Uncle Moneybags
But the Tsarnaevs were driven more by the quest for a good living than by religious devotion, and when Ruslan immigrated to the United States in 1995, he quickly built a life that proved magnetic to the rest of his family. With a big house on a cul-de-sac in Montgomery Village and a salary in 2005 of $216,000, plus stock options, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Ruslan was a shining model of what an immigrant could do in America.
Seven years after Ruslan began his U.S. adventure, Anzor and family — they now had two sons and two daughters — left Central Asia and settled in Cambridge, where they had friends. Within four days of landing in their new world, Anzor was busy fixing cars. He told his brother he was making $10 an hour, even $100 a day — almost inconceivable money to a newcomer from Russia.
“He was excited,” Ruslan recalled. “He loved it.”
...
Guive Rosen, 23, who was in several classes with Tamerlan, knew him as “a very goofy kid, a gentle-giant sort of person. . . . He liked to talk, always had his arm around your shoulders.” Rosen knew that Tamerlan was Muslim, but that was by no means a defining part of his persona. “It was a very minute detail about him,” Rosen said. “He didn’t impose any religious things on you, never talked about it.”
...
The Tsarnaev family was a neighborhood nuisance, said Rinat Harel, a longtime neighbor. She and other neighbors called police five years ago when the two brothers would hold loud parties and drink late into the night in the courtyard.
The brothers were “just obnoxious teenage boys,” Harel said, but the father, a short, beefy fellow, was a constant irritant who regularly threw his trash in neighbors’ recycling bins despite being asked to stop, filled precious spaces in this parking-starved city with cars he was working on, and claimed a 10-minute loading zone as his all-day storage space.
...
“We smoked,” said Peter Tenzin, Jahar’s wrestling co-captain during senior year. “Ninety-five percent of our school smoked. People are looking down on that about him, but that’s what we did.”
When Tenzin, now in college, thinks of Jahar, his mind fills with images of those long nights and so many fits of uncontrollable laughter.
“Jahar was a joker,” Tenzin said. Friends would tease Jahar, telling him that, given his smoking and drinking, some recent converts to Islam in his class were more Muslim than he was.
“He’d come back with a joke about blacks or Asians,” Tenzin said. “You have to understand — identity is always an issue in Cambridge.”
...
Two days later, just hours before the shootout that would end Tamerlan’s life, he called Alvi, his estranged uncle. Tamerlan said nothing about the bombings, Alvi recalled, but wanted to apologize.
“I want to have an uncle, and I love you,” Tamerlan said.
“I love you, too, Tamerlan,” Alvi replied. “Now we can just be a family.”
Tamerlan asked for his uncle Ruslan’s number. “I just want to make peace with him,” the nephew said.
Ruslan said Tamerlan never called.
Now Ruslan looks forward to visiting his surviving nephew in prison; he would tell Jahar that there is still time for evil and hate to leave his body, that he is still loved.
Ruslan believes his family is not so different from many others. “We all think we know each other,” he said, “but in fact we don’t.”
