The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy

EPILOGUE

The winter of 2014–2015 in Boston was the coldest and whitest on record. One record-breaking blizzard accompanied by blistering cold was followed by another and then another, and then by the coldest days in living memory. Photographs of Bostonians skiing down once lively streets circulated in the papers and on the Internet, while in the city itself people watched life grind to a halt. Public transportation was suspended for days at a time, and then did not work with any regularity. Schools piled up snow days, stranding parents at home with children. At universities, some spring-semester classes never started. The roofs of dozens of businesses collapsed, and even where they remained intact, businesses lost money because neither workers nor customers could make their way through the snow. Ice dams formed when household heat melted rooftop snow, which instantly snapped frozen in the frigid air, making houses look like the Snow Queen’s palace. “But for those of us living here, it’s not a pretty picture,” Cambridge journalist E. J. Graff wrote in The New York Times in February. “We are being devastated by a slow-motion disaster of historic proportions.” The worst thing to happen to Boston since the Marathon bombing was in many ways its opposite: it was slow and quiet, and the full extent of the damage would be unclear for a long time. “Where are the federal disaster funds, the presidential visit, Anderson Cooper interviewing victims, volunteers flying in?” wrote Graff. “The pictures may be pretty. But we need help, now.”

Tamerlan had been dead for nearly two years, and Jahar had been in federal prison almost as long. Like some other inmates awaiting trial on terrorism charges, he was subjected to “special administrative measures,” or SAMs, which create an extreme sort of solitary confinement. Inmates are usually banned from attempting communication with other prisoners. The exact restrictions imposed in specific cases are hard to ascertain, because SAMs subjects are forbidden to talk about them, but in Jahar’s case, most of the SAMs provisions became part of the court record. Once the restrictions were imposed, in August 2013, he could communicate by phone only with his lawyers and immediate family members, and his interlocutors were banned from recording the conversations and from releasing any part of them to anyone else. All calls with family were to be monitored, recorded, and analyzed by the FBI for evidence of any attempt to pass messages. Aside from the legal team, only immediate family members could visit, and they were required to speak English to Jahar, while an FBI agent listened in. The visits with family could involve no physical contact: Jahar and the visitors used telephone receivers to talk through a glass partition. Correspondence was also allowed only with family members, only in English, and only at the rate of one three-page letter a week, addressed to a single recipient. Taken together, these restrictions meant that only Bella and Ailina could visit Jahar and that he could speak on the phone only to them and to Zubeidat.

The restrictions were imposed by order of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who wrote: “I find that there is a substantial risk that his communications or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons.” Holder’s memo gave two examples of the inmate’s harmful contacts with the outside world: first, Jahar had asked Azamat, Dias, and Robel to hide evidence; second, Zubeidat had released portions of a May 24, 2013, phone call with him—the first time he had been able to speak on the phone after recovering from injuries to his vocal cords—“in an apparent attempt to engender sympathy for Tsarnaev.” The memo added: “Tsarnaev has also gained widespread notoriety while incarcerated, as evidenced by his receipt of nearly one thousand pieces of unsolicited mail.” By the time this document appeared, the government had collected all its evidence in the case against Dias, Azamat, and Robel, and it did not actually allege that Jahar had asked his friends to hide evidence. As for the portions of conversation publicized by Zubeidat, in which her son assured her that he was well, these “have little bearing on whether Tsarnaev will attempt to spread concrete actionable messages,” argued the ACLU of Massachusetts in an amicus brief in support of the defense’s attempt to have SAMs lifted. The court refused to lift SAMs—and even to allow the ACLU to file the brief.

AFTER THE INITIAL FLOOD of public attention—the news stories; then a Rolling Stone cover that drew fire because to some, the picture of Jahar, with tousled hair and the hint of a beard, made him look like a rock star, though the story itself could hardly be described as sympathetic or even sensitive; then the massive Boston Globe investigation—there was about a year of near silence. At least in part this was attributable to SAMs, which effectively restricted not only Jahar’s but also the family’s and the legal team’s ability to communicate publicly.

After his arrest, Jahar appeared in public once, at his arraignment on July 10, 2013. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, and he had what appeared to be a scab on his face—too fresh to stem from the wounds sustained almost three months earlier. He seemed to smirk. Or, some people thought, he might have been grimacing as a result of nerve damage caused by gunshot wounds.

The seventy-four-page indictment listed thirty counts, including “use of a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death,” “bombing of a place of public use resulting in death,” “malicious destruction of property resulting in personal injury and death,” and a number of conspiracy and possession-and-use-of-a-firearm charges. Seventeen of the counts carried the potential maximum sentence of death.

It was a mob scene outside the courtroom that day. Only twenty journalists were allowed inside, followed by thirty-five victims and their companions, some wearing leg braces, some using crutches, many holding hands and looking scared. Twenty members of the public entered next, most of them Jahar groupies and conspiracy theorists. When an additional five journalists were allowed in, the rest of the press attempted to rush the courtroom. “Whoa, whoa!” somebody shouted. “Someone’s going to get hurt!” Bella and Ailina, one of them carrying a baby, took seats at the front of the courtroom. A nurse in a white coat sat in the back. The courtroom became very, very quiet.

