Brothers Seen as Good Students and Avid Athletes
By ERICA GOODE NY Times
One was a boxer who liked Russian rap videos and once said, “I don’t have a single American friend.”
The other, an all-star high school wrestler, listed “Islam” as his worldview on a Russian social-media page and was described by a neighbor as a “very photogenic kid” who had “a heart of gold.”
As a picture has begun to emerge of the two brothers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who are suspected of carrying out the bombings at the Boston Marathon, it was difficult to distinguish them from millions of other young people who come to the United States to forge a future. The authorities are scrambling to determine how they might have evolved into terrorists who would plant powerful bombs in a crowd of innocent people.
The Tsarnaevs are believed to be of Chechen heritage and to have emigrated from Kyrgyzstan or another country in the region with their family to the United States in 2002 after living for some time in Makhachkala, capital of Dagestan in Russia.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger, graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in 2011, where he was listed as a Greater Boston League Winter All-Star wrestler. That year, he won a $2,500 scholarship awarded to 35 to 45 promising students by the City of Cambridge. He may be a student at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. On its Web site, the university said that “a person being sought in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing” had been identified as a student registered there. The university was closed down on Friday.
Mahmoud Abu-Rubieh, 17, a student at the high school, said he had known Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for almost three years as a friend and a wrestling teammate. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, he said, dressed “like any other student at our school,” favoring jeans or khakis, button-ups and T-shirts.
“I never heard him talk about politics,” Mr. Abu-Rubieh said. “He didn’t really bring up anything like that.” He said the last time he saw Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was about three months ago, when he stopped by wrestling practice.
“We exchanged a greeting,” Mr. Abu-Rubieh said. “He said it was nice to see that I continued to wrestle. If I wanted to convey any message it would be that he was a kind student, that many people respected him, he had many friends and was active in our school.”
Ashraful Rahman, 17, a senior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, said that he and two other friends recognized Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s photo on television on Thursday night and one of them called the F.B.I.'s tip line.
But he said he could not believe that Dzhokhar, whom he met two years ago, could have been involved in the bombing.
“He would never come across as someone who would do anything like this, Mr. Rahman said.
He and Dzhokhar have much in common, he said. Both were wrestlers, both enjoyed boxing and were both Muslim. They would occasionally meet at the mosque in Cambridge, a few blocks away from their school, he said.
Dzhokhar’s closest friends were a group known among their classmates as “stoners,” according to Mr. Rahman. He described Dzhokhar as “laid back” and said that he had assumed he was born in the United States because he did not speak with an accent.
Mr. Rahman said he last saw Dzhokhar last August, near the end of Ramadan, during prayers at the mosque.
“Regardless of whether you knew him as well as I did, as someone who wrestled with him, hung out and chilled with him or whether you were people who saw him the hallway, he was always the same — a generally nice guy,” Mr. Rahman said, adding that he was a hard-working student and an even harder working wrestler.
When he was not wrestling, Mr. Rahman said, Dzhokhar “was not some testosterone ridden jock or anything like that, just a cool guy.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died after a shootout with law enforcement officers early Friday morning, was apparently studying engineering at Bunker Hill Community College when a photographer, Johannes Hirn, chose a young boxer as the subject of an essay for a photojournalism class at Boston University four or five years ago.
In the essay, the subject, believed to be Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is quoted as saying he had become devoutly religious, having abandoned smoking and drinking. He sounded alienated from Russia, saying that he would not want to box on the Russian team unless Chechnya achieved independence. The essay was later published in a university magazine, The Comment, according to Peter Southwick, director of the photojournalism program, who taught the class.
“There are no values anymore,” Mr. Hirn quotes him as saying. “People can’t control themselves.”
Tamerlan confessed a love for the movie “Borat” in the essay, and showed off his pointed shoes — “I"m dressed European style,” Mr. Hirn quotes him as saying.
In the caption of one photo, showing his muscled upper body, he says that he does not usually take his shirt off in front of women. “I’m very religious,” he says.
