At his arraignment at a federal courthouse in Boston on July 10, Jahar smiled, yawned, slouched in his chair, and generally seemed not to fully grasp the seriousness of the situation while pleading innocent to all charges. At times he seemed almost to smirk—which wasn’t a “smirk,” those who know him say. “He just seemed like the old Jahar, thinking, ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’” says Payack, who was at the courthouse that day.
It had been the coach who’d helped Jahar come up with his nickname, replacing the nearly impossible-to-decipher Dzhokhar with a simpler and cooler-sounding rendering. “If he had a hint of radical thoughts, then why would he change the spelling of his name so that more Americans in school could pronounce it?” asks one longtime friend, echoing many others. “I can’t feel that my friend, the Jahar I knew, is a terrorist,” adds another. “That Jahar isn’t, to me.”
“Listen,” says Payack, “there are kids we don’t catch who just fall through the cracks, but this guy was seamless, like a billiard ball. No cracks at all.” And yet a deeply fractured boy lay under that facade; a witness to all of his family’s attempts at a better life as well as to their deep bitterness when those efforts failed and their dreams proved unattainable. As each small disappointment wore on his family, ultimately ripping them apart, it also furthered Jahar’s own disintegration—a series of quiet yet powerful body punches. No one saw a thing. “I knew this kid, and he was a good kid,” Payack says, sadly. “And, apparently, he’s also a monster.”
• • •
Though Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was raised largely in America, his roots are in the restive North Caucasus, a region that has known centuries of political turmoil. Born on July 22, 1993, he spent the first seven years of his life in the mountainous Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, where his father, Anzor, had grown up in exile. Anzor is from Chechnya, the most vilified of the former Soviet republics, whose people have been waging a near-continuous war since the eighteenth century against Russian rule. Dzhokhar’s mother, Zubeidat, is an Avar, the predominantly Muslim ethnic group of Chechnya’s eastern neighbor, Dagestan, which has been fighting its own struggle for independence against the Russians since the late 1700s. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Chechen nationalists declared their independence, which resulted in two brutal wars where the Russian army slaughtered tens of thousands of Chechens and leveled its capital city, Grozny. By 1999, the violence had spread throughout the region, including Dagestan.
Though Islam is the dominant religion of the North Caucasus, religion played virtually no role in the life of Anzor Tsarnaev, a tough, wiry man who’d grown up during Soviet times, when religious worship in Kyrgyzstan was mostly underground. In Dagestan, where Islam had somewhat stronger footing, many women wear hijabs; Zubeidat, though, wore her dark hair like Pat Benatar. The couple met while Anzor was studying law and were married on October 20, 1986. The next day, their first child, Tamerlan, was born. Three more children would follow, all of them born in Kyrgyzstan, where Anzor secured a job as an investigator in the prosecutor’s office in the nation’s capital, Bishkek.
It was a prestigious position, especially for a Chechen, but Anzor had larger ambitions. He hoped to take his family to America, where his brother, Ruslan, an attorney, was building an upper-middle-class life. After Russia invaded Chechnya in 1999, setting off the second of the decade’s bloody wars, 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. In the spring of 2002, Anzor, Zubeidat, and Jahar, then eight, arrived in America on a tourist visa and quickly applied for political asylum. The three older children, Ailina, Bella, and Tamerlan, stayed behind with relatives.
During their first month in America, Jahar and his parents lived in the Boston-area home of Dr. Khassan Baiev, a Chechen physician and friend of Anzor’s sister, who recalled Anzor speaking of discrimination in Kyrgyzstan that “went as far as beatings.” This abuse would be the premise of the Tsarnaevs’ claim for asylum, which they were granted a year later. In July 2003, the rest of the family joined them in Cambridge, where they’d moved into a small, three-bedroom apartment at 410 Norfolk St.; a weathered building with peeling paint on a block that otherwise screams gentrification.
