Dzhokhar A Tsarnaev, then a senior at a prestigious school, was awarded a $2,500 scholarship in May 2011 from the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to pursue higher education. Now the 19-year-old is on the run, described as “armed and dangerous” and suspected of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Dzokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed during the violent police chase, were from the Russian region near Chechnya and had been living together in Cambridge, outside Boston.
An uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, who lives in a Washington suburb, said the men had been in the US for about a decade. They came from a Russian region that has been plagued by an Islamic insurgency related to separatist wars.
On Dzhokhar’s page on the Russian social networking site Vkontakte, his world view is described as “Islam” and he says his personal goal is “career and money”.
The website spotcrime.com says Tamerlan was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend in July 2009. He was an amateur boxer, listed as a competitor in a National Golden Gloves competitionin 2009.