‘How It Really Happened with Hill Harper’ Season 5: Where is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev now and will he ever be freed?
A sweet boy or a vicious killer — who really is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings? On April 15, 2013, the day started as usual but was soon catapulted into a horrific event as two pressure cookers packed with explosives went off near the finish line during the iconic Boston Marathon at 2.49 pm. With three killed and hundreds injured, officers were under huge pressure to find out who was responsible for the attacks. Federal and local investigators jumped into action and released the clips of two suspects dubbed as “White Hat” and “Black Hat”.
After a 48-hour car chase and shootout, police nabbed the two identified as Chechen Kyrgyzstani-American brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. While Tamerlan was killed after succumbing to the injuries of the shooting, Dzhokhar was later arrested and tried in court for his crimes.
“Dzhokhar is a sweet boy, innocent. He was always smiling, friendly and happy,” Zaur Tsarnaev painted a different picture of the Boston Marathon bomber in an old phone interview from Makha chkala, Russia with Boston Globe years ago. Revealing that Dzhokhar went to the mosque sometimes but he was “never an extremist,” he added, “I don’t know how he is involved in this.”
“I used to warn Dzhokhar that Tamerlan was up to no good,” Zaur continued. “[Tamerlan] was always getting in trouble. He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used to strike his girlfriend... He was not a nice man.” It's been seven years since the devastating incident changed hundreds of innocent lives and the one question echoing through minds is: Who really is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and where is he now?
Who is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?
Born Dzhokhar Anzorovich Tsarnaev on July 22, 1993, he was raised in a family forcibly moved from the war-torn former Soviet fiefdom of Chechnya to the Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan in the years following World War II. With half-Chechen and half-Avar descent, Dzhokhar faced difficult initial years with his talented mechanic father Anzor Tsarnaev and mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva. He grew up with his brother Tamerlan and sisters, Bella and Ailina.
After living in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan and Makhachkala, Dagestan, the family traveled to the United States on a 90-day tourist visa in 2002 when Dzhokhar was eight years old. Eventually, they claimed asylum and Dzhokhar became a naturalized citizen on September 11, 2012. He first studied at Cambridgeport Elementary School and Cambridge Community Charter School's middle school program and soon went on to become an amateur wrestler and a Greater Boston League winter all-star at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.
At the time of the bombings, Tsarnaev was a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. A Boston Globe profile of Dzhokhar at that time dubbed him as a “gifted student who earned good grades in high school but liked to smoke marijuana with friends”. What's more, the report also said that he volunteered with the Best Buddies program, for specially-abled people. Known as “an angel” by his uncle and a party-loving “pothead” by some friends, he was reported to like hip hop and did not talk to them about politics.
His older brother Tamerlan's coach John Curran called Dzhokhar introverted as compared to his seven years apart outgoing brother, as per an NBC Bay Area report. “He was like a puppy dog following his older brother,” he said.
At the end of 2011, Dzhokhar contacted Brian Glyn Williams, a history professor at UMass Dartmouth who teaches a course on the history of Chechnya, expressing an interest in learning more about Chechen history. “He wanted to rediscover his roots and his identity,” said Williams. Online, however, Dzhokhar didn't have extremist views and seemed to have been “much more concerned with sport and cheeseburgers” than with religion. However, Boston Globe reports he mentioned a Quran verse often used by radical Muslim clerics and propagandists on the day of the Boston bombings.
Carjacking, murders and shootout
The two brothers murdered MIT police officer Sean Collier on April 18, 2013 at the MIT campus, stole his gun and then carjacked an SUV. Dun Meng, also known as "Danny" was the owner of the car who ran away and alerted officials that the Boston bombers were driving his car. Soon after, cops located the stolen SUV and a Honda being driven by the brothers in the wee hours of April 19.
A violent shootout with police in Watertown took place in one of the neighborhoods which led to Tamerlan being shot multiple times and Dzhokhar eventually ran over him with the SUV in an attempt to flee from the scene. Several police officers, FBI and SWAT teams got together for a manhunt and he was discovered wounded in David Henneberry's boat situated in a Watertown backyard, less than 400m from where he abandoned the SUV.
Multiple media outlets broadcasted the telecast as he stepped out of the boat with injuries on his left ear, neck and thigh. That night, he was taken into federal custody. After being treated at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, he was transported by US Marshals to the Federal Medical Center, Devens on April 26, 2020 and held in solitary confinement in a segregated housing unit with a 23-hour-per-day lockdown.
A long legal battle and the verdict
The trial began on January 5, 2015, where Dzhokhar pleaded not guilty to all 30 charges laid against him. His attorney Judy Clarke presented the case to Judge George O'Toole arguing that his brother Tamerlan was the mastermind behind the acts. However, after almost four months, the verdict was declared on April 8, 2015, as he was found guilty on all thirty counts of the indictment, especially with charges of usage of a weapon of mass destruction.
On June 24, 2015, Dzhokhar faced his victims in court. After being silent throughout his month-long trial, he apologized to the injured and the bereaved in the bombings. Later, he was transferred to the United States Penitentiary, Florence High in Colorado and on July 17, 2015, he was transferred to ADX Florence. A Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) spokesperson stated that "unique security management requirements" caused the agency to place Tsarnaev in Colorado instead of United States Penitentiary, Terre Haute, Indiana.
On December 12, 2019, he appealed his sentence on the grounds that the trial should not have been held in Boston and that there were errors in jury selection. Moreover, he also said that he acted under influence and was possibly fearful of what would happen to him if he refused. A three-judge panel of the First Circuit heard the plea and overturned the death sentence on July 31, 2020, with an order for a retrial with a new jury for the penalty phase of his trial.
However, he remained in prison from the multiple life sentences placed by the other uncontested convictions. Clarifying their stance, US Circuit Judge O Rogeriee Thompson, who wrote the opinion clarified the ruling of the court said, "Make no mistake: Dzhokhar will spend his remaining days locked up in prison, with the only matter remaining being whether he will die by execution."
Tune into the two episodes of ‘How It Really Happened with Hill Harper’ — titled 'Boston Marathon, Part 1, Reconstructing the Crime Scene' and 'Boston Marathon, Part 2, The Manhunt' — as it airs on HLN from 9 pm to 11 pm ET.