There are just a handful of Chechen families in the Boston area, and the Tsarnaevs seemed a welcome addition. “They had wonderful children,” recalls Anna Nikeava, a Chechen who befriended the Tsarnaevs shortly after they arrived. “They were very soft, like cuddly kittens, all four kids, always hugging and kissing each other.” And the parents, too, seemed to adore each other, even while Anzor, who spoke broken English, worked as a mechanic, making just ten dollars an hour. For the first year, the Tsarnaevs received public assistance. But they never seemed to struggle, Anna says. “They were very much in love and enjoying life. They were fun.”
Chechen families are very traditional—Anna, a warm and talkative woman in her late forties, tells me that in her country, “Ladies don’t wear pants, you have to wear a skirt,” and marrying outside the culture is taboo. The Tsarnaevs were atypical in that regard. Zubeidat was a “very open, modern lady” with a taste for stylish jeans, high heels, and short skirts. “She had the tattooed eyebrows, permanent makeup, very glamorous,” says Anna. “And her children were always dressed up nicely too.”
Zubeidat adored her children, particularly Tamerlan, a tall, muscular boy she compared to Hercules. Jahar, on the other hand, was the baby, his mother’s “dwog,” or “heart.” “He looked like an angel,” says Anna, and was called “Jo-Jo” or “Ho.”
“He was always like, ‘Mommy, Mommy, yes, Mommy’—even if his mom was yelling at him,” says Anna’s son Baudy Mazaev, who is a year and a half younger than Jahar. “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 five or six Chechen boys of roughly the same age in their circle, but Baudy and Jahar were particularly close. Now a student at Boston University, Baudy remembers family get-togethers in the Tsarnaevs’ cramped, top-floor apartment, where Jahar and Tamerlan shared a small room with a bunk bed; in an even smaller room, their sisters shared just a mattress. There was never room for everyone around the tiny kitchen table, so the boys would engage in epic games of manhunt or play video games on the giant TV in the living room while their parents ate and socialized. Anzor was famous for his booming laugh, which Jahar inherited—“It was so loud, the whole room would know if he was laughing,” says Baudy.
Jahar idolized his older brother, Tamerlan—all the children appeared to—and as a child, he followed his brother’s example and learned to box. But it was wrestling that became his primary sport, as was also true for Baudy, a squarely built kid who competed in a higher weight class than the slender, 130-pound Jahar. “It’s a Chechen thing,” says Baudy. “When I went to Chechnya to see my cousins, the first thing they ask is, ‘You want to wrestle?’”
Baudy is fiercely proud of his heritage, and Jahar, who shares a name with Chechnya’s first president, Dzhokhar Dudayev (one of Anzor’s personal heroes), had similar “Chechen pride.” He embraced the national Chechen symbol, the wolf; learned traditional dances; and could speak Chechen as well as Russian. He even talked about marrying a Chechen girl. “He would always talk about how pretty Chechen girls were,” says Baudy, though, to his knowledge, Jahar had never met one, aside from the sisters of some of their friends.
There were many, many Jahars in Cambridge: children of immigrants with only the haziest, if idealized, notions of their ethnic homelands. One of the most liberal and intellectually sophisticated cities in the United States, Cambridge is also one of the most ethnically and economically diverse. There are at least fifty nationalities represented at the city’s one public high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, whose motto—written on walls, murals, and school-course catalogs and proclaimed o
ver the PA system—is “Opportunity, Diversity, Respect.” About 45 percent of its students live in public or subsidized housing, largely in the city’s densely populated working-class neighborhoods. There are more affluent areas, and in them live the children of professors from nearby Harvard and MIT who also attend Rindge, “but not in tremendous numbers,” says Cambridge schools superintendent Dr. Jeffrey M. Young. “What you do have is some actively engaged political families”—like those of the school’s most famous alumni, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck—“and then there’s the voiceless, who we try to encourage to have more of a voice.”
