Agent Walker told him it was nothing like that—he was free to go. In fact, Agent Walker would drive him. When they arrived at Carriage Drive, Dias was there with two other FBI agents. They assembled around the table—the one at which Dias, Azamat, and Bayan had sat twelve hours earlier waiting for the FBI. Now it was the FBI, Dias, and Azamat, standing. The laptop, the ashtray, and the baseball hat sat on the table. One of the agents spotted the red hat.
“Is that Jahar’s?” he asked.
The boys nodded.
“We want that hat,” said the agent.
“I don’t know, I kind of like the way it looks on me,” said Dias, grabbing the hat and putting it on his head.
Azamat quickly tore the hat off his friend’s head and handed it to the agent.
The agents searched the apartment—Azamat had signed a consent form for that, too—and left, taking with them what they had found of Jahar’s stuff. When they were gone, Azamat asked Dias where he had thrown out the backpack.
“In the dumpster,” said Dias.
“You idiot,” said Azamat.
ROBEL DID NOT SEE the men in SWAT gear lay siege to 69A Carriage Drive, and he did not see his friends being led out of the building at gunpoint, in handcuffs and shackles. He had known to get as far away as possible from that place. After Azamat drove him to campus so he could dump his bag with the marijuana in it and they returned to Carriage Drive, Robel said, “The media are going to be here soon,” and got to work finding a ride out of New Bedford. He got hold of Quan Le Phan, a former roommate. He probably did not have to explain why he had to get away from the Kazakhs’ apartment: by this time, all of UMass knew that Jahar had been identified as one of the bombers. Quan had to leave campus anyway because the dorms were being evacuated, but Robel bombarded him with messages urging him to hurry until, less than half an hour later, Quan took Robel with him to his parents’ house in Worcester, about seventy miles to the northwest.
Just after three in the afternoon, Robel got a text from Azamat: “Policemen are coming to our apartment…” and less then a minute later: “They are looking for you…” Robel responded, “Tell them we left because of campus lockdown and are coming back when they tell us to.”
Robel’s strategy must have been to try to make himself invisible while also appearing cooperative. He knew the police would come to Carriage Drive, but he figured that if he avoided being spotted by them and especially if he made it inconvenient enough to try to get him, maybe the police would forget about him. There is, however, no such thing as being too inconveniently located for FBI agents conducting an investigation. Two officers—an FBI agent named Dwight Schwader and a county police detective named David Earle, who was also assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, one of a hundred such interagency groups run by FBI offices around the country—drove to Worcester. They asked Robel, Quan, and Quan’s roommate Jim Li, who had gone with Quan and Robel to Quan’s house from Dartmouth, to meet in the Price Chopper parking lot. The boys came and then took turns walking across the lot from their car to the officers’ SUV, getting in, and answering questions. Before letting them into the vehicle, the officers, who were wearing SWAT gear, stood each of the boys against the SUV and patted them down thoroughly.
Robel’s interview lasted a couple of hours, and just another two hours later, he was already feeling cavalier about it.
“It was kind of funny,” he texted at 1:53 in the morning to a friend named Elohe Dereje, an aspiring actress and model in Maryland. “They asked me what I was doing all day when I was hanging out with people. I told them smoking on so many occasions that they just started to laugh.”
A minute later, he added, “They grilled me for 2 hours straight.”
Elohe responded:
LMAOO WHAT?? YOU DID NOTTT…
LIKE WHERE THEY INTERROGATE YOU?
THEY HAD TO TAKE YOU?
I’M NOT PLAYING, THEY INTERROGATED
ME IN A PARKING LOT IN THEIR CAR
THESE GUYS ONLY CARED FOR
THE BOMBS AND GUNS
WOW, SO DID YOU FIND OUT
WHY THEY DID WHAT THEY DID?
WHY HIS BROTHER BOMBED
THE MARATHON?
NOPE, NOTHING SO FAR.
THEY SAID IF THE GUY DOESN’T TRY
TO PLEAD NOT GUILTY MORE PEOPLE
WON’T INTERROGATE ME
It was less than twenty-four hours since the brothers had been identified, but the narrative had already taken hold: it was the older brother who had bombed the marathon.
Later, when the officers who interviewed Robel were cross-examined in court, it would become clear that the interview had not been all that funny. At one point, Agent Schwader asked for Robel’s phone, and Robel placed it on the center console of the car. The agent went through his text messages, including the ones he had gotten from Dias the evening before: “Come to Jahar’s!” and again “Jahar!” But Robel kept saying that he did not remember anything about going to Jahar’s room, and his repetitive recollections of his numerous pot-smoking sessions served as his explanations both for how he had spent the day and for why he did not remember anything but the smoking. Agent Schwader thought he was stonewalling. Among other things Agent Schwader yelled at him was, “Maybe you are their bitch and you stayed outside,” when Dias and Azamat went in. Robel still insisted that he did not remember going to Jahar’s room.
It was not until after the officers allowed Robel, Quan, and Jim to go back to Quan’s parents’ house that the agents at the New Bedford police barracks got Azamat to talk in detail about Dias’s search of Jahar’s dorm room. So a couple of hours after Robel had relaxed enough to start bragging in text messages about his interrogation, the agents showed up at Quan’s house. They said they needed to talk to Robel. It was four in the morning.
They talked for about forty minutes. They studied his phone again. Robel still insisted that he did not remember going to Jahar’s.
The next day, Robel got a call from Michael Dukakis, the almost eighty-year-old former governor and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate, with whom Robel’s mother was on friendly terms. The old man said Robel’s mother had called him, worried sick because she had not heard from her son in two days. So Dukakis tried calling, perhaps hoping that Robel would answer out of respect—or because he was avoiding only his mother’s calls. And indeed, Robel answered. He told Dukakis that he was so confused he was not even sure what he had told the investigators so far. Dukakis must have told him to go home, because on Saturday both Robel and Jim, whose parents also lived in Boston, left Worcester and returned to their families.
BACK AT CARRIAGE DRIVE, Dias and Azamat assessed their situation. They seemed to be out of the woods. They had not been arrested, they had given the FBI Jahar’s things except for the backpack, and with Jahar himself having been caught, maybe the FBI did not need the backpack anymore. Dias and Azamat did not know where Bayan was, but they assumed the officers must have let her go early: after all, she had not gone to Jahar’s with them, and anyway, she was a girl. They could sleep—they had not done much of that in a while.
They came for Dias and Azamat in the afternoon. Both were told they were being arrested for visa violations. “This may be the first time Immigration makes a house call over a student-visa violation,” one of Azamat’s defense attorneys, Nicholas Wooldridge, would later say at trial. “And the FBI is with them! This may be the first time the FBI makes a house call over a student-visa violation.” Wooldridge was almost certainly wrong; with arresting people on visa-violation grounds having become one of the most important law enforcement tools after September 11, there had probably been many such joint “house calls.”