After Attack, Suspects Returned to Routines, Raising No Suspicions
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and IAN LOVETT
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.
==========================================
(F)AIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this
message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to
these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed
within for educational and discussion purposes only, in compliance with
"Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976.
The principle of "Fair Use" was established as law by Section 107 of The
Copyright Act of 1976. "Fair Use" legally eliminates the need to obtain
permission or pay royalties for the use of previously copyrighted materials
if the purposes of display include "criticism, comment, news reporting,
teaching, scholarship, and research." Section 107 establishes four criteria
for determining whether the use of a work in any particular case qualifies
as a "fair use". A work used does not necessarily have to satisfy all four
criteria to qualify as an instance of "fair use". Rather, "fair use" is
determined by the overall extent to which the cited work does or does not
substantially satisfy the criteria in their totality. If you wish to use
copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you
must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
THIS DOCUMENT MAY CONTAIN COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. COPYING AND DISSEMINATION IS
PROHIBITED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment