Mark St George/Rex USA
Mr. Tsarnaev in his high school wrestling days.
N.Y. TIMES
On the day after two bombs exploded near the finish line of the
Boston Marathon, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev tapped out an early-afternoon text message to a classmate at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Want to hang out? he queried. Sure, his friend replied. ...To even his closest friends, Mr. Tsarnaev was a smart, athletic 19-year-old with a barbed wit and a laid-back demeanor, fond of soccer and parties, all too fond of marijuana....Mr. Tsarnaev was a master of concealment....
But there were oblique signs that the gulf between the private and the public person was widening. Between raunchy jokes and posts about girls and cars on Twitter, Mr. Tsarnaev described terrifying nightmares about murder and destruction. In the last year, he alluded to disaffection with his American life and the American mind-set.
And as the date of the marathon drew close, he dropped cryptic hints of a plan of action, and the righteousness of an unspoken cause.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was born in July 1993 in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, the youngest of four children in a family that roamed for decades across the Caucasus and Central Asia looking for a stable home.
He spoke only broken English in 2002 when his father, Anzor, an ethnic Chechen, brought him to Massachusetts from the mostly Muslim region of Dagestan in
Russia, eventually winning asylum by claiming political persecution. But by the time he entered Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in 2007, he spoke with barely a trace of an accent, blending seamlessly into a student body that was a mélange of immigrants and American-born students of all colors.
By all accounts, he thrived there. Jahar, as his fellow students called him — the rough pronunciation of his Caucasian name, adopted as his nickname — became a star student, winning a $2,500 scholarship upon his graduation in 2011. He loved literature and world history, particularly studies of his former homelands.
In sophomore year, he joined the school’s wrestling team as a novice and quickly grew so strong and skillful, one teammate said, that he could take down even coaches. His teammates say they looked up to him as a teacher and motivator. “We’d be running stairs for hours,” said another, Zeaed Abu-Rubieh, now 21. “Every time I’d stop, when I was thinking about leaving, he’d push me forward, physically push me. And he was strong. He’d say: ‘Go on. Run. You can do it.’ He believed in people.”
His teammates eventually voted him captain. One of the coaches, Peter Payack, said he deserved it. Despite the draining four-hour daily practice and trips at sunrise to weekend meets, he said, Mr. Tsarnaev maintained his academic record and proved a model of good sportsmanship and steady temperament.
“You always see people’s personality traits over the course of a season,” he said. “If somebody is short-tempered, if they lose a match, maybe they throw a chair. There’s somebody who’s moody, or like a loner. He was none of those things.
After a match, there’s a prime opportunity to be mad, to say the ref robbed you. He just accepted what was done. If he lost a match, he’d put his arms out: ‘Well, I tried my best.’ And when he won, he’d pump his fist, both fists at head level: ‘Yeah, I won!’ But it was never anything excessive.”
As with almost everyone, however, Mr. Payack’s relationship with Mr. Tsarnaev went so far, and no further.
Mr. Tsarnaev was a skilled deflector of curiosity about his personal affairs. He rarely talked about his background except to say that he was Chechen or had lived in Russia. He was popular — “he had a lot of girls hitting on him,” said Junes Umarov, 18, a close friend who is also of Chechen descent — but even other close friends could not say whether he had a girlfriend. Almost no one knew anything about his family beyond a few brief sightings of his older brother, Tamerlan.
Every year, the Rindge and Latin wrestling team asks each senior to bring a relative to the last match of the year to walk onto the gym floor, receive a flower and snap a picture. Cambridge has its share of broken families and work-at-night parents; wrestlers can struggle to find the right person.
On the night of Mr. Tsarnaev’s last match, Mr. Payack said, “one of the coaches walked him out. No father, no brother, nothing.”
Few were granted a peek at Mr. Tsarnaev’s other life. But what little they saw was revealing.
Mr. Umarov has known Mr. Tsarnaev since 2004, shortly after his family came to the United States. Young Dzhokhar sometimes stayed at his home for weeks during summers, goofing around with Junes and his siblings.