All of the Tsarnaev children went to Rindge, as the school is known, but it was Jahar who assimilated best. Though he’d arrived in America speaking virtually no English, by high school he was fluent, with only a trace of an accent, and he was also fluent in the local patois. (Among his favorite words, his friends say, was “sherm,” Cambridge slang for “slacker.”) Jahar, or “Jizz,” as his friends also called him, wore grungy Pumas, had a great three-point shot, and became a dedicated pot smoker—something a number of Cambridge teens tell me is relatively standard in their permissive community, where you can score weed in the high school bathrooms and smoke on the street without much of a problem. A diligent student, he was nominated to the National Honor Society in his sophomore year, which was also when he joined the wrestling team. “He was one of those kids who’s just a natural,” says Payack, his coach, who recalls Jahar as a supportive teammate who endured grueling workouts and runs without a single complaint. In his junior year, the team made him a captain. By then, everyone knew him as “Jahar,” which his teammates would scream at matches to ensure the refs would never mispronounce his name.
“I could never quite get his name—Dokar? Jokar?” says Larry Aaronson, a retired Rindge history teacher (Jahar, he says, eventually told him to call him “Joe”). Aaronson, a longtime friend of the late historian Howard Zinn, also lives on Norfolk Street, down the block from the Tsarnaevs’ home. “I asked him once where he was from, and he said Chechnya. And I’m like, ‘Chechnya? Are you shitting me?’” says Aaronson. “I said, ‘My God, how did you cope with all that stress?’ And he said, ‘Larry, that’s how come we came to America, and how lucky that we came to Cambridge, of all places!’ He just embraced the city, the school and the whole culture—he gratefully took advantage of it. And that’s what endeared me to him: This was the quintessential kid from the war zone, who made total use of everything we offer so that he could remake his life. And he was gorgeous,” he adds.
• • •
Jahar’s friends were a diverse group of kids from both the wealthier and poorer sections of Cambridge; black, white, Jewish, Catholic, Puerto Rican, Bangladeshi, Cape Verdean. They were, as one Cambridge parent told me, “the good kids”—debate champs, varsity athletes, student-government types, a few brainiacs who’d go off to elite New England colleges. A diligent student, Jahar talked about attending Brandeis or Tufts, recalls a friend I’ll call Sam, one of a tight-knit group of friends, who, using pseudonyms, agreed to speak exclusively to Rolling Stone. “He was one of the realest dudes I’ve ever met in my life,” says Sam, who spent nearly every day with Jahar during their teens, shooting hoops or partying at a spot on the Charles River known as the “Riv.” No matter what, “he was the first person I’d call if I needed a ride or a favor. He’d just go, ‘I got you, dog’—even if you called him totally wasted at, like, two or three in the morning.”
“He was just superchill,” says another friend, Will, who recalls one New Year’s Eve when Jahar packed eight or nine people—including one in the trunk—into his green Honda Civic. Of course, he adds, the police pulled them over, but Jahar was unfazed. “Even if somebody caught him drinking,” says his buddy Jackson, “he was the calm, collected kid who always knew how to talk to police.”
He had morals, they all agree. “He never picked on anybody,” says Sam, adding that much like his brother, Jahar was a great boxer. “He was better at boxing than wrestling—he was a beast.” But while he could probably knock out anyone he wanted, he never did. “He wasn’t violent, though—that’s the crazy thing. He was never violent,” says Sam.
“He was smooth as fuck,” says his friend Alyssa, who is a year younger than Jahar. Girls went a little crazy over him—though to Jahar’s credit, his friends say, even when he had crushes, he never exploited them. “He’d always be like, ‘Chill, chill, let’s just hang out,’” says Sam, recalling Jahar’s almost physical aversion to any kind of attention. “He was just really humble—that’s the best way to describe him.”
Cara, a vivacious, pretty blonde whom some believe Jahar had a secret crush on, insists they were just friends. “He was so sweet. He was too sweet, you know?” she says sadly. The two had driver’s ed together, which led to lots of time getting high and hanging out. Jahar, she says, had a talent for moving between social groups and always seemed able to empathize with just about anyone’s problems. “He is a golden person, really just a genuine good guy who was cool with everyone,” she says. “It’s hard to really explain Jahar. He was a Cambridge kid.”