When Jahar was led in, one of the sisters began to cry loudly. Jahar’s lawyers, on his behalf, waived the reading of the indictment, and the prosecutor listed the charges briefly, grouped by the maximum penalty each carried: death, life imprisonment, twenty-five years, twenty years, and less. The defendant repeated the words “Not guilty” seven times. Inexplicably, he spoke with a heavy Russian accent. In twenty minutes, the hearing was over, and Bella and Ailina cried audibly as their brother was led out of the courtroom.

Jahar had a sterling legal team: Miriam Conrad, the public defender for the district that includes Massachusetts; several people from her office, one of whom spoke Russian; Judy Clarke, a famous lawyer for hopeless cases who had succeeded in helping Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) and several others avoid the death penalty; and David Bruck, another death penalty heavy hitter. Before the arraignment, Clarke and William Fick, the Russian-speaking public defender, had traveled to Dagestan to meet with Anzor and Zubeidat for the first time. It did not go well. The lawyers could not promise that they could prevent a sentence of death, and this not only scared and disappointed the parents but also made them deeply suspicious. It did not help that the lawyers were being paid out of public funds—as the parents perceived it, by the very same government that was seeking to have Dzhokhar executed.

Kheda Saratova, a Chechen human rights activist who had been trying to help the Tsarnaevs in the weeks after the bombing and who was present during conversations with the lawyers, fumed to me a few days later: “If it happens, with this capital punishment, the parents will die for sure. And the U.S. will get so many new enemies that that terrorist attack will certainly not be the last one. There will be people who will want to avenge Dzhokhar.” This was not usual human-rights-activist talk, but this human rights activist, most of whose international contacts were in Europe, was having trouble wrapping her mind around the idea of a civilized country that still used the death penalty. Even in Russia no one had been executed by the state in two decades. And America wanted to execute this kid?

AT JAHAR’S AGE, a year and a half is a long time. When he next appeared in public, in December 2014, he no longer looked like a gawky adolescent. His beard had come in dark and curly, if spotty. No trace of injury was visible, at least from a distance of a few yards. His mane of hair was disheveled. He was dressed for trial: a white shirt, a black pullover, gray slacks. He no longer spoke with a Russian accent as he affirmed to the judge that he was satisfied with his defense team.

Over the next couple of months he would not say anything else that was audible to the public. His look would gradually be tamed: he got a haircut, and the beard got a series of progressively closer trims. He would be brought to Boston’s waterfront federal courthouse amid heavy security every day—traffic closed off for blocks, Coast Guard boats in the water—and sit at a large table, flanked by Miriam Conrad and a jury consultant, as the court interviewed 256 people in what at times appeared like a vain search for eighteen people who could constitute an impartial jury.

The process, originally planned for three weeks, lasted two months, albeit with many snow-related delays. Most of the potential jurors were middle-aged, almost all of them were white, and none of them could be seen as Jahar’s peers. Very, very few of them seemed, on the face of it, suited to serve on this jury. On a detailed written questionnaire filled out before their interviews, sixty-eight percent had said they believed the defendant was guilty. Pressed by the judge to promise that they could set aside this presumption and listen to the evidence, most issued the promise easily, a few balked, and one, a psychologist, said, “I don’t know that the brain works that way.”

Some difficulties were inherent in seating a jury in a death penalty case: If it convicted the defendant, the same jury would have to reconvene to determine the penalty. People who are fundamentally opposed to capital punishment are disqualified from serving on death penalty juries, as are people who believe that all intentional murder should be punished by death. But finding people who have no strong views on the death penalty is a difficult proposition, and indeed, when the rare juror claimed that he or she had never given the issue much thought, it might have made one wonder how thoughtful this person was really capable of being. Members of the defense team also occasionally wondered whether potential jurors had been coached on answers that would make them likely to be selected—in order to write an eventual book, or to ensure that Jahar got the death penalty. For its part, all the defense needed was one juror who in the end would vote for life imprisonment: the defendant could be sentenced to death only if the decision was unanimous.

And so the process dragged on and on, some days yielding not a single suitable candidate. Jahar looked bored, even absent, most of the time: he leaned back in his chair and doodled on his legal pad. Only once did I see him actually look at a potential juror’s file: this was a young Mexican-born political science professor who studied immigrants and immigration; his opposition to the death penalty disqualified him.

As the weeks wore on and the snow piled up, the number of reporters in the press room dwindled. The room reserved for members of the public who wanted to watch jury selection through a video uplink was often deserted. One day, a young Latino man with a close-cropped beard and equally short hair on his head was the only person there. His name was Luis Vasquez.