Visits to the Tsarnaev household were different. “Every time we went to Dzhokhar’s house, his brother would make us work, do a bunch of push-ups, get us in shape, because we were staying inside playing video games all day,” Mr. Umarov said. “His brother never gave him wrong advice. So he looked up to his brother.”
A second Chechen friend since boyhood, 18-year-old Baudy Mazaev, said that the older brother and their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, “had a deep religious epiphany” about two or three years ago. At the time, Tamerlan’s new devotion only irritated Dzhokhar, he said.
During one visit about two years ago, he said, Tamerlan ordered him and Dzhokhar to sit and forced the two teenagers to read a book about the fundamentals of Islam and prayer. After that, he said, they began avoiding the apartment.
“He’d say: ‘Let’s not go to my house. Tamerlan will just make us read,’ ” he said. “And he was a big dude, so we kind of had to listen to him.”
During one exchange of text messages, he said, Dzhokhar indicated that Tamerlan was in the apartment with him. When Mr. Mazaev was slow to reply, he added: “Hey, stop ignoring me. Come back. Don’t make me suffer alone.”
Yet the conversion did not seem to diminish him in his younger brother’s eyes. “I know he respected him as the elder, especially once his father went to Russia,” Mr. Mazaev said. “He was his older brother and the only male of the house, so he was more dependent on him.”
While the younger brother prayed daily during lunch breaks at Rindge and Latin, and at least on occasion in his university dormitory, he never appeared especially devout, even telling one teacher, “I’m really not into that.” Up to his arrest, he drank and smoked marijuana — more marijuana than most high school or college students, friends said — despite what he said was Tamerlan’s clear disapproval.
The Dzhokhar that Mr. Mazaev and Mr. Umarov were allowed to see — in Mr. Umarov’s case, as recently as March — was the same Dzhokhar they had known for a decade.
Inside, however, some things were changing.
In February 2011, roughly when the boys’ mother embraced Islam, she separated from her husband, Anzor, a tough man trained in the law in Russia who was reduced in Cambridge to fixing cars in a parking lot. The two divorced that September, and Anzor returned to Russia, followed later by his ex-wife. Tamerlan filled the void as head of the family’s American branch. On Twitter, Dzhokhar wrote that he missed his father. ...
In college Mr. Tsarnaev’s grades plummeted, even as he boasted online of skipping classes and receiving a test “with all the answers on it.” He wrote of plagues of nightmares, three “zombie apocalypse” dreams in July and two in December, one of which depicted the end of the world. In February, he wrote, “I killed Abe Lincoln during my two hour nap #intensedream.”
He gained American citizenship on Sept. 11, 2012, “and he was pretty excited about it,” said his first-year dorm mate, Mr. Rowe. Yet the previous March, he had written “a decade in america already, I want out,” followed in April by “how I miss my homeland #dagestan #chechnya.” And days before his citizenship ceremony, he expressed wonder at why more people did not realize that the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center “was an inside job.”
That and other comments hint at a defensiveness about the confluence of Islam and terrorism that was odd for a young man who earlier had said he was “not into that.” But both those and later, darker posts — “If you have the knowledge and inspiration all that’s left is to take action,” he wrote a week before the bombings — look foreboding only in retrospect. ...
Just a year ago, Mr. Tsarnaev had wanted to become an engineer, and worried about his grades, said Sanjaya Lamichhane, a high-school wrestling teammate and former UMass Dartmouth classmate.
But as April began, Mr. Tsarnaev apparently declared that he no longer cared. After Mr. Tsarnaev emerged as a suspect in the bombing, Mr. Lamichhane said, a mutual friend from the University of Massachusetts recounted his last conversation with Mr. Tsarnaev, two weeks before the marathon. Mr. Tsarnaev told their friend, “God is all that matters. It doesn’t matter about school and engineering,” Mr. Lamichhane said. “He said, ‘When it comes to school and being an engineer, you can cheat easily. But when it comes to going to heaven, you can’t cheat.’ ”
