When she saw Jahar’s face on television, Lulu texted a friend from high schooclass="underline" “Do you think it’s Jahar?” They texted each other that they were shocked and crying and did not believe that it was Jahar. But then the television was saying that the surviving suspect in the marathon bombing had been positively identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and that he was on the loose after the previous night’s shoot-out in Watertown.
Terrorism works by striking at random. It is the understanding that anyone—including you and your loved ones—could become the victim of a terrorist attack that multiplies the fear-and-shock effect far beyond what simple killing and even carnage could engender. And the effect is multiplied exponentially if you learn that your loved ones, or at least your friends and neighbors, could become not only the victims but the terrorists themselves. “It is not Jahar,” said Lulu, willing her reality to split into two. “It may be his body, but it is not Jahar.”
For the next minutes or hours—they could not tell—Lulu and her boyfriend sat in front of their large-screen television, constantly switching between the news in English and in Spanish, which Lulu’s boyfriend understood better. Then Lulu looked up and saw a group of men in SWAT gear entering the house through the back porch. Their boots stomped simultaneously up and down the back stairs. Lulu called the landlord, who lived upstairs. He said that he was all right: he must have left the basement door ajar and law enforcement noticed it during a sweep of the street. The men in SWAT gear stomped through the house and out of it. Lulu and her boyfriend returned to switching between coverage of the hunt for Jahar in English and coverage of the hunt for Jahar in Spanish.
AFTER LEAVING PINE DALE HALL on Thursday night, Dias, Azamat, and Robel drove to Taco Bell. They ate there and continued to Carriage Drive. Bayan was on the couch, about halfway through The Pursuit of Happyness, a 2006 movie about a salesman who becomes homeless. Azamat and Robel, who gravitated to any lit screen in any room, joined her. Dias filled a pipe with the pot he had taken from Jahar’s room, then joined the other three on the couch. They watched the rest of the movie in the fog of the pot and the nagging anxiety about the television picture that had looked so much like Jahar. The boys occasionally looked at the news on their devices—there was something about a cop shot at MIT, but no information on whether Jahar was really Jahar; Azamat made an attempt to do his homework, without moving from the couch. When the movie ended, a bit after midnight, Dias and Bayan retired to Dias’s bedroom. Azamat and Robel turned the television set to the news but soon dozed off.
Azamat woke up around two o’clock and looked at the video of the FBI press conference again. It still looked like Jahar. He watched it one more time. And one more. Then he started watching Fox News on his computer, then CNN. Both seemed to be showing the same thing.
“Where yu looking?” he messaged Dias at 2:26. Over in the bedroom, Dias had also been watching the news.
“I think they caught his brother,” Azamat messaged at 2:28. Tamerlan had been dead nearly an hour, but some news outlets were reporting that the older and bigger suspect was in custody. CNN had already reported that the suspects were believed to be brothers—and both Dias and Azamat had met Tamerlan. Which mattered if the surviving bomber was indeed Jahar.
In the bedroom, Dias and Bayan started discussing the news. He told her that he had taken a backpack from Jahar’s room that contained emptied-out fireworks and a half-full jar of Vaseline, and that he suspected that Jahar had used these in making the bombs. Bayan took this information badly. “It could be evidence,” she said. “I don’t want it in the apartment!” This must not have occurred to Dias—nor did it occur to either of them now that they should take the backpack to the police, who were chasing after someone who appeared to be Jahar: they just realized that they had come too close to a bad sort of trouble. Dias walked out of the bedroom and either informed his friends that he was now going to dispose of the backpack or consulted them on this matter—later this would be much discussed in court. He removed the laptop from the backpack—there was no talk of getting rid of a perfectly good Sony VAIO just because it might belong to America’s most wanted man of the moment—took a half-full black garbage bag out of the kitchen trash can, stuffed the backpack inside, cinched the bag, and walked out of the apartment to toss the backpack with the fireworks and the Vaseline jar into the apartment complex dumpster.
“No more backpack,” he reported to Bayan when he returned.
“Where is it?”
“Far away.”
WHEN AZAMAT next woke up, Dzhokhar’s name was written on the television screen. A couple of hours earlier, after seeing a picture that was even more clear than all the previous ones—the resolution kept going up—and looked ever more like Jahar, Azamat had Googled “Dzhokhar,” “Dzhakhar,” “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,” “Djahar Tsarnaev,” and other spellings he could imagine for his friend’s name, and perhaps felt reassured by not finding the name linked to the words “Boston bomber.” But now it was, on television, and now Azamat believed it. He smoked pot for what may have been the first time in his life. He woke up Robel, who was now panicking, too. Robel said he had changed his mind about staying the weekend at the Carriage Drive apartment—and that he urgently needed Azamat to drive him to campus to drop off his backpack. He was afraid the police would now come to search the Kazakh students’ apartment and discover Robel was carrying marijuana.
Azamat and Robel came to UMass Dartmouth a little after nine in the morning, just as dozens of police vehicles were pulling up to campus, which was about to be evacuated. Robel still managed to drop his backpack in a friend’s room. Back at Carriage Drive, he frantically texted another friend, asking to be picked up—and within half an hour, he left Azamat, Dias, and Bayan, none of whom had lived in the United States for more than two years, to wait for what seemed to him an inevitable encounter with law enforcement.
The FBI called in the early afternoon, through a friend—probably because the people at 69A Carriage Drive still had no regular telephone service on their “family plan” and the friend knew to text the Kazakhs first so they could Skype back. Azamat dictated the address, and the three teenagers started waiting for the FBI to come. Azamat Skyped his father, the most powerful man among all their parents.
“The FBI are coming here,” said Azamat.
“Why?” asked Amir, his father.
“Because one of the Boston bombers was our friend.”