Boston bomb families divided
The families of the Boston bombing victims are divided over whether the death penalty is appropriate for the young man in thrall to his brother, who allegedly masterminded the horrific attack.
JUST BEFORE 3pm on Monday 15 April 2013, two bombs went off on Boylston Street, near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. It was a sunny Patriots’ Day; the finish line was crowded with families, students, people out enjoying the spring weather.
The bombs were made from pressure- cookers, stuffed with gunpowder taken from fireworks. Glued all over them were ballbearings and nails, shrapnel designed to cause as much carnage as possible.
The bombs instantly turned Boylston Street into a charnel house.
The second bomb was placed behind a row of children. One, eight-year-old Martin Richard, was blown into the street and killed. Two others died in the street, and more than 260 were wounded.
Immediately, a frantic search for the perpetrators began online and in the media. Users on Reddit began frenziedly pointing fingers, including at one grad student, Sunil Tripathi, who turned out to be dead.
That night, the two actual bombers – Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother Dzhokhar, known as ‘‘Jahar’’ – behaved as if nothing was amiss. Twenty minutes after the bombs went off, security cameras caught Jahar buying a pint of milk. Jahar tweeted : ‘‘Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people.’’
Almost exactly two years since the attack, after a fivemonth trial and testimony from 154 witnesses, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty on all 30 charges relating to the bombing and subsequent manhunt. On Friday he was sentenced to death .
The counts, as they were intoned, named his victims. Krystle Campbell, a restaurant manager. Lu Lingzi, an exchange student from China. Eight-year-old Martin Richard; and Sean Collier, an MIT police officer Tsarnaev and his brother murdered several days later.
Forty minutes after the bombs went off, Khairullozhon Matanov Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, sentenced to death. called his friend Tamerlan Tsarnaev and invited him and Dzhokhar to dinner. He picked the brothers up in his leased taxi, and drove them to a kebab restaurant in Somerville, Massachusetts, where Matanov and Tamerlan often dined.
According to later police interviews with Matanov – who at first denied that this meeting ever happened – while they discussed the bombings, the brothers did not say anything which implicated them in the attack.
Pictures of the bombers didn’t surface until the Thursday night, three days after the detonations. When they did, the brothers sprang into action.
Using a Ruger pistol, they murdered Collier. They carjacked a Mercedes SUV. Fire was exchanged with Watertown police officers – the brothers threw pipe bombs at them. During the exchange, Tamerlan was killed – run over by his brother, who was driving the SUV.
The younger Tsarnaev escaped, triggering a vast manhunt which shut down whole sections of the city. He was eventually found in a dry-docked boat. On the inside of the craft – which was riddled with bullet holes and stained with his blood – he had scrawled a manifesto.
‘‘The
‘The pursuit of the death penalty could bring years of appeals and prolong reliving the most painful day of our lives.’
US
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killing Runners head towards the finish line of the Boston Marathon as an explosion erupts near the finish line in April 2013. I our innocent civilians,’’ Tsarnaev wrote. ‘‘We Muslims are one body. You hurt one, you hurt us all. Now I don’t like killing innocent people. But due to said [word obscured by bullethole] it is allowed.’’
For some of the victims, the result will bring peace – to others it will not.
There has been a schism among the bombing victims and their families over whether the death penalty would be appropriate.
Liz Norden, whose two sons each lost a leg, and who was present in court to see the government rest its case, has spoken out consistently in favour of death.
‘‘That would be justice for me,’’ she told reporters outside the courthouse the day Tsarnaev was sentenced.
But others have spoken out against the death penalty; most notably the Richard family, who wrote in a front page op-ed in the Boston Globe that the pursuit of the death penalty ‘‘ could bring years of appeals and prolong reliving the most painful day of our lives’’ as endless appeals run on.
Throughout the trial, Tsarnaev remained largely impassive. Throughout lengthy testimony from victims, amputees, those who lost loved ones – testimony designed by the government to ram home for the jury the sheer horror of what was committed that April day – Tsarnaev’s face betrayed no sign that he understood or empathised with what he heard.
Only once during the trial did a crack appear in his dispassionate facade. During the sobbing testimony of his mother’s sister, Tsarnaev was seen to wipe away a tear.
Compared with his charismatic, radicalised older brother, whom Tsarnaev followed ‘‘like a puppy’’ in the words of one witness, the defendant was portrayed throughout the trial as a weaker, lesser character.
There was always a vast gulf between Tsarnaev the stoner, whom his friend Tiarrah Dottin described as ‘‘cool, fun, laid-back’’, dancing and listening to rap music, smoking weed and drinking with friends and working with disabled children at school; and Tsarnaev the bomber.
From the shadows, a picture began to emerge of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Family members and friends testified to the difference between the two brothers.
Tamerlan had recently returned from a trip to Russia, where he had told friends he wanted to join the mujahadeen. A previously snappy dresser, he had begun to wear more conservative clothes as his ‘‘ obsession’’ with radical Islam increased.
He became enamoured with speeches by the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, several of which he sent to his brother. He downloaded issues of al- Qaida’s Inspire magazine, which included instructions on how to make the sort of brutal pressure- cooker explosive device that the brothers would later use with devastating effect.