Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Dzhokhar Anzorovich "Jahar" Tsarnaev (Cyrillic: Джоха́р Анзо́рович Царна́ев /ˌdʒoʊˈxɑr ˌtsɑrˈnaɪ.ɛf/; born July 22, 1993)[note 1] and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev were convicted of planting bombs at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. The bombings killed three people and reportedly injured as many 264 others. At the time of the bombings, Tsarnaev was a student at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Following the bombings, on April 18, there was a shootout between police and the Tsarnaev brothers. An MBTA police officer was critically injured in the course of Tsarnaev's escape in an SUV. Tsarnaev was injured but escaped, and a large manhunt ensued, with thousands of police searching a 20-block area of Watertown, Massachusetts. On the evening of April 19, the heavily wounded Tsarnaev was found unarmed hiding in a boat on a trailer in Watertown just outside the police perimeter, arrested, and taken to a hospital. It was later reported that he was persuaded to surrender when the FBI negotiators mentioned a public plea from his former wrestling coach.

While still confined to a hospital bed, Tsarnaev was charged on April 22 with using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death and with malicious destruction of property resulting in death. Tsarnaev allegedly later said during questioning that they next intended to detonate explosives in Times Square in New York City. Tsarnaev reportedly also said to authorities that he and his brother were radicalized, at least in part, by watching Anwar al-Awlaki lectures. He was convicted on April 8, 2015, and was sentenced to death on May 15, 2015.

Tsarnaev's defense team consisted of by Miriam Conrad, David Bruck, William Fick, Timothy G. Watkins, and Judy Clarke.

He and his family had immigrated to the United States as refugees in 2002 and he became a naturalized U.S. citizen on September 11, 2012.

Family background

The Tsarnaevs were forcibly moved from Chechnya to the Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan in the years following World War II. Anzor Tsarnaev is a Chechen, and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva is an Avar. The couple had two sons, Tamerlan, born in the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1986, and Dzhokhar, born in Kyrgyzstan in 1993. The parents also have two daughters. Anzor is a traditional Muslim who reportedly shuns religious extremism[31] and raised his children as Muslims. According to some, other Chechen Americans in the area apparently did not consider the American branch of the family to be "fully" Chechen because they had never lived in Chechnya.

As children, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar lived in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan. In 2001, the family moved to Makhachkala, Dagestan, in the Russian Federation. In April 2002, the Tsarnaev parents and Dzhokhar went to the United States on a 90-day tourist visa. Anzor Tsarnaev applied for asylum, citing fears of deadly persecution due to his ties to Chechnya.

Tamerlan was left in the care of his uncle Ruslan in Kyrgyzstan, and arrived in the U.S. around two years later. In the U.S. the parents received asylum and then filed for their four children, who received "derivative asylum status". They settled on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tamerlan lived in Cambridge on Norfolk Street until his death.

The family "was in constant transition" for the next decade. Anzor and Zubeidat Tsarnaev both received welfare benefits. The father worked as a backyard mechanic and the mother worked as a cosmetologist until she lost her job for refusing to work in a business that served men. In March 2007, the family was granted legal permanent residence.

Early life

Tsarnaev was born in Kyrgyzstan. As a child, he emigrated with his family to Russia and then, when he was eight years old, to the United States under political asylum. The family settled in Cambridge and became U.S. permanent residents in March 2007. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen on September 11, 2012, while in college. His mother, Zubeidat, also became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but it is not clear if his father, Anzor, ever did. Tamerlan, his brother, was unable to naturalize expeditiously due to an investigation against him, which held up the citizenship process. At Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, a public high school, he was an avid wrestler, captain of his high-school wrestling team, and a Greater Boston League winter all-star. He sometimes worked as a lifeguard at Harvard University.

In 2011, he contacted a professor at UMass Dartmouth who taught a class about Chechen history, expressing his interest in the topic. He graduated from high school in 2011 and the city of Cambridge awarded him a $2,500 scholarship that year. His brother's boxing coach, who had not seen them in a few years at the time of the bombings, said that "the young brother was like a puppy dog, following his older brother".

Education

Tsarnaev enrolled in the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, with a major in marine biology, in September 2011. He said that he hoped to become a dentist.

Tsarnaev was described as "normal" and popular among fellow students. His friends said he sometimes used marijuana, liked hip hop, and did not talk to them about politics. He volunteered in the Best Buddies program. Many friends and other acquaintances found it inconceivable that he could be one of the two bombers at first, calling it "completely out of his character". He was not perceived as foreign, spoke English well, easily fit in socially, and was described by peers as "[not] 'them'. He was 'us.' He was Cambridge".

On the Russian-language social-networking site VK, Tsarnaev described his "world view" as "Islam" and his personal priorities as "career and money." He posted links to Islamic websites, links to videos of fighters in the Syrian civil war, and links to pages advocating independence for Chechnya. Dzhokhar was also active on Twitter. According to The Economist, he seemed "to have been much more concerned with sport and cheeseburgers than with religion, at least judging by his Twitter feed"; however, according to The Boston Globe, on the day of the 2012 Boston Marathon, a year before the bombings, a post on Tsarnaev's Twitter feed mentioned a Quran verse often used by radical Muslim clerics and propagandists.

In 2012, Arlington Police ran a warrant check on Tsarnaev and checked his green Honda when they were investigating a report of underage drinking at a party in Arlington Heights.

At the time of the bombing, Tsarnaev was a sophomore living in the UMass Dartmouth's Pine Dale Hall dorm. He was struggling academically, having received seven failing grades over three semesters, including Fs in Principles of Modern Chemistry, Introduction to American Politics, and Chemistry and the Environment and had an unpaid bill of $20,000 to the University. He was known to be selling marijuana to make money.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Tsarnaev