Bomb Suspect Is Charged and Could Face the Death Penalty
Published: April 22, 2013 242 Comments
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The affidavit said that investigators later found clothing in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s dorm room at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth that matched the clothing of the bombing suspect captured on video at the marathon.
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F.B.I. interrogators had been communicating with Mr. Tsarnaev, who is in the hospital with what investigators believe is a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the neck, according to a law enforcement official. What Mr. Tsarnaev has said — it was unclear if he was able to speak, or had been communicating with the investigators in writing — has led investigators to believe that there are no other conspirators at large or unexploded devices that have not been recovered, the official said.
American officials have also been pressing the Russian government for more details about a Russian request to the F.B.I. in 2011 about whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev had any links to extremist groups. The official described the Russians as “cooperative.”
The White House said earlier Monday that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would not be tried as an enemy combatant. “We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.
Mr. Carney noted that it was illegal to try an American citizen in a military commission, and that a number of high-profile terrorism cases were handled in the civilian court system, including that of the would-be bomber who tried to bring down a passenger jet around Christmas 2009with explosives in his underwear.
Mr. Carney said the government had gotten “valuable intelligence” from suspects kept in the civilian judicial process. “The system has repeatedly proven it can handle” such cases, he said.
The charges were announced soon after hundreds of mourners attended a funeral at St. Joseph Church in Medford for Krystle Campbell, the 29-year-old restaurant manager killed near the finish line of the marathon, a race she tried to see every year.
Julie Dziamba, 21, who had worked at a restaurant called the Summer Shack where Ms. Campbell had been a manager, traveled from New London, N.H., to pay her respects. “She always had a smile on her face,” Ms. Dziamba said, “even if she was mad at us for not cleaning up or getting things done on time.”
A statewide moment of silence was observed at 2:50 p.m., exactly a week after the deadly explosions brought a bloody end to the 117th running of the Boston Marathon. And a memorial was scheduled for Monday night at Boston University, where students, faculty and staff members were set to gather in honor of Lu Lingzi, 23, a Chinese graduate student who was killed in the bombing.
A memorial for Sean A. Collier, 26, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology patrol officer who law enforcement officials believe was shot dead in his patrol car Thursday night by the Tsarnaev brothers, was being planned for Wednesday, a university official said. The federal affidavit unsealed on Monday made no mention of the shooting of Officer Collier.
More details of the radicalization of the older suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, emerged Monday, as the Islamic Society of Boston’s Cambridge mosque said in a statementthat he had interrupted sermons there twice because he apparently “disagreed with the moderate American-Islamic theology” of the mosque.
After a preacher said on Nov. 16 at a weekly congregational prayer that it was appropriate to celebrate national holidays like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, the society said, the older suspect stood up and challenged the preacher, arguing that celebration of any holiday was not allowed in the faith, arguing the point further with the preacher after the sermon ended.
Then, on Jan. 18, when one of the preachers spoke about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the society said, “the older suspect stood up, shouted and called him a ‘non-believer’; said that he was ‘contaminating people’s mind’; and began calling him a hypocrite.” The statement said that people shouted that the suspect should “Leave now!”
After that, the society said, a few leaders of the mosque sat down with Mr. Tsarnaev and told him that if he continued to interrupt sermons, he would no longer be welcome. “While he continued to attend some of the congregational prayers after the January incident, he neither interrupted another sermon nor did he cause any other disturbances,” the society said.
The suspects were not members or regular attendees, the society said. The older suspect began going intermittently to Friday Prayer over a year ago, and occasionally to daily prayers, while the younger suspect was rarely seen at the center, coming only occasionally for prayer.
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