Portrait emerges of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

[DonViejo]

Friends tell Salon the wannabe engineer liked to talk about rap, not politics. Also: "Dzhokhar likes the chronic"

BY PATRICK TRACEY

BOSTON — None of the young local neighborhood guys who grew up with the young brothers Tsarnaev could believe they were the same pair fingered on video last night as the two Boston Marathon suspects.

“When I first heard the news (last night), I thought they were joking,” said Derek Winbush, who graduated in 2011 from Cambridge Rindge and Latin high school with Dzhokhar, the youngest brother.

“But the way they [the two brothers] were walking, the way was holding his backpack, it was them” seen placing the bombs near the finish line Monday afternoon on Boylston Street in Boston’s Copley Square.

“I wouldn’t say he was a good friend, but we hung out,” Winbush said of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from the seat of his silver Schwinn 7-speed bike, amid an endless stream of SWAT team vehicles arriving to cordon off the working-class Cambridge neighborhood where the brothers have lived since they were preteens.

Although they kept their home lives to themselves, the brothers got respect on these streets as skilled wrestlers and boxers, but also as fairly good students. Winbush said they used to attend parties on nearby Magazine Street with ordinary high school kids, just drinking and smoking pot.

“Dzhokhar likes the chronic,” he shared. He said he never discussed politics, preferring discussions about rappers.

Winbush said he “didn’t want to call the hotline on my friend after seeing the video, because it couldn’t have been them, but it was. I couldn’t believe it.”

As the National Guard rolled in with swarms of FBI agents to surround the tenement home of the two brothers in this working-class neighborhood not far from MIT, and as gawkers gathered as close to the home as you could get, about half a city block away, he became a believer.

Friends said the younger brother seemed non-religious, although the older of the two, Tamerlan, was more overtly open about his Muslim religious convictions, at least online. Tamerlan, who died in a shootout with police late last night, was also less social.

full article:
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/portrait_emerges_of_dzhokhar_tsarnaev/

[msongs]

1. media turns alleged killers into celebrity darlings. thanks a lot nt

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

3. "Celebrity darlings"? What's wrong with learning something

about these guys? Getting as much information about them as possible is extremely useful to law enforcement, and is certainly interesting for the public in general. A couple of apparently ordinary, nice, well-educated young men turn out to be terrorists. Isn't that newsworthy? Reporting information about them and their background hardly makes them "celebrity darlings."

[HiPointDem]

2. 'the tenement home' = what the heck does that mean?

[notadmblnd]

4. definition

Tenement -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenement_house

A tenement is, in most English-speaking areas, a substandard multi-family dwelling in the urban core, usually old and occupied by the poor.

[HiPointDem]

7. i know the definition. i doubt they lived in a tenement.

[woodsprite]

5. Well, in my area it means a run down, inner city, tight-living-quarters neighborhood. n/t

[HiPointDem]

6. yes. i doubt they lived in a tenement.

[eShirl]

8. it means affordable

[Bernardo de La Paz]

9. The essence of "tenement" is "to hold" = rent rather than own; from Latin (via French).

The additional sense added over time is as others have said: crowded low-standard housing.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. A house subdivided into apartments (nt)

[Warpy]

11. Superficial male surface bonding over sports and pot, no real

friendship, only relationship was with a brother who got religion and felt no connection with this country, parents had left the country, extended family disinterested.

He sounds pretty isolated to me and isolation can be incredibly toxic.

I do have a few questions, though. He escaped in a car, have they found the car? Is there any blood in it indicating he was wounded in the firefight? Have there been any more carjackings within the range of a tank of gas? Are gas stations on the lookout if he hasn't ditched the car in favor of another one? There is one hell of a lot the bafflegabbers haven't been told and it doesn't seem like they're smart enough to ask.