Jahar's World
He was a charming kid with a bright future. But no one saw the pain he
was hiding or the monster he would become.
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The Making of a
Monster&body=http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/jahars-world-20130717http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/jahars-world-20130717?print=true
July 17,
2013 11:00 AM ET
Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Illustration
by Sean McCabe
Our
hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, and our thoughts
are always with them and their families. The cover story we are publishing this
week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling
Stone’s long-standing commitment to
serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural
issues of our day. The fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is young, and in the same
age group as many of our readers, makes it all the more important for us to
examine the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding
of how a tragedy like this happens. –THE EDITORS
Peter
Payack awoke around 4 a.m. on April 19th, 2013, and saw on his TV the grainy
surveillance photo of the kid walking out of the minimart. The boy, identified
as "Suspect #2" in the Boston bombing, looked familiar, thought
Payack, a wrestling coach at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. On the
other hand, there were a million skinny kids with vaguely ethnic features and
light-gray hoodies in the Boston area, and half the city was probably thinking
they recognized the suspect. Payack, who'd been near the marathon finish line
on the day of the bombing and had lost half of his hearing from the blast, had
hardly slept in four days. But he was too agitated to go back to bed. Later
that morning, he received a telephone call from his son. The kid in the photo?
"Dad, that's Jahar."
"I felt like a bullet went through
my heart," the coach recalls. "To think that a kid we mentored and
loved like a son could have been responsible for all this death. It was beyond
shocking. It was like an alternative reality."
People in Cambridge thought of
19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – "Jahar" to his friends – as a
beautiful, tousle-haired boy with a gentle demeanor, soulful brown eyes and the
kind of shy, laid-back manner that "made him that dude you could always
just vibe with," one friend says. He had been a captain of the Cambridge
Rindge and Latin wrestling team for two years and a promising student. He was
also "just a normal American kid," as his friends described him, who
liked soccer, hip-hop, girls; obsessed over The
Walking Dead and Game of Thrones;
and smoked a copious amount of weed.
Payack stared at his TV, trying to
reconcile Dzhokhar, the bomber accused of unspeakable acts of terrorism, with
the teenage boy who had his American nickname "Jahar" inscribed on
his wrestling jacket. He'd worn it all the time.
That afternoon, Payack spoke with CNN,
where he issued a direct appeal. "Jahar," he said, "this is
Coach Payack. There has been enough death, destruction. Please turn yourself
in."
At that precise moment, just west of
Cambridge, in suburban Watertown, Jahar Tsarnaev lay bleeding on the floor of a
22-foot motorboat dry-docked behind a white clapboard house. He'd been wounded
just after midnight in a violent confrontation with police that had killed his
26-year-old brother, Tamerlan. For the next 18 hours, he would lie quietly in
the boat, as the dawn broke on a gray day and thousands of law-enforcement
officials scoured a 20-block area in search of him. He was found just after 6
p.m., though it would take nearly three more hours for FBI negotiators to
persuade him to surrender.
The following morning, Payack received
a text from one of the agents with the FBI's Crisis Negotiating Unit. He'd
heard Payack's televised appeal, told him he'd invoked the coach's name while
speaking with Jahar. "I think it helped," the agent said. Payack was
relieved. "Maybe by telling Jahar that I was thinking about him, it gave
him pause," Payack says. "Maybe he'd seen himself going out as a
martyr for the cause. But all of a sudden, here's somebody from his past, a
past that he liked, that he fit in with, and it hit a soft spot."
When investigators finally gained
access to the boat, they discovered a jihadist screed scrawled on its walls. In
it, according to a 30-count indictment handed down in late June, Jahar
appeared to take responsibility for the bombing, though he admitted he did not
like killing innocent people. But "the U.S. government is killing our
innocent civilians," he wrote, presumably referring to Muslims in Iraq and
Afghanistan. "I can't stand to see such evil go unpunished. . . . We
Muslims are one body, you hurt one, you hurt us all," he continued,
echoing a sentiment that is cited so frequently by Islamic militants that it
has become almost cliché. Then he veered slightly from the standard script,
writing a statement that left no doubt as to his loyalties: "Fuck
America."
In
the 12 years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
there have been more than 25 plots to strike the United States hatched by
Americans, most of which were ill-conceived or helped along by undercover
operatives who, in many cases, provided their targets with weapons or other
materials. A few – including the plots to blow up the New York subway system
and Times Square – were legitimate and would have been catastrophic had they
come to fruition. Yet none did until that hazy afternoon of April 15th, 2013,
when two pressure-cooker bombs exploded near the marathon finish line on
Boylston Street, killing three people, including an eight-year-old boy. Close
to 300 more were injured by flying shrapnel, with many losing a leg, or an arm,
or an eye; a scene of unbelievable carnage that conjured up images of Baghdad,
Kabul or Tel Aviv.
