Three weeks later, he tweeted, “To be honest, I don’t care for those people that wanna commit suicide, your life b, do what you think will make you happy. #selfishbastards.”
And in another month he tweeted, “Share the love, the knowledge and the wealth.”
On April 9, he posted several videos on his VK.com page, including one about the carnage in Syria that ended with the line “Syria is calling. We will answer,” and one about a blind boy who spends all his time studying the Koran.
And on April 12 he tweeted, “Now we ain’t come here to start no drama, we are just looking for future baby mamas.”
And eight minutes later, “Dreams really do come true, last night I dreamt I was eating a cheeseburger and in the afternoon today, guess what I’m eating…”
He used his Facebook page that week to advertise some Ed Hardy clothes for sale, new with tags.
And among all that, there were hundreds of tweets and posts about girls, food, sleeping habits, the drudgery of college, and a couple of sophomoric jokes in Russian thrown in. Who knew what could come out of the guy’s mouth?
ONLY THREE STATES in the union observe Patriots’ Day, the anniversary of the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord. Massachusetts is the only one of those states that has actual celebratory practices for the holiday: the battles are reenacted; the Red Sox play their home opener at Fenway Park; schools and state offices are closed; and the Boston Marathon is run. It is like Massachusetts’ own big American holiday. Though if you have never lived anywhere in America outside Massachusetts, you might just think Patriots’ Day is a big American holiday, period. Kind of like a second Fourth of July.
Patriots’ Day 2013 fell on April 15, tax day—an ironic coincidence for a big American holiday. At 2:49 p.m. that day, a couple of hours after the winner completed the Boston Marathon, when runners were crossing the finish line in a steady stream, two bombs went off near the end of the route, killing three people and injuring at least 264 others, including sixteen who lost limbs.
Eight
THEY ARE US
In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, police scanned the crowd for people who looked suspicious, which is to say Muslim, which is to say darker than Boston-white. A twenty-year-old man from Saudi Arabia was among the walking wounded—the dozens of people with burns, scratches, and bruises from being thrown who were making their way, with the assistance of uninjured runners, to the assembled ambulances. Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, an English-language student who had been on his way to meet friends for lunch and decided to get a glimpse of the marathon on the way, had been thrown by the second explosion. He had burn injuries on his head, back, and legs. His jeans were torn. He was covered in blood, most of it other people’s. A police officer directed Alharbi, along with other victims, toward the waiting ambulances—but when the student boarded one, several officers followed him into the vehicle. At the hospital, more than twenty police officers and FBI agents surrounded his bed. At 4:28 in the afternoon, less than two hours after the bombs went off, the New York Post reported that law enforcement were talking to a suspect in the bombing. By evening, the media had his name and address, and the FBI had his Facebook password. By Tuesday morning, the Post had published a picture taken in the street in Revere, the Boston suburb where Alharbi lived, Fox News had reported his name, and other media had published a mistranslation of a Facebook post of his: “God is coming to the U.S.” In fact, he had written, “Thank God I arrived in the U.S. after a long trip.” CBS stated that a spectator at the marathon had seen Alharbi “acting suspiciously” and tackled him. Other media reported that he had had burns on his hands, pointing to the probability that he was the bomber.
Alharbi was exonerated by the FBI within twenty-four hours of the bombing, but by this time he had no home—his address was now so widely known that he felt he would be unsafe there—and no money: the FBI never returned his wallet. The Saudi embassy provided Alharbi with food and a hotel room.
After Alharbi came Sunil Tripathi, Salaheddin Barhoum, and Yassine Zaimi. The last two were Moroccan immigrants, a seventeen-year-old high school track competitor and his twenty-four-year-old coach, who had been fingered by amateur online detectives. On Thursday, April 18, the Post published a photograph of them on the cover, with the banner headline BAG MEN: FEDS SEEK THESE TWO PICTURED AT BOSTON MARATHON. The evidence, as analyzed by the online crowd: one of the men was wearing a black backpack—and a black backpack, or what remained of it after a bomb exploded inside, had been found at the scene. Plus, they looked dark and were indeed Muslim.
Sunil Tripathi was a brown-skinned American student at Brown University who had disappeared almost a month before the bombing. This suspect too came courtesy of Internet amateurs, but the social network Reddit gave it such traction that for a day or two those following the case were all but certain this young man was the prime suspect. In fact, he had been dead for weeks—his body was found another week later.
At five o’clock on Thursday, the FBI called a press conference at a Sheraton hotel in Boston. Within half an hour media had released pictures of another pair of young men: one older, one younger, one wearing a white baseball cap and the other a black one—oddly, all of this was also true of the two Moroccans, and in some quarters confusion persisted. The pictures were taken from surveillance tapes; the FBI believed the two men to be the bombers, and was asking the public for help in identifying them.
LARRY AARONSON is the sort of person who engages with everything that happens in his city and feels responsible for everyone he has ever known. This time his personal investment was overwhelming: he knew three of the people who lost limbs. One was the son of a fellow Rindge and Latin teacher, a special boy who had been doing relief work in war zones. Another was the daughter of a teacher. A third was a teacher who was dating a former student. Aaronson felt personally injured, and he was glued to Facebook, where friends and strangers were exchanging the latest news and rumors. His own suspicion was that the bomber was a rogue Tea Party member who had chosen the coincidence of Patriots’ Day and tax day to protest the government by killing amateur athletes.
But then he saw reports on the Saudi student, the Moroccans, and the boy who looked Sri Lankan. They seemed no more and no less absurd than any other possible suspect. Then he saw the picture of the men the FBI said were suspects. One of them looked uncannily like Jahar. As Thursday evening wore on, the pictures Aaronson was seeing on his screens became more and more clear: as the resolution went up, the bombers were coming into focus. Man, this is looking a lot like Jahar, he was thinking. I should call him and tell him, “You better go to the police, because they are showing pictures of this kid who looks just like you.”
Ginny, a receptionist at a Cambridge hospital, recognized Tamerlan right away. She had the day off, so, like many people in the Boston area, she was home in front of her television set when the pictures were first shown. “That’s the fucking guy who used to come in and talk to me!” Ginny shouted to her husband. “He delivered for Mona Lisa!” Mona Lisa was the pizza place down the street from the hospital, just across from Rindge and Latin. It was owned by two brothers—Ginny was pretty sure they were Brazilian (they were actually Egyptian)—and Tamerlan had spent a couple of months delivering for them. On one of his first deliveries, he’d asked the receptionist her name, though he never introduced himself. From then on, he would come in, always dressed in jeans and a hoodie, and say, in his strong accent, “I’m from Mona Lisa. How you doin’, Ginny?” Her first thought on seeing his photo on television was, He knows my name! She barely considered going to the authorities: “I was scared. I didn’t want to become a target.”