Katherine Russell outside the building in Cambridge, Mass., where she lived with Tamerlan Tsarnaev and their daughter.
N.Y. TIMES
When Katherine Russell arrived as a freshman at Suffolk University just over five years ago, she seemed to bond so well with her new roommates in their lively dorm opposite Boston Common that one classmate likened them to sitcom characters. “They reminded me of the show ‘Sex and the City,’ ” he recalled. “Two of them were free-spirited, one was materialistic and Katherine was the social butterfly.”
Then Ms. Russell began dating Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a boxer from Cambridge, Mass., known for his flashy clothes, and her life began to change. As he became a steadily more religious Muslim, Ms. Russell converted to Islam. She started to cover her head with a hijab in public, startling some classmates. She dropped out of college in 2010, the year they got married and had a daughter.
Katherine Russell, in the 2007 yearbook for North Kingstown High School in Rhode Island
She moved into his family’s run-down apartment in Cambridge, trading her old life of New England comfort and privilege — her father and grandfather both went to Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale — for the struggles of an immigrant family, with money so tight that they were on public assistance at times. ...
The surviving bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, has told investigators that he and his brother built their bombs in the Cambridge apartment where Ms. Russell lived with Tamerlan, 26, and their daughter, Zahira, a toddler, according to two law enforcement officials. Other officials raised the possibility that the bombs may have been assembled elsewhere.
Investigators are also interested in a text message Ms. Russell sent to her husband after the F.B.I. released photographs of him and his brother a few days after the bombings. (This week, the F.B.I. took samples of Ms. Russell’s DNA, and determined that her fingerprints and DNA did not match samples found on some bomb fragments, the officials said.) ...
Ms. Russell grew up in a comfortable home on a leafy street..., the daughter of a doctor. Stephen Constantine, 23, who, like Ms. Russell, played alto saxophone in a middle school band, recalled her as popular and a good musician. “She could play more complex music than I could and learn it faster, and her sound was warmer and fuller bodied,” he said. In high school, she won an award for her drawing of a cat menacing a mouse. “It was a large colored-pencil drawing of a black cat with its paw raised and a gray mouse scooching out of the way,” her art teacher, Amos Trout Paine, recalled. She quoted a David Bowie song, “Quicksand,” in her high school yearbook.
Shortly after graduating, she had a brush with the law: she was arrested and charged with shoplifting five items worth $67 from an Old Navy at the Warwick Mall, according to a police report. She performed community service and paid money toward a general restitution fund that benefits crime victims, and the case was dismissed. The lawyer who represented her, J. Patrick O’Neill, who serves in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, said he could not recall details of the case or much about Ms. Russell.
Katherine Russell in a booking photograph from a shoplifting
arrest in 2007
In 2007, she moved to Boston to major in communications at Suffolk. It was there that friends introduced her to Mr. Tsarnaev, who had gone to a nearby community college. They dated on and off, people who knew them said, and eventually Ms. Russell converted to Islam. She seemed to embrace her new religion willingly and enthusiastically, said someone who occasionally attended Russell family gatherings, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to betray the family’s confidence. “She was infatuated with this guy, and she adopted that religion,”...
They married on June 21, 2010, in a 15-minute ceremony in an office on the third floor of the Masjid Al Quran, on a quiet residential street in Dorchester, Mass. Imam Taalib Mahdee said that he had not met the couple before the ceremony,....
Evan McGlinn for The New York
Times
The Masjid Al Quran, in the Dorchester section of Boston, where Ms. Russell married Tamerlan Tsarnaev
...Ms. Russell did not go back to college that fall. Mr. Tsarnaev, who had given up boxing after being barred from national Golden Gloves tournaments because he was not a United States citizen, was growing increasingly religious, neighbors said. Money was scarce: the family’s income was supplemented by public assistance and food stamps from September 2011 to November 2012, state officials said. And last year, Mr. Tsarnaev left his wife and daughter behind in Cambridge for six months while he traveled to Dagestan to see his father, and to visit Chechnya. ...
At times Ms. Russell supported the family by working as a home health aide — “working long hours, caring for people in their homes who are unable to care for themselves,” her lawyers said in the statement.
One neighbor said that Ms. Russell often seemed shy and quiet in the presence of her husband, but warmer and friendlier when he was not around. Another neighbor recalled hearing yells coming from the apartment.
A relative said Ms. Russell began attending family gatherings less frequently, and withdrew a little from her old social life. “I think she believes in Islam,” said the relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and who said she had seemed happy with her husband. “I don’t think she was coerced. I think she’s faithful to the religion.”