Elena herself felt like she was finally settling into a good life. After two years in Germany she requested a transfer to Georgia: she had spent only a few years in Atlanta, but she felt like the city was home, both because Nyusha was there and because it was where Elena first landed as a Russian mail-order bride. She and seventeen-year-old Alex returned to Georgia in March 2013. She was now based at Fort Stewart, 230 miles southeast of Atlanta, and Elena immediately set about house-hunting in Savannah, the beautiful historic town about forty minutes away, toward the coast. A month later, she was closing on her first house. The date was April 15.
ELENA DID NOT BEGIN to grasp the impact of the Boston bombing until two weeks later, when her daughter was detained at the airport on the way home. Reni-Nyusha told her mother that Ibragim had been called in for questioning and said that the FBI was following him everywhere he went. On May 10, during a visit to Reni, Ibragim came down to see Elena in Savannah. Reni had asked him to run some things of hers from Atlanta to her mother’s house. Ibragim struck Elena as depressed. She was also surprised to see he was still limping, ostensibly a consequence of a knee operation back in March. It might in fact have been the result of a fight he had had in an Orlando parking lot a few days earlier.
Around seven-thirty in the evening on May 21 someone knocked on Elena’s door. It was two FBI agents. “What’s our fools’ psychology?” she ranted to me a year later. “If we haven’t done anything wrong, we fear nothing. I even kept telling them they were doing good for the country.” Obviously, she let them into her house.
“They spent two hours asking me the same questions over and over again: Did they sleep together? Did they sleep on the couch together when they spent the night at my place? How religious was he? Did he abuse her? I told them that if anyone had so much as touched my baby in a bad way, I would have killed them. That’s exactly what I said.” That is easy to believe. Elena is a large, shapely woman with long blond hair—the very image of an all-powerful Russian matriarch, as well as of the ideal Russian mail-order bride, and the very opposite of her own daughter, who is slight, dark-haired, and soft-spoken.
After a couple of hours of circular questioning, Elena asked the agents to leave. She called her daughter.
“I just had a visit from them,” said Elena.
“So did I.”
Elena tried calling Ibragim, but he did not pick up.
AFTER TRYING IBRAGIM unsuccessfully at five in the morning, Reni got ready for work and jumped on her motorcycle. As she left her apartment complex, she noticed a car. Everything about the car was conspicuous: the way it was parked, across two spaces, the man at the wheel, who was white—an unusual sight in this neighborhood—and the fact that he was sitting at the wheel of a parked car in the wee hours of the morning. Ibragim had mentioned being followed by the FBI, but Reni did not yet realize that overt, menacing surveillance is a typical FBI tactic that was being applied to several of Tamerlan’s friends. She did know that the man at the wheel had to be an agent. She raised the face shield of her motorcycle helmet and gave the guy a stare she hoped conveyed the depth of her disdain for him, and rode away. The car followed her, but she lost it easily and rode to the Holiday Inn, where she was working the morning shift. The FBI car, as it turned out, went to the Hilton, where she was supposed to work that afternoon and evening.
At seven o’clock Reni’s phone rang; it was a former supervisor with whom Reni had stayed friends. He was also a biker, and he, his wife, and Reni often took weekend riding trips together.
“What’s your husband’s last name?” he asked. “It says in the paper that a guy named Ibragim has been killed in Orlando.”
The thing about working at a hotel is that there is always a newspaper at hand early in the morning. Reni grabbed a copy of USA Today off the top of a stack and found the headline. The FBI agent called from the Hilton just then; she told him where she was, and he said he was coming. It took him forty minutes to get there. Meanwhile, Reni kept dialing her mother.
Elena had a training session that morning. She could not pick up when her daughter called or when an unknown number began showing up on her phone every few minutes. She finally picked up when the training ended, around seven-thirty in the morning.
“Hello. We were at your house last night.”
This was when she lost her cool. “You are going to start calling me at work now? I told you everything yesterday. I have nothing else to say to you.”
“We have something to tell you. Ibragim Todashev died of gunshot wounds this morning.”
Elena hung up and called her daughter. Reni was screaming into the phone: “Mama, they’ve killed him!”
“Then I knew that they weren’t kidding,” Elena told me. She rushed to do the paperwork for an emergency leave; her commanding officer was understanding, but bolting from work at an Army base still requires a lengthy bureaucratic procedure. Meanwhile, the two FBI agents from the evening before came.
“You don’t have to worry about your children,” said the one who usually did the talking. “Your family is safe.”
“Why? Why?” Elena remembers screaming, meaning, Why was Ibragim killed?
“He became aggressive,” the agent told her.
“What are you telling me that my children are safe for when you just killed one of them? Look at me—I’m being aggressive now, too. Are you going to kill me?”
What Elena remembers the FBI agent doing next is this: “He placed his foot up on the chair right next to where I was sitting, and he hiked his pant leg up. He had a gun strapped to his shin. He said, ‘If you touch my gun now, my partner can kill you. He has that right.’ The gun was just about level with my face. It’s a good thing I didn’t reach for it then. Or I wouldn’t be talking to you today.”
WHAT EXACTLY Ibragim Todashev did to get himself killed was not clear then and is not clear now. By the day of his death, he had been what the FBI called “interviewed” three times. The first time, on April 20, began with Ibragim on the ground on the condo complex’s bucolic lawn, with armed men crowded around him: this was the manner in which the FBI first ID’d him, though he was never arrested and all his conversations with the FBI were, technically, voluntary. From that point on he was under constant overt surveillance. In addition, the FBI took all of his electronics—but returned them a day later. At least at some points, the FBI appears to have had a drone follow him. And on May 16, his girlfriend, Tatiana Gruzdeva, was arrested.
The other women in Ibragim’s life seem to have had varying levels of awareness of Tatiana’s existence: Elena thought Tatiana was Ibragim’s roommate, and Reni thought she was the girlfriend of Ibragim’s best friend, Khusein Taramov. In any case, Tatiana was arrested for alleged visa violations, leaving Ibragim living in the apartment alone.