TALE OF 2 BROTHERS: The Boston bombing suspects

April 19, 2013 ByJeff Donn and Jocelyn Noveck Associated Press

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BOSTON — Tamerlan Tsarnaev was an amateur boxer who had hoped to fight on the U.S. Olympic team, a man who said he had no American friends. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrestled at a prestigious high school, won a scholarship from his city and went on to university.

Two brothers, one dead, one alive and at large. After hours when they were known only by grainy images of two men in baseball caps, a portrait gradually emerged Friday of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing.

They had come to the United States about 10 years ago from a Russian region near Chechnya, according to an uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md. They had two sisters. As kids they rode bikes and skateboards on quiet Norfolk Street in Cambridge, Mass.

But their lives appeared to take different turns — at least until this week, when a video caught them together on Boylston Street, moments before two bombs unleashed terror at the finish line of America’s most famous race.

Tamerlan, believed to be 26 when he was killed overnight in a shootout, dropped out after studying accounting at Bunker Hill Community College for just three semesters.

“I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.” he was quoted as saying in a photo package that appeared in a Boston University student magazine in 2010.

He identified himself then as a Muslim and said he did not drink or smoke: “God said no alcohol.” He said he hoped to fight for the U.S. Olympic team and become a naturalized American. He said he was studying to become an engineer.

More recently, Tamerlan — married, with a young daughter — became a more devout Muslim, according to his aunt, Maret Tsarnaeva. She told reporters outside her Toronto home Friday that the older brother had taken to praying five times a day.

Tamerlan traveled to Russia last year and returned to the U.S. six months later, government officials told The Associated Press. More wasn’t known about his travels.

According to law enforcement records he was arrested, in 2009, for assault and battery on a girlfriend; the charges were dismissed.

Dzhokhar, meanwhile, was described by friends as well-adjusted and well-liked in both high school and college.

“I’m in complete shock,” said Rose Schutzberg, 19, who graduated high school with Dzhokhar and now attends Barnard College in New York. “He was a very studious person. He was really popular. He wrestled. People loved him.”

In fact, Schutzberg said, she had “a little crush” on him in high school. “He’s a great guy,” she said. “He’s smart, funny. He’s definitely a really sweet person, very kind hearted, kind soul.”

Dzhokhar, 19, attended the prestigious Cambridge Rindge and Latin school, a public school just blocks from Harvard Yard, participating on the wrestling team. In May 2011, his senior year, he was awarded a $2,500 scholarship from the city to pursue higher education, according to a news release at the time. That scholarship was celebrated with a reception at city hall.

He was currently attending the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Mass., university officials said Friday. He lived on the third floor of the Pine Dale dormitory. Harry Danso, who lives on the same floor, told the AP he saw him in a dorm hallway this week.

“He was regular, he was calm,” said Danso.

The school would not say what he was studying. The father of the suspects, Anzor Tsarnaev, told the AP his younger son was “a second-year medical student,” though he graduated high school in 2011.

“My son is a true angel …,” he said by telephone from the Russian city of Makhachkala. “He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here.”

Dzhokhar’s page on the Russian social networking site Vkontakte says that before moving to the United States, he attended School No. 1 in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim republic in Russia’s North Caucasus that has become an epicenter of the Islamic insurgency that spilled over from Chechnya. On the site, he describes himself as speaking Chechen as well as English and Russian. His world view is described as “Islam” and he says his personal goal is “career and money.”

Deana Beaulieu, 20, lives two blocks away from the suspects’ home on Norfolk Street, went to high school with Dzhokhar and was friendly with his sister.

Beaulieu says she didn’t recall Dzhokhar expressing any political views. “I thought he was going to branch off to college, and now this is what he’s done. … I don’t understand what the hell happened, what set him off like this.”

Florida Addy, 19, of Lynn, Mass., said she lives in the same college dorm with Dzhokhar this year and was on the same floor last year. She called him “drug” (pronounced droog), the Russian word for friend, a word he taught her.

Addy said she saw Dzhokhar last week, when she bummed a cigarette from him. They would occasionally hang out in his room or at the New Bedford apartment of Russian students he knew. He generally wore a hoodie or a white t-shirt and sweatpants, and spent a lot of his time with other kids from Russia.

She described him as down to earth and friendly, even a little mysterious, but in a charming way. She had just learned that he had a girlfriend, although she did not attend the university.

“He was nice. He was cool. I’m just in shock,” she said.

Tim Kelleher, a wrestling coach for a Boston school that competed in 2010 against Dzhokhar’s team, said the young man was a good wrestler, and that he’d never heard him express any political opinions.

“He was a tough, solid kid, just quiet,” said Kelleher, now a Boston public school teacher.

Tamerlan was more defined by athletics, and clearly proud of his boxing prowess. USA Boxing spokeswoman Julie Goldsticker said Tamerlan registered with the group as an amateur boxer from 2003 to 2004, and again from 2008 to 2010. He competed as a heavyweight in the National Golden Gloves competition in Salt Lake City on May 4, 2009, losing his only bout.

In photographs that appeared in the student magazine, including one in which he posed with his shirt off, Tamerlan has the muscular arms of a boxer, and is dressed in flashy street-clothes that he said were “European style.”

Gene McCarthy, who trained Tamerlan at the Somerville Boxing Club, described him as a “nice kid” who already was a good fighter before he showed up at the gym years ago.

“He never lost a bout for me,” McCarthy said. “He had some skills from his father before he showed up in my gym.” McCarthy described the young man as “very intelligent” and recalled that he also played classical piano.

Another boxing trainer who worked with Tamerlan, Kendrick Ball, called him “a real cocky guy … If anybody’s better than him, he doesn’t let you know you’re better than him.”

Before moving to Dagestan, the Tsarnaev family lived in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia. Leila Alieva, who went to school with Tamerlan in the Kyrgyz town of Tokmok, remembers an educated family and a nice boy.

“He was … a good student, a jock, a boxer. He used to win all the (boxing) competitions in town,” she said. “I can’t believe they were involved in the explosions, because Tamerlan was a very positive guy, and they were not very Islamist. They were Muslim, but had a secular lifestyle.”

In a local news article in 2004, Tamerlan spoke about his boxing and his views of America.

“I like the USA,” Tamerlan was quoted as saying in The Sun of Lowell, Mass. “America has a lot of jobs. That’s something Russia doesn’t have. You have a chance to make money here if you are willing to work.”

Noveck reported from New York. Associated Press writers Bridget Murphy, Pat Eaton-Robb and Adam Geller in Boston; Michelle R. Smith in Providence, R.I.; Laura Wides-Munoz in Cambridge, Mass.; Erika Niedowski in Dartmouth, Mass.; Michael Kunzelman in New Orleans; Eric Tucker in Montgomery Village, Md.; Michael Biesecker in Raleigh; Justin Pritchard in Los Angeles; Eileen Sullivan, Jack Gillum, Steve Braun, Pete Yost, Alicia Caldwell, and Kim Dozier in Washington; Charmaine Noronha in Toronto; Arsen Mollayev in Makhachkala, Russia; Leila Saralayeva in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; and Vladimir Isachenkov and Lynn Berry in Moscow contributed to this report. The AP News Research Center also contributed.