“The Chechen?” Amir was beside himself. He had always thought Chechens were trouble—and he certainly did not send his son to the United States so he would make friends with one of them. “Did you have anything to do with the bombing?”
“No.”
“All right, in that case we are not getting a lawyer—that will show that you have nothing to hide. Now show me the apartment.”
Azamat lifted his MacBook to give his father a panoramic view of the place. It looked like a dungeon: they had drawn the blinds and were huddling like three scared kids as they waited.
“Open the blinds!” Amir barked. “You need to give the FBI a clear view inside the apartment so they won’t shoot.”
The kids did as they were told and sat down at the dining table to wait again. Azamat’s family was now looking at them through the Skype window in the laptop perched on the table. After a couple of hours the wait grew tedious; it was now nearly five in the afternoon in New Bedford and four in the morning in Kazakhstan. Amir said he did not think the FBI was coming after all, and said good night to his son and his friends.
Just after he signed off, Azamat looked down at his chest and saw more than a dozen red spots—for the number of gun sights trained on him. The apartment was surrounded by several score law enforcement officers in SWAT gear. Since that morning, a large part of Greater Boston had been in virtual lockdown—residents had been asked to “shelter in place,” meaning not to leave their homes—and police and FBI had been searching for Jahar house by house in Watertown. He seemed nowhere to be found, and that elevated the possibility that he was simply at his best buddies’ apartment. The troops had come here prepared to fight him, or perhaps his allies.
The three Kazakh students were ordered out of the apartment, searched—the boys were directed to remove their shirts—and placed in police vehicles.
“This is the biggest thing since nine-eleven,” Robel had said, ill-advisedly, to Azamat at some point on Friday morning. Massachusetts state authorities and media, the FBI, and the police apparently thought something similar—although, if one measured “big” in loss of life, bigger things, meaning bigger acts of sudden violence, had certainly happened, including the Virginia Tech shooting, which took thirty-three lives in 2007, and the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, shooting, in which twelve people died during a midnight show at a movie theater. Those, however, fell into the “angry white man” category of crimes, which FBI investigators believe they understand well. (In 2009 there was also the Fort Hood shooting, in which an Army major killed thirteen people on a military base, but because the shooter was a Muslim, the crime was seen as belonging to a different category—and a Senate report called it “the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.”) The Boston Marathon bombing, it seemed immediately apparent to investigators, did not fall into the “angry white man” category, if only because the brothers were two, and not exactly white, by virtue of being Muslim. They therefore approached the crime as an attack in progress, as September 11 had been when that investigation first got under way. Following policy and practice established at least fifteen years before September 11, 2001, investigators focused on the suspects’ networks among aliens, presuming these networks to be both extensive and dangerous—in other words, they pursued a lot of dead ends.
Early Friday morning, a neighbor called Larry Aaronson, screaming into the phone: “They are fucking us!” Aaronson thought he was aware of the facts contained in that statement, however one interpreted the syntax. “You don’t think I’m following the news on Facebook?” he asked.
“You don’t understand,” the neighbor shouted. “They went to Rindge and Latin, they live next door, they are fucking us!”
Just then Norfolk Street was starting to fill up—with the FBI and the police, all in SWAT gear, and the media. Chris LaRoche’s husband shook him awake after a friend had called saying, “Your street is on TV.” Chris had seen the suspects’ pictures the previous evening, but he had not recognized the brothers. Now, as he tried to wrap his not-yet-awake mind around the information, someone pounded on the door: “FBI!” The residents were hastily herded up the street and corralled in the garage where condo owners rented parking spaces. They stood there exchanging bits of information and answering questions from reporters who floated up from Norfolk Street every few minutes. Everyone had different impressions of the Tsarnaevs. Someone thought that Tamerlan looked like a good father. Chris had assumed the family had fled conflict in the Balkans, probably Kosovo. Rinat Harel, the art teacher, seemed to be the only one who thought the family was from Chechnya. She caught herself thinking that now, after all these years, she could start using the front entrance to her building again, and immediately felt ashamed. After about an hour, the residents were allowed to leave the garage, but not to return to Norfolk Street. A group went to Dunkin’ Donuts, because it was open. Then Chris and his husband walked to a friend’s house in Porter Square, a couple of miles away. It was eerie: a beautiful sunny morning, and the two of them the only people on the streets in all of Cambridge and Somerville.
ABOUT AN HOUR after law enforcement raided the Carriage Drive apartment, the shelter-in-place request was withdrawn and tens of thousands of people stepped out for the first time that day, tens of thousands of pairs of eyes scanning familiar landscapes for anything that seemed different. Very soon, a Watertown homeowner reported seeing blood on the side of a boat he had stored in the backyard and what he thought was a body inside the boat itself. Jahar was hiding in the covered boat; he might have been there the eighteen hours that the police had been searching for him. The house-by-house search of the neighborhood had missed this house, along with a number of others. Law enforcement once again assembled a SWAT team to take the prisoner. They tried to smoke him out with tear gas, scare him with gunfire, and coax him with words. Finally, an officer approached the boat and barked at Jahar to get down from it. The terrorist responded with a childish “But it’s going to hurt”: it was a seven-foot drop off the edge of the boat, which sat on a wheeled platform. The officers helped him down indelicately.
PART THREE
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AFTERMATH
Nine
HOW MUSA KHADZHIMURATOV FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH AMERICA
“This is a catastrophe,” the woman told me. “It is a catastrophe for us Chechens.”
She said she knew right away. In fact, she had always known. The woman had been eight years old when the first war in Chechnya began—she had grown up being a target. So when her own eight-year-old daughter here, in suburban Boston, asked if it was true that the bombers were Chechen, the woman said, “No!” and turned off the television: the word CHECHEN had been right there on the screen, beneath a picture of the younger brother. Turning off the television did not help any more than turning off bad news has ever helped anyone. The girl soon heard it at school and at the playground, and her best friend was not allowed to come over to play anymore.
The woman would not let me use her name, but she talked to me while she cooked—traditional rough Chechen bread in large square loaves, and cake: the family was expecting a visitor from Chechnya. They had been living in Boston for about seven years at the time of the bombing, and life had been pretty good. They came as refugees—a relatively privileged status that entitles new arrivals to seek both employment and public assistance—because the brother and father of the woman’s husband had both been disappeared by the Russians. Her husband worked in construction, and she was staying home with their three children, two of them born in this country. They had a house in a middle-class neighborhood, next door to another Chechen family. They socialized primarily with other Chechens; this was a traditional house, where the woman would set the table for the men and stay out of the room while they ate and talked. She knew the wives, but since Tamerlan never brought his wife to their house, she knew nothing of the Tsarnaevs except that the older brother sometimes played soccer with her husband and the other men. She had never seen Dzhokhar—until she saw him on television on April 19, 2013.