Jahar’s Life before the Boston Marathon Bombing: A Thread

Childhood (1/3)

Dzhokhar Anzorovich Tsarnaev was born on July 22, 1993, in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan to parents Anzor Tsarnaev (Chechen) and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva (Avar). His mother was said to be lively and fun, a glamorous woman who affectionately called him —

— ‘Ho’ or ‘Jo-Jo’. His father was a hardworking mechanic, tough and wiry but known for a booming laugh that his son inherited. “Anzor was tough as they come,” recalled Joe Timko, a supervisor at Webster Auto Body in Somerville where Anzor did body work for several months. “He’d —

— change a transmission right there on the street. I mean, he was a stone. But he was also very emotional. He always came right up and gave you a hug.” The couple met while Anzor was studying law and were married on October 20th, 1986. He had one older brother and two older —

— sisters, Tamerlan, Bella, and Ailina. They were described as “... very soft, like cuddly kittens, all four kids, always hugging and kissing each other.”

His family had been forcibly moved from Chechnya in the years following World War II. Anzor secured a job as an —

— investigator in the prosecutor’s office in the nation’s capital, Bishkek. His father hoped to take them to America, where his uncle, Ruslan, an attorney, was building an upper-middle-class life. After Russia invaded Chechnya in 1999, Anzor was fired from his job as part of a —

— large-scale purge of Chechens from the ranks of the Kyrgyz government. The Tsarnaevs then fled to Zubeidat’s native Dage­stan, but war followed close behind. By 2002, age eight, he was brought to America on a tourist visa with his parents who quickly applied for political —

— asylum. The rest of the family would follow in the next year to settle in Cambridge, moving into a three-bedroom­ apartment at 410 Norfolk St.

He is remembered by locals to have been a loving, smiley child. “He was always like, ‘Mommy, Mommy, yes, Mommy’ – even if his mom —

— was yelling at him,” says family friend Baudy Mazaev. “He was just, like, this nice, calm, compliant, pillow-soft kid. My mom would always say, ‘Why can’t you talk to me the way Dzhokhar talks to his mother?'” There were multiple Chechen families in the neighbourhood and the —

— children would play together while their parents socialized. A noisy and packed but loving household, including multiple babies as the Tsarnaev sisters married, had children, then divorced and returned home at young ages.

He was enrolled at the public elementary school, The —

— Cambridgeport School, where he flourished. Although he was initially held back because of his limited English he was reading so proficiently by the end of the third grade that he was bumped to fifth grade. He quickly adopted ‘Jahar’ or even ‘Joe’ as the Americanized versions —

— of his name, the original being difficult for native English speakers to pronounce. Katie Charner-Laird, one of his former teachers, recalls one of his report cards saying that he had “a heart of gold.”

He idolized his older brother, the first born child lovingly nicknamed —

— ‘Hercules’ and doted on by their proud mother. Relative Naida Suleimanov said the two were always very close. “This is the custom,” she said. “You always listen to your older sibling, your older brother, and follow his example.” Criticism of Tamerlan was unheard of in their —

— home. “He had told his mother that he felt there were two people living inside of him,” said a family friend. “I told her, ‘You should get that checked out.’ But she just said, ‘No, he’s fine.’ She couldn’t accept the tiniest criticism of him. But obviously she was thinking —

— about it enough that she brought it up.” Mental healthcare was never sought for Tamerlan, but he was encouraged to embrace Islam and would occasionally bring Dzhokhar along with him to the Friday service at the Islamic Society of Boston’s mosque.

Youth (2/3)

Following the lead of the eldest child who was an amateur boxer, he took up boxing but eventually would settle on wrestling. Tamerlan sometimes took him to the gym. As one trainer remembered it, Dzhokhar was not particularly interested in boxing, “but he was —

— going through the motions for his brother… He was like a lost dog.”

Tension grew in the house of Tsarnaev as the years passed. Enough so that Ruslan, his uncle, became purposefully estranged. Dynamics changed as religion increased. Anzor and Tamerlan alike were not —

— opposed to raising a hand to the younger children. The girls feared their father, who banned them from dating outside Islam. Some neighbors recall Zubeidat, clad in a hijab, sternly leading her daughters to the mosque. She had begun to give up her fashionable lifestyle in —

— exchange for pushing her children to study the Qu’ran and follow Islamic morals. Once, when Anzor discovered marijuana in a beer can in Dzhokhar’s car, he struck him, according to a couple of his friends. As Anzor’s health was declining, Tamerlan gained a role as an —

— enforcer — Dzhokhar in particular coming under close scrutiny of his brother, who at seven years his senior seemed more a mentor than a friend. “Pray,” the older brother told the younger. “You cannot call yourself a Muslim unless you thank Allah five times a day.”

He —

— graduated from the Community Charter Schools of Cambridge school in 2007. Neither Anzor nor Zubeidat were there. Though they were noted for their voracious support of Tamerlan’s extra curriculars, Dzhokhar’s coach said that in the three years that he had wrestled, not one of —

— his family members had ever come to watch him compete.