An uneasy panic settled over Boston
when it was revealed that the Tsarnaev brothers were not, as many assumed,
connected to a terrorist group, but young men seemingly affiliated with no one
but themselves. Russian émigrés, they had lived in America for a decade – and
in Cambridge, a city so progressive it had its own "peace commission"
to promote social justice and diversity. Tamerlan, known to his American
friends as "Tim," was a talented boxer who'd once aspired to represent
the United States in the Olympics. His little brother, Jahar, had earned a
scholarship to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and was thinking about
becoming an engineer, or a nurse, or maybe a dentist – his focus changed all
the time. They were Muslim, yes, but they were also American – especially Jahar, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen
on September 11th, 2012.
Since the bombing, friends and
acquaintances of the Tsarnaevs, as well as the FBI and other law-enforcement
officials, have tried to piece together a narrative of the brothers, most of
which has focused on Tamerlan, whom we now know was on multiple U.S. and
Russian watch lists prior to 2013, though neither the FBI nor the CIA could
find a reason to investigate him further. Jahar, however, was on no one's watch
list. To the contrary, after several months of interviews with friends,
teachers and coaches still reeling from the shock, what emerges is a portrait
of a boy who glided through life, showing virtually no signs of anger, let alone
radical political ideology or any kind of deeply felt religious beliefs.
At his arraignment at a federal
courthouse in Boston on July 10th, Jahar smiled, yawned, slouched in his chair
and generally seemed not to fully grasp the seriousness of the situation, while
pleading innocent to all charges. At times he seemed almost to smirk – which
wasn't a "smirk," those who know him say. "He just seemed like
the old Jahar, thinking, 'What the fuck's going on here?'" says Payack,
who was at the courthouse that day.
It had been the coach who'd helped
Jahar come up with his nickname, replacing the nearly impossible-to-decipher Dzhokhar with a simpler and
cooler-sounding rendering. "If he had a hint of radical thoughts, then why
would he change the spelling of his name so that more Americans in school could
pronounce it?" asks one longtime friend, echoing many others. "I
can't feel that my friend, the Jahar I knew, is a terrorist," adds
another. "That Jahar isn't, to me."
"Listen," says Payack,
"there are kids we don't catch who just fall through the cracks, but this
guy was seamless, like a billiard ball. No cracks at all." And yet a
deeply fractured boy lay under that facade; a witness to all of his family's
attempts at a better life as well as to their deep bitterness when those
efforts failed and their dreams proved unattainable. As each small
disappointment wore on his family, ultimately ripping them apart, it also
furthered Jahar's own disintegration – a series of quiet yet powerful body
punches. No one saw a thing. "I knew this kid, and he was a good
kid," Payack says, sadly. "And, apparently, he's also a
monster."
Though
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was raised largely in America, his roots are in the restive
North Caucasus, a region that has known centuries of political turmoil. Born on
July 22nd, 1993, he spent the first seven years of his life in the mountainous
Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, where his father, Anzor, had grown up in
exile. Anzor is from Chechnya, the most vilified of the former Soviet
republics, whose people have been waging a near-continuous war since the 18th
century against Russian rule. Dzhokhar's mother, Zubeidat, is an Avar, the
predominantly Muslim ethnic group of Chechnya's eastern neighbor, Dagestan,
which has been fighting its own struggle for independence against the Russians
since the late 1700s. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Chechen nationalists
declared their independence, which resulted in two brutal wars where the
Russian army slaughtered tens of thousands of Chechens and leveled its capital
city, Grozny. By 1999, the violence had spread throughout the region, including
Dagestan.
Though Islam is the dominant religion
of the North Caucasus, religion played virtually no role in the life of Anzor
Tsarnaev, a tough, wiry man who'd grown up during Soviet times, when religious
worship in Kyrgyzstan was mostly underground. In Dagestan, where Islam had
somewhat stronger footing, many women wear hijabs; Zubeidat, though, wore her
dark hair like Pat Benatar. The couple met while Anzor was studying law and
were married on October 20th, 1986. The next day, their first child, Tamerlan,
was born. Three more children would follow, all of them born in Kyrgyzstan,
where Anzor secured a job as an investigator in the prosecutor's office in the
nation's capital, Bishkek.
It was a prestigious position,
especially for a Chechen, but Anzor had larger ambitions. He hoped to take his
family to America, where his brother, Ruslan, an attorney, was building an
upper-middle-class life. After Russia invaded Chechnya in 1999, setting off the
second of the decade's bloody wars, Anzor was fired from his job as part of a
large-scale purge of Chechens from the ranks of the Kyrgyz government. The
Tsarnaevs then fled to Zubeidat's native Dagestan, but war followed close
behind. In the spring of 2002, Anzor, Zubeidat and Jahar, then eight, arrived
in America on a tourist visa and quickly applied for political asylum. The
three older children, Ailina, Bella and Tamerlan, stayed behind with relatives.
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