Larry Aaronson, a retired social studies teacher at the high school, lived a few houses from the Tsarnaev family on Norfolk Street, on the border between Cambridge and Somerville.
He became friendly, with Dzhokhar, who he said he saw often around the neighborhood but had not seen recently. He believed that Dzhokhar might have gone off to college, Mr. Aaronson said.
“He was gracious,” he said of the younger Tsarnaev brother. “He told me he was from Chechnya, and I asked him what that was like, and he never expressed any bitterness toward Russia or his situation.”
He added, “This comes as a total shock.”
Both young men had a substantial presence on social media. On Vkontakte, Russia’s most popular social media platform, the younger of them, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, describes his worldview as “Islam” and, asked to identify “the main thing in life,” answers “career and money.” He lists a series of affinity groups relating to Chechnya, where two wars of independence against Russia were fought after the Soviet Union collapsed, and lists a verse from the Koran, “Do good, because Allah loves those who do good.”
Ruslan Tsarni, the brothers’ uncle, said at a news conference at his home outside Washington on Friday that his nephews had difficulty adjusting to the United States and that he thought their actions came from “not being able to settle themselves and hating everyone who did.”
But he said he had not seen his nephews since December 2005, and he implied that some rift had occurred between the two families.
“My family has nothing to do with that family, he said. “I just want my family to be away from them.”
Mr. Tsarni said that the two brothers may have been radicalized but if so, it was not their father who was responsible. The father, he said, had recently moved back to Russia but had been working “fixing cars” in the United States.
“I never ever imagine that children of my brother would be associated with that,” he said.
He added: “I say, Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness.”
The family is part of a Chechen diaspora that dates back to 1943, when Stalin deported most of the population of Chechnya from its homeland and over concerns the Chechens were collaborating with the Nazy German invading army. Most returned to Chechnya in the 1950s, after the death of Stalin and lifting of the deportation order, but some stayed. Kyrgyzstan’s Chechen diaspora is concentrated in a steppe region on the Kazakh border, near the town of Talas.
The deportation was a searing, and in some cases, radicalizing experience. Among the former diaspora in Kyrgyzstan was the first rebel president of Chechnya in the post-Soviet period, Dzhokhar Dudayev, who hailed from the Kyrgyz diaspora villages, said Edil Baisalov, a former presidential chief of staff in Kyrgyzstan.
Irina V. Bandurina, secretary to the director of School No. 1 in Makhachkala, Russia, said the Tsarnaev family left Dagestan for the United States in 2002 after living there for about a year. She said the family — parents, two boys and two girls — had lived in Kyrgyzstan previously.
She said Dzhokhar, the younger boy, attended School No. 1 in the first grade, and Tamerlan attended school in Makhachkala through the eighth grade. She said she did not know them personally.
Although the Tsarnaev family is believed to have come to the United States in 2002, they were in Turkey on July 9, 2003, according to Muammer Güler, the Turkish Interior Minister, and left the country 10 days later from the capital, Ankara. There was no information on the family’s next destination after Turkey, the minister said.
Adnan Z. Dzarbrailov, the head of a Chechen diaspora group in Kyrgyzstan, said in a telephone interview that the Tsarnaev family lived near a sugar factory in the small town of Tokmok, about 70 kilometer, or 40 miles, from the Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The last member of the family left years ago, he said. He described them as “intelligentsia” and said an aunt of the accused bombers was a lawyer.
Sultan Tsarnaev, a grandfather of the brothers, died in an accident in Tokmok in the 1980, when a propane tank he was carrying exploded, according to Mr. Dzarbrailov and Uzbek Aliyev, a Chechen living in Tokmok. Their uncle, Anwar Tsarnaev, studied at a university in Bishkek with Mr. Aliyev.
“They were good students, they were good people,” he said of the uncle and aunt of the accused bombers. Both brothers eventually emigrated from Kyrgyzstan, he said.
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