Path From 'Social Butterfly' to Boston Suspect's Widow
By MICHAEL COOPER, SERGE F. KOVALESKI, RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and JOHN ELIGON
When Katherine Russell arrived as a freshman at Suffolk University just over
five years ago, she seemed to bond so well with her new roommates in their
lively dorm opposite Boston Common that one classmate likened them to sitcom
characters. "They reminded me of the show 'Sex and the City,' " he recalled.
"Two of them were free-spirited, one was materialistic and Katherine was the
social butterfly."
Then Ms. Russell began dating Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a boxer from Cambridge,
Mass., known for his flashy clothes, and her life began to change. As he
became a steadily more religious Muslim, Ms. Russell converted to Islam. She
started to cover her head with a hijab in public, startling some classmates.
She dropped out of college in 2010, the year they got married and had a
daughter.
She moved into his family's run-down apartment in Cambridge, trading her old
life of New England comfort and privilege - her father and grandfather both
went to Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale - for the struggles of an immigrant
family, with money so tight that they were on public assistance at times.
Now Ms. Russell, 24, is known around the world as the widow of the man
suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon with his brother before he was
killed April 19 after a shootout with the police. And she has attracted the
interest of the F.B.I., which is trying to determine whether she knew about
the bombings or helped the two brothers in any way, knowingly or
unknowingly, before or after the attacks.
The surviving bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, has told investigators
that he and his brother built their bombs in the Cambridge apartment where
Ms. Russell lived with Tamerlan, 26, and their daughter, Zahira, a toddler,
according to two law enforcement officials. Other officials raised the
possibility that the bombs may have been assembled elsewhere.
Investigators are also interested in a text message Ms. Russell sent to her
husband after the F.B.I. released photographs of him and his brother a few
days after the bombings, two other law enforcement officials said. (This
week, the F.B.I. took samples of Ms. Russell's DNA, and determined that her
fingerprints and DNA did not match samples found on some bomb fragments, the
officials said.)
Ms. Russell's lawyers issued a statement saying that the marathon bombings
had "caused profound distress and sorrow to Katie and her family" and adding
that "the reports of involvement by her husband and brother-in-law came as
an absolute shock to them all."
The recent turn of events has stunned Ms. Russell's friends, relatives,
former classmates and neighbors. In North Kingstown, R.I., where she grew
up, a newspaper, The Standard-Times, summed up local sentiment in a
front-page headline. "NK native widow of Boston bombing suspect," it read.
"Former high school classmate calls situation 'odd.' "
Ms. Russell grew up in a comfortable home on a leafy street there, the
daughter of a doctor. Stephen Constantine, 23, who, like Ms. Russell, played
alto saxophone in a middle school band, recalled her as popular and a good
musician. "She could play more complex music than I could and learn it
faster, and her sound was warmer and fuller bodied," he said. In high
school, she won an award for her drawing of a cat menacing a mouse. "It was
a large colored-pencil drawing of a black cat with its paw raised and a gray
mouse scooching out of the way," her art teacher, Amos Trout Paine,
recalled. She quoted a David Bowie song, "Quicksand," in her high school
yearbook.
Shortly after graduating, she had a brush with the law: she was arrested and
charged with shoplifting five items worth $67 from an Old Navy at the
Warwick Mall, according to a police report. She performed community service
and paid money toward a general restitution fund that benefits crime
victims, and the case was dismissed. The lawyer who represented her, J.
Patrick O'Neill, who serves in the Rhode Island House of Representatives,
said he could not recall details of the case or much about Ms. Russell.
In 2007, she moved to Boston to major in communications at Suffolk. It was
there that friends introduced her to Mr. Tsarnaev, who had gone to a nearby
community college. They dated on and off, people who knew them said, and
eventually Ms. Russell converted to Islam.
She seemed to embrace her new religion willingly and enthusiastically, said
someone who occasionally attended Russell family gatherings, and who spoke
on the condition of anonymity so as not to betray the family's confidence.
"She was infatuated with this guy, and she adopted that religion," the
person said, recalling a dinner in Boston when she announced that she had
decided to start wearing a head scarf as part of her faith. "It was a big
surprise."
Mr. Tsarnaev had a rough side: a domestic violence complaint was lodged
against him in 2009 by another girlfriend, officials said. His father, Anzor
Tsarnaev, said last month that he had "hit her lightly."
But things seemed promising for the young couple in 2010, said Julian
Pollard, 31, a boxer who recounted a conversation with Mr. Tsarnaev that
year at a Golden Gloves tournament in Lowell, Mass. "He said the training
was going great, that he was happy with his faith and that he had just met a
girl and he was very happy about that," he said. "He told me that he was
engaged to her, or was about to propose."
They married on June 21, 2010, in a 15-minute ceremony in an office on the
third floor of the Masjid Al Quran, on a quiet residential street in
Dorchester. Imam Taalib Mahdee said that he had not met the couple before
the ceremony, and that she was the one who had called and asked to be
married there. "They were a happy couple," he said. Their marriage
certificate listed his occupation as driver, hers as student.
But Ms. Russell did not go back to college that fall. Mr. Tsarnaev, who had
given up boxing after being barred from national Golden Gloves tournaments
because he was not a United States citizen, was growing increasingly
religious, neighbors said. Money was scarce: the family's income was
supplemented by public assistance and food stamps from September 2011 to
November 2012, state officials said. And last year, Mr. Tsarnaev left his
wife and daughter behind in Cambridge for six months while he traveled to
Dagestan to see his father, and to visit Chechnya.
Her mother-in-law, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, said in an interview that Mr.
Tsarnaev had wanted Ms. Russell and their child to move to Dagestan with
him, and that she had been thinking of it. "She herself agreed; she said she
wanted to study a different culture, language," Ms. Tsarnaeva said.
At times Ms. Russell supported the family by working as a home health aide -
"working long hours, caring for people in their homes who are unable to care
for themselves," her lawyers said in the statement.
One neighbor said that Ms. Russell often seemed shy and quiet in the
presence of her husband, but warmer and friendlier when he was not around.
Another neighbor recalled hearing yells coming from the apartment.
A relative said that Ms. Russell attended family gatherings less frequently,
and withdrew a little from her old social life. "I think she believes in
Islam," said the relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and who
said that she had seemed happy with her husband. "I don't think she was
coerced. I think she's faithful to the religion."
On April 19, as the news spread that the Tsarnaev brothers were believed to
have committed the marathon bombings and had gone on a nightlong crime spree
that involved the fatal shooting of a campus police officer at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a carjacking and a gunfight with the
police in which Tamerlan was killed, a neighbor knocked at the door of their
third-floor apartment in Cambridge, where Ms. Russell had apparently just
heard the news from a relative. "She was in utter shock," the neighbor said.
"Utter shock."
Then law enforcement officers arrived and ordered them all out. Their
downstairs neighbor Albrect Ammon, 18, said that Ms. Russell, who was
dressed all in black, tried to borrow a cellphone from another woman, but an
officer snatched it away, saying she was the suspect's wife.
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