At 2:49 pm on April 15th, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev allegedly detonated a bomb at the Boston Marathon. By 8:14 pm, he was on Twitter, ostensibly offering his solidarity as a Bostonian, “Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people.” At 11:13, he had two conversations with a user named @mellochamp who has a protected account. The second exchange includes this cryptic comment from Tsarnaev: “and they what “god hates dead people?” Or victims of tragedies? Lol those people are cooked.” Since we can’t read the other side of this conversation, it’s hard to understand the context. But it seems to be saying that people who think God hates the victims of tragedies are going to burn in hell. At 12:34 in the morning, he had another Tweet: “There are people that know the truth but stay silent & there are people that speak the truth but we don’t hear them cuz they’re the minority.” This tweet was to no one in particular, but it is a bit creepy under the circumstances.
He may have gone to sleep at this point because the next Tweet doesn’t come until 1:14 that afternoon. This one is addressed to another protected account: “<a href="https://twitter.com/J_tsar/status/324209310936752129"@therealAbdul_ you need to get Claritin clear.” Evidently, “The Real Abdul” was having allergy problems. At 1:18 pm, he wrote to Abdul again: “#heavy I’ve been looking for those, there is a shortage on the black market if you wanna make a quick buck, nuff said..” We have no idea what “those” are, but it’s not clear that they have anything to do with the bombing. A few minutes later, he Tweets (to no one in particular): “So then I says to him, I says, relax bro my beard is not loaded.” This is probably a common joke told by Muslims who know that they are viewed with suspicion in this country. The problem is, the joke doesn’t work if you just set off a bomb in a public place.
At 5:09 pm, he responded to a friend of his who had posted a picture of victims. It was about a woman who had supposedly died in the blast. Her boyfriend had been planning to propose to her. Tsarnaev correctly noted that it was “A Fake Story.” His last tweet on Tuesday said, “Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got somethin to say but nothin comes out when they move their lips; just a bunch of gibberish.”
The next day, Tsarnaev tweeted at 1:43 pm that “I’m a stress free kind of guy.” His last tweet was actually a retweet of Mufti Ismail Menk, a Muslim scholar who studied in Medina, Saudi Arabia: “Attitude can take away your beauty no matter how good looking you are or it could enhance your beauty, making you adorable.” I don’t know much about this Mufti other than he seems to live in Zimbabwe.
Either before or after these two tweets, he traveled more than an hour south of Cambridge to the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth where he is enrolled as a student.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had passed an apparently normal day at the school Wednesday, according to a UMass official, working out at the gym, then sleeping in his single-unit room at the Pine Dale Hall dorm that night, while law enforcement officials were frantically scanning photos and video trying to identify him and his brother.
School officials know he was there Wednesday because of card swipes, but it was not clear if he had been there earlier. He was described as good, typical student who played intramural soccer.
A student, who didn’t want to be identified, said she saw Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at a party Wednesday night that was attended by some of his friends with whom he played intramural soccer.
“He was just relaxed,” she said.
So, on Monday this guy blew a bunch of innocent people’s legs off and killed at least two people and gravely wounded scores more, and on Wednesday he is still just going about his business, like nothing happened. On Wednesday night he goes to a party with his college friends and is “totally relaxed.”
He slept in his dorm room on Wednesday night and woke up there on Thursday morning. We don’t hear from him again until 10:48 in the evening when a police officer is shot near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the meantime, at 5:20 pm, the FBI releases video footage of Dzhokhar and his brother with their backpacks.
What followed was a violent odyssey through the streets of Cambridge and Watertown with reports of gun battles and hand grenades and pressure-cooker bombs thrown at the cops and suicide vests. It was an odyssey that left Tamerlan shot dead in the street, run over by his own younger brother. Meanwhile, Dzhokhar escaped and stowed himself away in a boat in the backyard of some random family where he successfully evaded the biggest dragnet in history for almost an entire day.
Does any of this make sense to you?