Cambridge kids, the group agrees, have a fairly nonchalant attitude about things that might make other people a little uptight. A few years ago, for instance, one of their mutual friends decided to convert to Islam, which some, like Cara, thought was really cool, and others, like Jackson, met with a shrug. “But that’s the kind of high school we went to,” Jackson says. “It’s the type of thing where someone could say, ‘I converted to Islam,’ and you’re like, ‘OK, cool.’” And in fact, a number of kids they knew did convert, he adds. “It was kind of like a thing for a while.”
Jahar never denied he was a Muslim, though he sometimes played it down. He fasted during Ramadan, which included giving up pot—an immense act of self-control, his friends say. “But the most religious thing he ever said was, ‘Don’t take God’s name in vain,’” says Alyssa, who is Jewish. “Yeah,” says Jackson, “he might have been religious, but it was the type of thing where unless he told you, you wouldn’t know.”
A few years ago, one Rindge wrestler, another Muslim, attended an informal lunchtime high school prayer group, where he spotted Jahar. “I didn’t know he was Muslim until I saw him at that Friday prayer group,” he says. “It wasn’t something we ever talked about.”
His friend Theo, who also wrestled with Jahar, thinks somewhat differently. “I actually think he had a real reverence for Islam,” he says. There was one occasion in particular, a few years ago, when Jahar became visibly uncomfortable when James, the friend who’d converted, began speaking casually about the faith. “He didn’t get mad, but he kind of shut him down,” Theo recalls. “And it showed me that he took his religion really seriously. It wasn’t conditional with him.”
Yet he “never raised any red flags,” says one of his history teachers, who, like many, requested anonymity, given the sensitivity of the case. Her class, a perennial favorite among Rindge students, fosters heated debates about contemporary political issues like globalization and the crises in the Middle East, but Jahar, she says, never gave her any sense of his personal politics, “even when he was asked to weigh in.” Alyssa, who loved the class, agrees: “One of the questions we looked at was ‘What is terrorism? How do we define it culturally as Americans? What is the motivation for it—can we ever justify it?’ And I can say that Jahar never expressed to us that he was pro-terrorism at all, ever.”
Except for once.
“He kind of did, one time to me, express that he thought acts of terrorism were justified,” says Will. It was around their junior year; the boys had been eating at a neighborhood joint called Izzy’s and talking about religion. With certain friends—Will and Sam among them—Jahar opened up about Islam, confiding his hatred of people whose “ignorance” equated Islam with terrorism, defending it as a religion of peace, and describing jihad as a personal struggle, nothing more. This time, says Will, “I remember telling him I thought certai
n aspects of religion were harmful, and I brought up the 9/11 attacks.”
At which point Jahar, Will says, told him he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Will asked why. “He said, ‘Well, you’re not going to like my view.’ So I pressed him on it, and he said he felt some of those acts were justified because of what the U.S. does in other countries, and that they do it so frequently, dropping bombs all the time.”
To be fair, Will and others note, Jahar’s perspective on U.S. foreign policy wasn’t all that dissimilar from a lot of other people they knew. “In terms of politics, I’d say he’s just as anti-American as the next guy in Cambridge,” says Theo. Even so, Will decided not to push it. “I was like, ‘Wow, this dude actually supports that? I can’t have this conversation anymore.’”
They never brought it up again.
• • •
In retrospect, Jahar’s comment about 9/11 could be seen in the context of what criminal profilers call “leakage”: a tiny crack in an otherwise carefully crafted facade that, if recognized—it’s often not—provides a key into the person’s interior world. “On cases where I’ve interviewed these types of people, the key is looking past their exterior and getting access to that interior, which is very hard,” says Tom Neer, a retired agent from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and now a senior associate with the Soufan Group, which advises the government on counterterrorism. “Most people have a public persona as well as a private persona, but for many people, there’s a secret side, too. And the secret side is something that they labor really hard to protect.”
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