The Brothers (13 page)

It was nearly four in the afternoon when Jahar became available to give Azamat a ride to Carriage Drive. He, Azamat, and Robel spent less than ten minutes in the car on the way to the apartment, and then Robel returned to campus with Jahar. That would make Robel the last person to have seen Jahar before his picture was broadcast to the world—the boys parted ways in Pine Dale Hall less than an hour before the FBI press conference. Before leaving his dorm room, Jahar retweeted a post by a Zimbabwean mufti: “Attitude can take away your beauty no matter how good looking you are or it could enhance your beauty, making you adorable.”

Andrew Dwinells, had he gone to the police, would not have been able to tell them much. His roommate had seemed the same as he’d ever been. He slept when Andrew left for class, and was out when Andrew returned.

And even if all the students who had seen Jahar in the days following the bombing had gone to the authorities with their stories, the FBI would have learned only Jahar’s name. Jahar’s observed behavior contained no clues to what he and Tamerlan were planning to do and where they were planning to hide once their faces were known—because the brothers had no plan. While Boston was reeling from the marathon bombing, nothing extraordinary had happened to the bombers themselves.

•   •   •

AFTER JAHAR
dropped him off at Carriage Drive, Azamat took a nap. About an hour and a half later, Dias and Bayan walked in. Now Azamat took the car: he went to the gym, and Dias stayed at the apartment, where, prompted by a text message, he eventually turned on the television and saw the picture of his best friend wearing a white baseball cap with the visor turned back. The first person Dias texted was Jahar:

YO BRO

WASUP

PICK ME UP PLEASE

SORRY MAN I’M IN BOSTON

WHERE R YU?

IN MY CRIB-

I AM TRYAN TO GO TO UMASS

PLEASE

YO BRO

Dias’s mind had not just split into two tracks: it had all but imploded. He wanted to go to campus to find out if Jahar, his best friend, was the Boston Marathon bomber—and he wanted Jahar, his buddy with the car, who was texting him right back, as usual, to drive him there. It took him a minute to grasp that Jahar was out of reach. At 8:43 in the evening he texted Jahar again.

U SAW THE NEWS?

YEA BRO I DID

FOR REAL

I SAW THE NEWS . . .

BETTER NOT TEXT ME MY FRIEND

LOL

U SAW URSELF THERE?

AHAHA

HAHAHA

IFYU WANT YU CAN GO TO MY
ROOM AND TAKE WHAT’S THERE:)
BUT IGHT BRO SALAM ALEKUM

WHAT’S WRONG WITH YU?

HAHA;)

CAN’T RIGHT NOW MAN

Dias began frantically texting Azamat, who had finished his workout and gone shopping at Target. In the space of ten minutes Dias sent ten messages, all of them imploring Azamat to pick him up at once. “Azkro,” they began. “What yu doing,” “Will yu pick me up?” “Please,” “Azik!” and so on. Azamat dropped his shopping and rushed home. Dias was waiting for him at the sliding door—this would have shaved half a minute off the time required to exit the apartment and enter the car. Dias told Azamat to drive to campus, then explained that he had seen a photo on the news and it looked like Jahar.

By the time they got to Pine Dale Hall, Jahar had been gone more than four hours and the haphazard pilgrimage to the locked door to his dorm room had lasted more than three. Robel, whom Dias had also texted, was there, as was Lino, who had been smoking weed with Robel in his dorm room. Like all the students who had come here in the last few hours, they knocked, jerked the handle, confirmed that the door was locked, and commenced a few minutes of standing around looking somber. All agreed that the picture on TV looked like Jahar. All nodded their heads. Then there was nothing left to do. The four young men went to Lino’s room and started a game of Xbox. After about five minutes, Dias said he was going back to Jahar’s room, and left.

For every four cramped residential double rooms in Pine Dale Hall, there is one common study area, also cramped; this makes the four rooms a “suite.” Dias found Andrew working on an essay in the common room. When he said he needed Andrew to let him into the dorm room, Andrew thought nothing of it: he had accommodated such requests before, whenever Dias, the only genuinely frequent visitor to Jahar’s side of the room, had forgotten his iPhone charger there. It was in the room that Dias showed Andrew the text message from Jahar: “Ifyu want yu can go to my room and take what’s there:) but ight bro Salam alekum.” To Andrew, who had not yet seen the news, the message read as somewhat cryptic but also unsurprising: he could imagine Jahar, who had never seemed to be quite there in the first place, picking up one day and vanishing.

