in tow, the newlyweds moved to Bellingham, Washington, where trouble began almost immediately. Ailina began arguing with her husband about his alleged infidelities, and he responded by beating and choking her. The relationship ended a year later, but not before Tamerlan flew to Washington State to thrash Elmirza for harming his sister. Tamerlan, however, was not above striking a woman himself. He was arrested by Cambridge police in 2009 for slapping his then girlfriend, Nadine Ascencao. Tamerlan admitted to the assault, but the case was eventually dismissed.
Ailina and her one-year-old son moved back into the Tsarnaev’s tiny Cambridge apartment, where her sister was now raising a child of her own. Bella had dropped out of high school during her junior year. She traveled to Kazakhstan, got married, and had a baby. Bella’s marriage lasted about as long as her sister’s had. Both daughters were now back at home, living in cramped quarters and under the watchful eye of their parents. As stern as Anzor could be, he was no match for the domineering Zubeidat, who tried to control every facet of their daughters’ lives. Feeling smothered by their mother, the sisters soon moved out of the apartment on Norfolk Street and into a homeless shelter. Trouble followed Ailina, who was later arrested in 2010 for allegedly using a counterfeit bill to pay for a meal at an Applebee’s restaurant in Dorchester. Ailina then lied to police about the incident and refused to give up any names of those who had accompanied her to the restaurant that day. The sisters eventually moved to New Jersey, where Bella landed in court, charged with marijuana possession and distribution. She was also arrested in December 2012 after police responded to a domestic disturbance call at her apartment in Fairview, New Jersey.
Marijuana use was an even bigger problem for the youngest Tsarnaev child. Dzhokhar, dubbed “Jahar” by his friends and classmates at Cambridge Rindge & Latin — the high school once attended by Oscar-winning actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as well as NBA great Patrick Ewing — was a lazy-eyed stoner who lacked any real ambition, despite scoring good grades and excelling on the wrestling mat. Although he did not share his older brother’s imposing build, the smaller and softer Dzhokhar worked just as hard and impressed his coach enough to be selected as captain of the high school team. But though he took such a fevered interest in Tamerlan’s athletic career, Anzor was never seen at any of his youngest son’s wrestling matches. When Dzhokhar was presented with the team’s MVP award during his senior year, none of Dzhokhar’s family members attend
ed the ceremony to see him accept the honor. This lack of interest and guidance triggered a rebellion, and the youngest son began smoking pot frequently. If Anzor found a marijuana joint inside Dzhokhar’s 1999 green Honda Civic, he would react with a hard slap to the back of his son’s head instead of a helpful dose of fatherly advice. But it wasn’t as if Dzhokhar’s marijuana use had made him an outlier among his peers, especially those in the pot-smoking crowd. Dzhokhar was a typical American teenager who enjoyed a little weed, listened to rap music, and liked fast cars. Of his immediate family, it was Dzhokhar who had assimilated most thoroughly into their adopted homeland.
Tamerlan, the family’s great hope, also began to party, much to the dismay of his father. Anzor had invested a great deal of time in his son’s boxing career — hundreds of hours spent accompanying Tamerlan during his pre-dawn road work through the streets of Cambridge and hundreds more bouncing from sweaty gym to sweaty gym, filling his son with grand ideas of becoming an Olympic boxer. For Anzor, having his son represent the United States during the Olympics would be the ultimate sign of American success, and that success would have a dollar sign attached to it. The Olympics had been a lucrative launching pad for other boxers such as Sugar Ray Leonard and Oscar De La Hoya, and it would mean large purses right out of the gate for Tamerlan, who would otherwise have to slug his way through the ranks as a club fighter. And Anzor knew that he could market his son well. Tamerlan was ruggedly handsome and flashy. He was prone to performing backflips in the ring, and his flamboyant attire — which alternated between white fur and snakeskin, and military-style boots and khakis — always set him apart from the crowd. Some fighters snickered and called Tamerlan’s outfits “Euro-trash,” but he could back it up in the ring — which was the only thing that truly mattered. In 2009, Tamerlan won his first New England Golden Gloves championship, which propelled him to the national tournament in Salt Lake City, Utah. Fighting as a heavyweight, the Chechen immigrant wanted to make sure everyone attending would remember his name. A consummate showman, Tamerlan wore a silk scarf and mirrored sunglasses while introducing himself to fellow competitors at the tournament. Inside the ring, his bite matched his bark. He dropped his opponent to the canvas with a thunderous punch, then dominated him for the rest for the bout. Yet when the judges’ scorecards were announced, the opponent was declared the winner — over a chorus of boos from fans who believed that Tamerlan had clearly won.