Luis’s wife had woken him on the Friday morning after the bombing. She shook him, that is, until he was awake. Then she tried to say something, but words refused to form. She pointed at the television and said, “Look at the names.” There were the same pictures the couple had seen on the screen the evening before, but now the suspects were identified. Luis had not recognized Tamerlan earlier because, frankly, the guy on television did not look like Tamerlan. “The Tamerlan I knew never wore a hat—his hair was far too good for that. He never wore sunglasses: girls loved his eyes. He was never clean-shaven, he always had a five-o’clock shadow going unless he had to shave for boxing. He was never stooped. The Tamerlan I knew was tall, he stood proud, he was a beautiful man.” The man in the photos looked ordinary, even dumpy; Tamerlan and Luis had always been the opposite of that.

They had become friends at Rindge and Latin because they both shadowed a tight-knit group of ESL girls: Tamerlan was keeping watch over Bella, and Luis was trailing his girlfriend, Bella’s best friend, who was Venezuelan. Now this girl, who had become Luis’s wife, was pointing at the television set while Luis “felt like I was floating, like I was pulled out of my own body.”

Then CNN called, and Luis became a star of its Boston bombing show. He did not know much—he realized how little Tamerlan had disclosed whenever they had run into each other in the years after graduating from high school—but compared with people who had been talking into microphones before him, Luis was an expert. He debunked the theory that the brothers “had been brought up to be terrorists,” as he had already heard it put on the air. He stressed that they had been living in Cambridge for a decade. He mentioned that he had often seen Tamerlan in the library studying.

After high school their paths had been fairly similar. Both got married. Both became fathers: Luis’s first son was born when he was nineteen. Luis had dropped out of the University of Massachusetts Boston as well as Bunker Hill. Both of them had been staring at hard and hopeless lives as working-class young fathers in an overpriced American city where they had been led to believe they could lead lives of meaning. About a month before the bombing, Luis had announced his candidacy for the Cambridge city council, the longest shot on a long list. And now he was on national television. He looked great. Strangers on Twitter began tagging CNN with calls for the network to hire him as an on-air personality. When it was all over, Luis applied to the competitive journalism department at Emerson College, and, with an over-the-top recommendation from CNN, he was admitted (he still lost his city council race). The college was not far from the courthouse, so Luis discovered the peculiar pleasure of spending some of his afternoons watching the interminable process of jury selection.

The week I met with Luis, a federal appeals court had heard the defense argue—as it had repeatedly in written motions—that the trial should be moved from Boston. Between the saturation publicity and what she called “the six degrees of connection,” argued Judith Mizner, the public defender’s appellate chief, justice in Massachusetts could not have the necessary “appearance of justice.”

It was not a large state, and the Boston Marathon was a very large event in it: one after another, potential jurors had said that they knew someone on the witness list or someone who had been at the finish line or a first responder, or they worked for a company that sponsored the marathon or a hospital that treated some of the victims. As if to underscore the effects of saturation publicity, one of the judges had asked a prosecutor about “the video of the defendant placing a backpack at the site of the explosion.” This was a video that, if it existed, had never been shown to the public—a fact the prosecutor failed to point out. The following day, one of the prospective jurors also made reference to having seen this purported video.

To my surprise, Luis, who seemed to have perfected the political art of speaking with detachment about anything, waxed passionate against moving the trial. “It’s an attempt to strip us of our dignity all over again,” he said. “If someone has the audacity to hurt our community, they should have the cojones to face us back and to explain.” Did he really think he would get an explanation from Jahar, who was not likely even to testify at his own trial? Luis admitted that he did not. After a few minutes, we circled back to April 2013. The afternoon of the marathon, Luis had been planning to go to the finish line with his family. He had not much wanted to, so they had been slow leaving the apartment. Luis had stepped back in to turn off the television—and on it, had seen the explosions.

I expected him to say that if he had been less reluctant to attend the marathon, he or any other member of his family might have died. But instead he said, “If I’d made it to the finish line, he would have seen me with my family. Would he have stopped? I just keep thinking of that small tiny chance that the whole thing could have been prevented just by being there.”

On Friday evening, four days after the bombing, Luis was standing at CNN’s temporary set in Boston’s Copley Square talking with Anderson Cooper. He heard a producer say that the younger brother had just been captured, and he thought, “They are going to drop me now.” Then he heard Anderson Cooper say that Jahar was in custody—and Luis was still there, at the very center of things, on the news. The crowd around them began chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” What Luis really wanted to say was, “We got him, I’m going to Disney World”—he felt that much the winner at the moment. He might have failed, four days earlier, to prevent a tragedy by his mere presence, but now, by his mere presence, he had become intimately involved with bringing evil to justice. He did not give voice to any of that, but instead, with suitable grandeur, he did what Anderson Cooper had not done: he made a sweeping motion to include the chanting crowd in the shot.

This might have been what he had anticipated that morning, when he felt himself floating, like he had been pulled out of his body: his own moment of glory. And this was not only his moment of glory but, in the fervor of all those chanting people, the glory of his time, his place, his country, the vastness of all that it stood for, against the vastness of all that threatened it. “The one thing I hold dear and I cherish,” Luis told me on a frozen afternoon in Boston nearly two years later, “is the chants ‘U-S-A!’ flooding the airwaves—and I forever got to be a part of that moment.” No wonder he did not want to let it go.