A portrait emerges
Boxing, academics once ranked high on brothers’ list.
BOSTON Tamerlan Tsarnaev practised martial arts and boxing, even aspiring to fight on the U.S. Olympic team. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been on the wrestling team at a prestigious school and won a scholarship. Neighbours recalled the ethnic Chechen brothers, living on a quiet street in Cambridge, Mass., riding bikes and skateboards.
Two brothers, one now dead — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one alive and arrested by police late Friday night. Hours after the first grainy images of the two men were released to the public by the FBI, a portrait quickly emerged Friday of the men suspected in Monday’s deadly Boston Marathon bombing.
The brothers, who had lived in the violence-wracked region of Dagestan in southern Russia, lived together and had been in the country for about a decade, according to an uncle, Ruslan Tsarni.
The older brother, Tamerlan, was believed to be 26 when he was killed overnight in a shootout with police.
An aunt, Maret Tsarnaeva, told reporters in Toronto that Tamerlan recently became a devout Muslim who prayed five times a day.
She said her brother, Anzor Tsarnaev, was desperate when he found out Tamerlan dropped out of his university.
Tamerlan married and had a three-year-old daughter in the U.S., she said.
“He has a wife in Boston and from a Christian family, so you can’t tie it to religion,” she said.
Tamerlan once said he hoped to fight for the U.S. Olympic team and become a naturalized American.
“I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.” he was quoted as saying in a photo package that appeared in a Boston University student magazine in 2010.
Government officials said Tamerlan travelled to Russia last year and returned to the U.S. six months later.
Dzhokhar had attended the prestigious Cambridge Rindge and Latin school, participating on the wrestling team. In May 2011, his senior year, he was awarded a $2,500 scholarship from the city to pursue higher education.
He attended the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, university officials said Friday. They would not say what he was studying.
Harry Danso, who lives on the same floor of the dormitory, told The Associated Press he saw him in the hallway this week, and Tsarnaev was calm.
The father of the suspects, Anzor Tsaraev, told The Associated Press his younger son was a second-year student studying medicine.
Dzhokhar’s page on the Russian social networking site Vkontakte says that before moving to the U.S. he attended School No. 1 in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim republic in Russia’s North Caucasus that has become an epicentre of the Islamic insurgency that spilled over from the region of Chechnya.
On the site, he describes himself as speaking Chechen as well as English and Russian. His world view is described as “Islam” and he says his personal goal is “career and money.”
Deana Beaulieu said she went to school with Dzhokhar and was friendly with his sister. She hadn’t seen him since they graduated.
“He was just a quiet kid,” Beaulieu said of Dzhokhar. She couldn’t recall his ever expressing any political views. “I thought he was going to branch off to college, and now this is what he’s done. ... I don’t understand what the hell happened, what set him off like this.”