A year later, during the 2010 Golden Gloves tournament, Tamerlan tried to intimidate his opponent even before they both stepped into the ring. He approached the fighter and his trainer in the locker room and vowed that he would take them both down. The trainer, outraged by the breach of pugilistic protocol, complained to tournament officials that Tamerlan, who was still a year away from being eligible to apply for US citizenship, should not be allowed to compete.
Tsarnaev won the tournament but lost the war. Golden Gloves of America later announced a change in policy that prohibited all non-citizens from participating in its Tournament of Champions — which meant that Tamerlan could not advance to the US Olympic trials.
Both Tamerlan and Anzor were devastated by the news, and the Tsarnaev family quickly began to unravel. Tamerlan turned his focus from training to the nightclub scene, while his mother clutched more tightly to her Koran. It was while prowling the bars in Boston that Tamerlan caught the eye of his future wife, Katherine Russell.
Russell, an attractive brunette from an upper-middle-class neighborhood in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, arrived in Boston in the fall of 2007 to attend Suffolk University. By all accounts, Russell was a typical college student. She wore jeans, T-shirts, and skirts, and she liked clubbing. Her parents were in the medical field: her father, Warren, graduated from Yale and worked as an emergency room doctor, and her mother, Judith, was a nurse. Katherine and her two younger sisters were raised Christian, but no one remembers them being devoutly religious. Katherine attended public high school in North Kingstown, where she excelled at art. She chose to major in communications at Suffolk University and even had plans to enter the Peace Corps. But her life was dramatically altered when a friend introduced her to Tamerlan at a local club.
Tsarnaev was at a particularly low point in his life. He had no job, his boxing career was floundering, and his academic career showed little promise. Tamerlan had quit attending Bunker Hill Community College, where he had struggled mightily in his accounting classes. He later enrolled at Mass Bay Community College but dropped out after just three weeks. Tamerlan was seeing another woman at the time, so his relationship with Katherine was casual at the beginning. He also had another woman in his life — one whose influence began to overshadow his father’s.
Zubeidat Tsarnaev grew hysterical when Tamerlan told her that he wanted to move out of their Cambridge apartment for a life on his own. She cried for several days and told him that he was turning his back on his culture and its tradition of a son staying in the family home with his mother until marriage.8
Fearing that she had lost her daughters and was now losing her sons, Zubeidat Tsarnaev urged Tamerlan to spend his evenings reading the Koran with her instead of carousing with his American friends. Readings were often followed by research as Tamerlan used the family’s only computer to scour Islamic fundamentalist websites in search of nourishment for the ideas his mother had been planting in his head. These sites and others claimed that the attacks of September 11, 2001, had been orchestrated by the United States government in an attempt to turn America against the Muslim world.
Despite her hatred of the West, Zubeidat had depended on government assistance for her very survival. For four years — from October 2002 to November 2004, and again from August 2009 to December 2011 — the Tsarnaev family collected Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, or food stamps. Anzor Tsarnaev also collected Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children benefits, or welfare, during two separate periods in 2003 and 2009.9 At one point, Zubeidat also chose to steal what she could not take legally from the government. In June 2012, with her marriage to Anzor unraveling, Zubeidat walked into the retailer Lord & Taylor at the Natick Collection, a posh suburban shopping mall just outside Boston, and tried to walk out with $1,624 in women’s clothes. She was detained and arrested for shoplifting and two counts of malicious damage to property. Zubeidat’s mug shot bore little resemblance to the confident, modern woman who had arrived in America nearly a decade before. Her face appeared weathered. She had heavy bags under each eye, and deep lines formed by worry and resentment etched trails near her mouth.
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