Sunday, April 28, 2013

After Attack, Suspects Returned to Routines, Raising No Suspicions

 

After Attack, Suspects Returned to Routines, Raising No Suspicions

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and IAN LOVETT

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/us/after-attack-suspects-returned-to-routines-raising-no-suspicions.html?hp&_r=1&

 

 

BOSTON - Just five hours after the bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon

last week, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was back at his computer, doing what he

did almost every day, posting a message on Twitter.

 

"Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people," he wrote.

 

His brother, Tamerlan, 26, returned to his home in Cambridge, which he

shared with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter, and went about his

normal activities, including a trip to the supermarket.

 

The bombings that turned America's oldest and most prestigious road race

into a scene of blood and horror had killed three people and wounded more

than 260 others, many of them grievously. President Obama called the episode

an "act of terror." The heart of the city, Copley Square and much of

Boylston Street, was paralyzed for days as hundreds of city, state and

federal law enforcement personnel scoured the area for evidence and later

cast a huge dragnet across the metropolitan region for the suspects, who

would soon be identified as the Tsarnaev brothers.

 

During that time, the brothers picked up their daily routines and blended

back into the area that had become enmeshed in trauma. For the most part,

they appeared calm, according to people who saw them, raising no suspicions

that anything was amiss, let alone that they might have had anything to do

with the attack.

 

For more than three days - from the time of the explosions at 2:50 p.m. on

Monday, April 15, until the F.B.I. released their photographs to the world

at 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 18 - the very ordinariness of their activities

let the brothers hide in plain sight.

 

"It's scary to think that he was around here, listening to everyone talking

about the bombers and stuff like that," Bobby Kedski, a sophomore at the

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, said of Dzhokhar, a fellow student

there, whom he saw working out in a campus gym on Tuesday night. "He was

just amongst us, taking it all in. It's scary to think about that."

 

Slipping back into a routine after committing a crime, even an atrocity, is

fairly typical behavior, said Dr. Stuart W. Twemlow, a retired professor of

psychology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He works on threat

assessment with the F.B.I. and helped on the Columbine shootings, among

other cases.

 

A return to business as usual helps a criminal "blot out the horror with

which he was associated," Dr. Twemlow said.

 

"That is a normal, dissociative response," he said, adding that the younger

brother, whose movements were more public, had most likely "denied and

compartmentalized what he had just done."

 

Dzhokhar may have spent Monday night with his brother in Cambridge, which he

often did, because the university had no record of his return to campus on

Monday. Wherever he was, he continued to send out Twitter messages.

 

After his first post-bombing message, at 8:04 p.m. on Monday, he picked up a

conversation at 12:11 a.m. Tuesday with a friend on Twitter who has since

deleted his account. Dzhokhar's end of the conversation is all that is

visible, leaving the context unclear.

 

What's new with them? Dzhokhar asked. His next post to the friend, a couple

of minutes later said: and they what "god hates dead people?" Or victims of

tragedies? Lol those people are cooked.

 

At 12:34 a.m., the next Twitter message was sent from an iPhone: There are

people that know the truth but stay silent & there are people that speak the

truth but we don't hear them cuz they're the minority.

 

He "favorited," or bookmarked, a post on Twitter that had appeared at 1:20

a.m.: The sad part about the events in Boston today, is that some bs

Hollywood director is gonna try n make a movie n profit from tragic events.

 

He was back on Twitter later Tuesday, when he favorited a 11:21 a.m. post

from a classmate: Thanks UMD, a freezing shower is exactly what I needed

right now.

 

Between 12:30 and 1 that afternoon, Dzhokhar picked up a car that he had

dropped off at a repair shop in Somerville, next to Cambridge, a couple of

weeks before to fix a damaged bumper, suddenly saying he needed it

immediately.

 

This was one of the few times during that week when someone described

Dzhokhar as appearing anxious and out of character. Gilberto Junior, who

owns the shop, thought Dzhokhar was either nervous or on drugs.

 

"He was biting his fingernails, and I noticed he was shaking his legs," Mr.

Junior said.

 

Mr. Junior explained that to fix the car's bumper, he had had to remove it,

as well as the taillights, so it would be illegal to drive. But Mr. Tsarnaev

insisted on taking it anyway, Mr. Junior recalled.

 

"He said, 'I don't care. I need the car right now,' so I gave him the keys,"

Mr. Junior said.

 

He said he was picking it up for a friend, and explained, " 'I need the car

now because my friend, she's upset,' " Mr. Junior quoted him as saying. "

'She wants the car, she wants the car, she wants the car.' So I said, 'O.K.'