Soon after he entered Cambridge Rindge, Dzhokhar was busy with honors courses and wrestling practice. He was voted team captain in his junior and senior years. At home, he continued to play the role of the obedient child —

— and often babysat for his sisters’ babies. Behind that facade he was partying a lot, smoking and drinking. Tamerlan, who was quickly gaining interest in their faith, discouraged this and would insist the other male stop drinking and come home early. Friends have commented, —

— “Jahar was really wary of coming home high because of how his brother would react. He’d get really angry. He was a really intense dude,” regarding Tamerlan and said that, “If you weren’t Muslim, he was even more intense. I was fascinated – this dude’s, like, six-three, he’s —

— a boxer — I wanted to meet him, but Jahar was like, ‘No, you don’t want to meet him.'”

Friends recalled him as reliable and smooth, getting along well with his mates and girls. He rarely discussed politics or religion with them, and was known to become uncomfortable if —

— others brought it up. However, a wrestling teammate noted, “I actually think he had a real reverence for Islam,” There was one occasion in particular when he became visibly uncomfortable when a friend who’d converted began speaking casually about the faith. “He didn’t get —

— mad, but he kind of shut him down. It showed me that he took his religion really seriously. It wasn’t conditional with him.”

In June 2011, when he graduated from Rindge, Dzhokhar was one of 45 students granted a $2,500 college scholarship from the city of Cambridge and was —

— named to the National Honor Society. In another senior rite of passage, he was awarded the MVP trophy by his high school’s wrestling team. While each of the other team members who received awards were accompanied by a family member or friend, he had neither.

Early Adulthood (3/3)

Eventually his sisters would move out and his parents divorced, separately moving back to Russia. This left him with Tamerlan, his new sister-in-law (Katherine Russel), and niece (Zahira). By all accounts, he adored the child.

He matriculated at the —

— University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Planning to major in engineering, he moved into a dorm the fall semester of freshmen year and took the courses principles of modern chemistry, pre-calculus, introduction to design, critical writing and reading, and elementary Spanish —

— II.

He was popular among his peers who jokingly referred to him as ‘Jizz’, partaking in street racing and clubbing. He soon began dealing pot, bringing in up to $1000 a week and indulging in designer shoes, street racing, and psychedelics. He owned a gun illegally to protect —

— himself at this time.

He was known in high school for his fast driving, but in college took the recklessness to new limits. A lit cigarette in hand, he would accelerate his 1999 green Honda Civic to nearly 120 miles an hour. Once, when his car was jammed with passengers, he —

— stuffed a friend in the trunk rather than leave him behind. Another stunt both impressed and slightly terrified his friends: Dzhokhar sometimes turned corners with the steering wheel between his knees, leaving his hands free to roll a joint.

His looks, good manners, and —

— flawless English were a big asset whenever he and his friends had run-ins with police. This happened one night at a campus parking lot when he and some friends were smoking weed inside a car. A police officer caught them. “Are you guys smoking marijuana?” the officer asked. —

— Dzhokhar nodded, then repeated respectful words like “officer” and “sorry” and “never again.” Friends said he always knew how to fake penitence. The officer listened, then said, “OK, my problem then is that you’re illegally parked, so please go.” He drove away, with his —

— friends suppressing laughter. Such confrontations with authority were hardly rare. Close calls happened as often as twice a month over issues such as speeding, raucous partying, and possession of alcohol or drugs.

A triple homicide was committed in Massachusetts on the —

— evening of September 11, 2011. The Tsarnaev brothers would not be identified as suspects until later when the case was re-examined, and authorities said they may have been responsible for the murders, that forensic evidence connected them to the scene of the killings, and —

— that their cell phone records placed them in the area at the time of the killings. In May 2013, Ibragim Todashev, who knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was shot and killed by law enforcement officers who had been interviewing him about the bombings and the murders. The FBI alleged —

— that just before he was killed, Todashev made statements implicating both himself and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the murders—saying that the initial crime was a drug-related robbery and the murders were committed to prevent being identified by the victims.

Though he had been —

— labelled the brains of the family, his grades began to suffer. He kept his poor academic performance secret.

The summer was spent working as a life-guard while Tamerlan became increasingly devoted to Islam. With no parents present, his domineering sibling was the head of —

— the household. One of Jahar’s wrestling teammates who also went to UMass Dartmouth, Nawrass Abu-Rubieh, remembers being told by Dzhokhar one day that summer, “I want to get out of this house.” He expressed having trouble sleeping, missing his father, and disliking school.

—

— He became a naturalized U.S. citizen on September 11, 2012 and returned to Dartmouth but soon fell into financial trouble as his aid package was held up. It was quickly becoming clear that he was failing to be independent and his hopes of obtaining a degree were bleak. Much —

— time was spent at home in Cambridge with his brother.

Around then, he downloaded onto his laptop several radical Muslim publications that focused on jihad and enemies of Islam, alongside an article from an English-language Al Qaeda publication entitled, “Make a bomb in the —

— kitchen of your mom.” Tamerlan, unemployed and therefore using his money, paid $200 in cash for fireworks and $160 to rent guns for practice at a shooting range.

Together, the Tsarnaev brothers would delve deep into radical idealogy, motivated by islamophobia in America —

after 9/11 and war in the middle east. Plans began to form.

April 15, 2013, Dzhokhar Anzorovich Tsarnaev, alongside his older brother, would cement himself in history. He will be remembered only as one of the two terrorists to commit the Boston Marathon Bombing, erasing the life he had before that the moment he delivered one of two —

— pressure cooker bombs to Boylsten Street and being proceeded by his participation in a further carjacking, firefight, and infamous manhunt.

End of Thread.