Dias began a frantic search of Jahar’s side of the room—the wardrobe, the dresser drawers under the bed, the desk. Azamat and Robel came, summoned by a text Dias had sent to Robel: “Come to Jahar’s.” They sat impassively on the bed, staring at images moving across the television screen—it was
Project X
, an unfunny 2012 comedy about three high school students trying to throw the party of a lifetime—as Dias continued his search. What was he looking for? Pot? But he knew where Jahar kept his stash, so, barring the possibility that he was too agitated to remember even that simple fact, he had no reason to be conducting a search. More likely, he was still seeking what everyone who had knocked on Jahar’s door that day had sought: an answer. He thought he might have found it when he came upon a black JanSport backpack with some emptied-out fireworks in it: a larger hollow cylinder and a half-dozen long ones, barely thicker than a cigarette, which had been removed from the large one and then relieved of the gunpowder. He also found a half-empty jar of Vaseline. From something he had either watched on a screen or heard in conversation, Dias knew that gunpowder and Vaseline could be components of explosive devices. He placed the open backpack in front of Azamat and mouthed the words “I think he used these to make the bombs.” Azamat nodded.

But finding the backpack could not have helped reconcile the conflicting tracks of Dias’s mind. The fireworks looked so ordinary. The larger cylinder was a meek blue; the thin inner cylinders were just paper. They looked like the remnants of a long-ago New Year’s, or like that March night on the bank of the Charles River when Jahar had set off the fireworks while the rest of the crew watched. And the jar of Vaseline was just a jar of Vaseline. Dias may have known that these objects could be the remnants of making a bomb, but all of them were of this reality, not of the fantastical, otherworldly, disastrous realm of the carnage on television.

When Dias, Azamat, and Robel left Jahar’s room after about half an hour, they took with them: the black backpack with the fireworks and the Vaseline, a black Sony VAIO computer, a thumb drive, a brown clay ashtray, a small bag of marijuana, a pair of red Beats headphones that Azamat did not exactly remember loaning to Jahar a few months before, and a red baseball cap that Dias decided he liked.

Andrew returned to the common room and told the friend with whom he had been studying there that Dias and company had been acting “suspiciously.” He texted Jahar: “Hey your friends said you left.” He got no response.

•   •   •

AT SOME POINT
he saw the news. He saw Jahar’s face. He also saw, unfolding, one of the most bizarre manhunts ever to reach the small screen. FBI investigators working out of the Boston office had zeroed in on Jahar as early as Wednesday morning—he was the only person on the surveillance tapes who exhibited no reaction to the explosions. While others ran, ducked, or at least screamed in terror, he kept walking, his white baseball cap turned backward, his step bouncy. They noticed Tamerlan second—he was walking a few people away from his brother, but they appeared to be in step. The investigators called them Black Hat and White Hat: they had no names for the suspects and no idea where to look for them. Facial-recognition software evidently could not be used because of the angle at which the surveillance camera had caught the brothers’ faces. So the FBI chose to show the faces to the American public, with a warning: “We consider them to be armed and extremely dangerous.” Said Richard DesLauriers, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, during the press conference called to release the photographs: “No one should approach them.”

Five hours later, a member of the campus police force at MIT was shot at close range while he sat in his patrol car. According to the media narrative that followed, members of Massachusetts law enforcement were immediately certain that Black Hat and White Hat were behind the murder. It is possible, though, that they reacted with similar certainty to every violent crime committed in and around the city in the days after the bombing. State Police Superintendent Timothy Alben even told the press that the bombers were responsible for the robbery of a 7-Eleven store in Cambridge on Thursday night. At the scene of the MIT murder, police and the FBI found Officer Sean Collier’s body with five gunshot wounds, including two to the head, and no clues that might help them find the brothers, if they were indeed the killers. They had not even taken Collier’s gun—they had been unable to work his locking holster.

It was over an hour before a 911 call came in from a Cambridge gas station. The brothers had hijacked a car driven by a young Chinese-immigrant engineer who would become known to the media as “Danny.” After a meandering, harrowing ride around Watertown and Cambridge, Danny had managed to escape while the brothers were filling up the tank. They were now driving a new Mercedes SUV that belonged to Danny. The car had a GPS device that would allow the police to track the brothers in real time.