"

 

By 1:14 p.m. Dzhokhar was back on Twitter. In an exchange with another

fellow student, he dispensed some medical advice: you need to get Claritin

clear.

 

The other student has since deleted his account so the reply is no longer

visible. Within three minutes, Dzhokhar added: #heavy I've been looking for

those, there is a shortage on the black market if you wanna make a quick

buck, nuff said.

 

At 5:09 p.m., he called out what he believed was a fake story circulating on

the Internet about a man who was going to propose to a woman at the marathon

only to discover she was among the victims. "Fake" he wrote to the Twitter

account that had shared that post.

 

At 5:22 p.m., he posted a tweet using an iPhone: So then I says to him, I

says, relax bro my beard is not loaded.

 

The university's first indication of his return to campus was from a swipe

of his identification card about 8:55 Tuesday night at his residence hall.

Ten minutes after that, he swiped his card into the gym, where many students

on campus said they often saw him working out.

 

"He was running some cardio on treadmill," said Mr. Kedski, who said he

often saw Dzhokhar smoking cigarettes and marijuana outside his dormitory.

"He just seemed like a normal kid," Mr. Kedski added. "He blended in very

well."

 

A university official said that card swipes indicated that Dzhokhar was on

campus Tuesday night, Wednesday and Thursday. It is not clear if he attended

classes, but many students said they saw him around.

 

Derek Juozaitis, a sophomore, said he said hello to Dzhokhar on the way to

class after the bombings, though he could not remember whether it was

Tuesday or Wednesday.

 

"I stopped by his room a couple times," Mr. Juozaitis said. "He was just

playing FIFA on Xbox. It wasn't, like, weird. He was just doing what I do."

 

Dzhokhar spoke to his classmates about the bombing, calling it sad and a

tragedy, his classmates said. He seemed to have resumed his habits of

staying up late and sleeping in late, and of smoking marijuana, which he did

frequently, they said.

 

At 10:29 p.m. Tuesday, his Twitter account posted rap lyrics from Eminem:

Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got somethin to say but nothin comes

out when they move their lips; just a bunch of gibberish.

 

As Tuesday turned into early Wednesday, he was still up, returning to

Twitter at 1:43 a.m.: I'm a stress free kind of guy.

 

There is little indication of his activities on Wednesday, when his tweets

slowed down.

 

Though he may have been quiet, Dzhokhar was hardly a loner - he was quite

sociable.

 

Sonja Bergeron, 19, said she would often see him at parties at dorms where

he would be drinking and smoking marijuana. (She advised reporters to "look

for the potheads" to find people who would have known him better.)

 

"He was a kind of a party animal," she said.

 

On Thursday, President Obama spoke at an interfaith service in Boston for

the victims of the bombings. Afterward, as President and Mrs. Obama visited

victims at various hospitals, Dzhokhar's account shared a message from a man

named Mufti Ismail Menk. "Attitude can take away your beauty no matter how

good looking you are or it could enhance your beauty, making you adorable."

 

While Dzhokhar had returned to college and the trappings of his life, his

brother, Tamerlan, was more elusive. Several neighbors said they did not see

him after the marathon, but then again, many had not seen him before it. It

was not unusual, they said, for him to stay inside his apartment, watching

his 3-year-old daughter while his wife, Katherine Russell, worked as a home

health aide.

 

At home, he often played video games and posted videos on YouTube. The

daughter was learning how to ride a tricycle, which still sat in the front

yard of the house.

 

"She was his first kid, so I would give him advice, tell him to take her to

the playground and make sure she got to spend time with other kids," said

Joanna Herlihy, the owner of the three-story apartment building where they

all lived.

 

Another neighbor, who refused to give his name for fear of how people might

react to him speaking positively about a terrorist suspect, said he had not

seen Tamerlan since the Saturday before the bombing. But he described him as

friendly and outgoing.

 

Another person said that Tamerlan returned to the normal tasks of daily life

that week: he went to Whole Foods at one point, and to a park with his

daughter at another. He even commented on the bombing, "Did you see what

happened?"

 

On Thursday at 5 p.m., the F.B.I. released photographs of the brothers and

said they were the bombing suspects. At 9:06 p.m., an acquaintance sent

Dzhokhar a picture that had emerged from many of the photos of the suspects

taken at the scene of the marathon. It showed Dzhokhar with his white

baseball cap on backward.

 

"Lol..." the friend wrote. "Is this you? I didn't know you went to the

marathon!!!!"

 

John Eligon and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Boston, and

Jennifer Preston from New York.

 

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