340
Behavior in Social
and cultural context
10
One Suspect in Boston Marathon Bombing
Dead, One Captured
BOSTON, MA, April 19, 2013. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, once
hoped to fight on the U.S. Olympic team. His brother
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, had been on his high school wres-
tling team and was attending the University of Massachusetts
at Dartmouth on a city scholarship. The brothers had come
to the United States about 10 years ago from Chechnya,
a region of Russia. They lived together in Cambridge, and
were said to be devout Muslims who did not drink or smoke.
Now Tamerlan Tsarnaev is dead and his brother has been
captured. Both are suspects in the Boston Marathon bomb-
ing last Monday that killed three people and severely injured
more than 170 others.
The bombs used were crudely fashioned from ordinary
kitchen pressure cookers packed with explosives, nails, and
ball bearings designed to inflict maximum harm. The explo-
sions killed an 8-year-old boy and two young women, one a
graduate student from China.
Two years ago, Tamerlan told a Boston University stu-
dent magazine that he did not have a single American
friend. “I don’t understand them,” he said. But Dzhokhar
had many American friends and was well liked, though
his coach and friends said he was “quiet” and deeply in-
fluenced by his older brother. The father of the suspects,
reached in Chechyna, described his younger son as “a true
angel.”
PSychology in the newS
Roles and Rules
Drawing on Social Support
and Behavior
Individuals in Groups
Us Versus Them: Group
Identity
Prejudice and Group
Conflict
Psychology in the News,
Revisited
Taking Psychology With
You: Dealing With Cultural
Differences
The brothers appeared in a surveillance video released
by authorities a few days after the bombing. They were walk-
ing down a sidewalk, unnoticed by spectators at the race.
Investigators asked for the public’s help in identifying the two
men, and calls began flooding in. A few hours later, the sus-
pects reportedly carjacked a Mercedes in Cambridge. Police
chased the vehicle, and exchanged gunfire with the driver
and passenger. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was critically injured and
A surveillance camera captured this image of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (left,
in white cap) and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (in sunglasses), suspects in the
Boston marathon bombing. Tamerlan was later killed in a shootout with
the police; Dzhokhar was wounded and captured alive.