From the aimless way the brothers had driven around in his car, Danny ventured that they might return to Watertown. He was right: the Mercedes was next seen in East Watertown, where they had ditched the green Honda a short while earlier. There appeared to be no rhyme or purpose to their actions, either while they were driving around with Danny or now—most likely because they had no plan. With them they had five homemade explosive devices, a semiautomatic handgun, a machete, and a hunting knife—the arsenal of monstrous children who seemed to have packed everything they had in the apartment that was in some way a weapon, and then bought the Ruger 9mm pistol off a Rindge and Latin friend of Jahar’s who had become a far more serious drug dealer than Jahar himself. They had apparently planned to travel in one car—and had transferred their eclectic armory into the Mercedes—but now they decided to reclaim the Honda. They had, it would seem, not considered the possibility of being identified, and they had no idea where and by what means they would go. This made them dangerous in a way entirely different from what those who were looking for them had imagined. Danny, who had had a conversation with Tamerlan as he drove at gunpoint, told the police that his kidnapper had boasted of having set off the bombs at the marathon and that he had mentioned possibly going to New York. He had also identified himself as a Muslim American.

Just before one in the morning, police from Watertown and a number of nearby municipalities converged on Laurel Street, two blocks of modest one- and two-family houses that on any other night or day might have been called sleepy, and began shooting haphazardly. A transit cop named Richard Donohue received the worst gunshot wounds, from one of his own. There is no indication that a negotiating team was present: the only conversation on record appears to be an officer yelling to the brothers to “give up.” In response, Jahar hurled the explosive devices, which turned out to be pipe bombs and a pressure-cooker bomb—literally a pressure cooker stuffed with small metal objects such as nails and ball bearings as well as explosives. The bombs used on Monday at the marathon finish line had been pressure-cooker bombs too. But this time, the explosives going off on a narrow residential street appeared to have injured no one.

The final gun battle took place between Watertown policeman Jeff Pugliese and Tamerlan. Pugliese hit Tamerlan several times; Tamerlan hit nothing aside from the walls of a couple of houses, ran out of ammunition, and threw his gun at Pugliese, finally hitting him. Tamerlan then tried to run, but Pugliese and another officer tackled him, pinning him to the pavement. Jahar jumped behind the wheel of the SUV and charged at the three men struggling on the ground. The officers jumped out of the way, and the Mercedes ran over Tamerlan, dragging him about thirty feet down the block. In a book published a year later, two
Boston Globe
reporters, Scott Helman and Jenna Russell, wrote: “Tamerlan was left lying on his stomach, clinging to the final moments of his life. He tried to lift up his head. Blood pooled around his body, streak marks visible on the street where the SUV had dragged him. Pugliese ran over, put cuffs on him, and pressed a foot into his back. Then he called for an ambulance. At long last, Tamerlan was theirs.”

Tamerlan was delivered to Beth Israel Deaconess hospital around 1:20 in the morning. He was unconscious and naked—his clothes had been cut away, exposing several gunshot wounds, a large gash on his torso, and burns from being dragged along the street by the SUV. Trauma teams dressed in protective gear first checked him for radioactivity, using a Geiger counter, and then intubated him. At 1:35 they pronounced him dead.

Meanwhile Jahar drove away from the scene of the battle. Probably because they were all still focused on the gunfight and also possibly because they were officers from many different forces acting without a clear center of command, police trailed him by almost a minute, giving him enough time to ditch the Mercedes and vanish into the suburban maze.

•   •   •

LULU EMMONS’S MOTHER
called just before six in the morning on Friday and told her to turn on the news. She knew Lulu’s boyfriend left for work at six, and she thought it might not be a good idea for him to go out. Lulu had been living away from her mother for just a short time. She had graduated from Rindge and Latin in 2011, done a year of college, found it very difficult, and was now regrouping, working as a waitress and living with her boyfriend in a neat and homey apartment on the first floor of a house in Watertown. Lulu turned on the news and saw Jahar’s face. She and Jahar had shared at least one class every year of high school. Sometimes they walked over to the athletics building together: he was going to wrestling practice and she to swimming. For a while Lulu dated a boy who was on the wrestling team, and he would often mention Jahar. “The general consensus was that he was really good,” she told me almost a year after the bombing. “Not the best, not like going to go on to something, but good.” She also told me she knew Jahar “was from the Czech Republic, we knew he wasn’t from here because of the way he spelled his name, but his English was fine.” She never knew what his religion might be.