Accounts differ on nature of Boston bombing suspects

>>FBI photos of the suspects

Conflicting pictures are emerging of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings.

Friends say Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, were normal, typical young men who never had any complaints about America. The boys’ father says he believes authorities have the wrong people. But their uncle openly called them losers Friday morning.

Boston Globe reporter Mark Arsenault tells KIRO Radio’s Luke Burbank Show that shock was the most common reaction among the brothers’ friends and acquaintances upon hearing of their potential involvement.

“From the outside they looked like the typical American immigrant success story,” says Arsenault. “They came from Russia. They didn’t have heavy accents. They had essentially spent a great part of their lives in America, in Cambridge.”

They had come to the United States about 10 years ago from a Russian region near Chechnya. They had two sisters. As kids they rode bikes and skateboards on quiet Norfolk Street.

The Tsarnaevs lived in the Cambridge area since around 2001, Arsenault says, explaining Cambridge is a pretty affluent area with a lot of artists and technology companies.

“A lot of ‘live and let live’ people, a very cool and groovy area of Massachusetts, that’s where they’ve grown up.”

The two apparently fit in with other students. A high school classmate tells WBZ in Boston that Dzhokhar was smart and funny, and a regular student.

“During that time he was the class clown. He would joke around […] He was very friendly, everyone liked him. No one had any problems with him. You would think he was here from America.”

Other high school classmates dispute reports that Dzhokhar was a loner and had no friends, saying he was a fairly popular kid and a lot of people are surprised at hearing this news.

Dzhokhar’s fellow students say he never said anything against the community or America, and they can’t believe what they’re learning.

“They’ve said that these guys talked about normal, teenage things, that they did not seem particularly interested in politics or world religion or the clash of cultures or anything like that,” says Arsenault.

But the boys’ uncle paints a much different picture of the two.

“I say what I think was behind it: being losers. Not being able to settle themselves and hating everyone who did,” says Ruslan Tsarni.

Tsarni says his family hasn’t had anything to do with the two since 2009, when they started acted strangely.

“Hatred to those who were able to settle themselves, these are the only reason I can imagine. Anything else, anything to do with religion, Islam, it’s a fraud, it’s fake.”

One acquaintance did note a marked change in the older brother about a year ago. Tamerlan was a promising boxer, and one of his coaches told reporters he’d witnessed a change in him.

“One of his former boxing coaches, the manager of a gym he used to work out at, said that within the last year he had come back to the gym after being away and seemed to be a different person and was sort of rude and disrespectful to people. It seemed that maybe something had happened or that he had somehow become more radical or rude and testy person,” says Arsenault.

Tamerlan, believed to be 26 when he was killed overnight in a shootout, dropped out after studying accounting at Bunker Hill Community College for just three semesters.

“I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.” he was quoted as saying in a photo package that appeared in a Boston University student magazine in 2010.

He identified himself then as a Muslim and said he did not drink or smoke: “God said no alcohol.”

But the father of the suspects, Anzor Tsaraev, says he believes authorities are targeting entirely the wrong men, and that his sons are good boys.

“My son is a true angel,” Anzor said by telephone from the Russian city of Makhachkala, speaking of his son currently at large. “He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here.”

Anzor Tsaraev is absolutely furious that his older son was killed. He doesn’t think his sons would be involved in terrorism. He said they were very happy with their lives in America. They were not Muslim radicals and he’s very much looking for answers.

The aunt of two suspects also stood up for her nephews, lashing out at the media.

“Did you see with your own eyes that it was Tamerlan standing there with explosives? I cannot take this kind of information lightly,” Maret Tsarnaeva tells reporters outside her Toronto home Frida. “I need evidence, then come and see my reaction.”

“As far as I know them, they were fine, in good health, in good mind.”

Tsarnaeva says the older brother had taken to praying five times a day.

He had traveled to Russia last year and returned to the U.S. six months later, government officials told The Associated Press. More wasn’t known about his travels. According to a crime website he was arrested, in 2009, for domestic assault on a girlfriend.

Dzhokhar, 19, attended the prestigious Cambridge Rindge and Latin school, a public school just blocks from Harvard Yard, participating on the wrestling team. In May 2011, his senior year, he was awarded a $2,500 scholarship from the city to pursue higher education, according to a news release at the time. That scholarship was celebrated with a reception at city hall.

He was currently attending the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Mass., university officials said Friday. He lived on the third floor of the Pine Dale dormitory.

The school would not say what he was studying. The father of the suspects, Anzor Tsarnaev, told the AP his younger son was “a second-year medical student,” though he graduated high school in 2011.

Dzhokhar’s page on the Russian social networking site Vkontakte says that before moving to the United States, he attended School No. 1 in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim republic in Russia’s North Caucasus that has become an epicenter of the Islamic insurgency that spilled over from Chechnya. On the site, he describes himself as speaking Chechen as well as English and Russian. His world view is described as “Islam” and he says his personal goal is “career and money.”

Before moving to Dagestan, the Tsarnaev family lived in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia. Leila Alieva, who went to school with Tamerlan in the Kyrgyz town of Tokmok, remembers an educated family and a nice boy.

“He was … a good student, a jock, a boxer. He used to win all the (boxing) competitions in town,” she said. “I can’t believe they were involved in the explosions, because Tamerlan was a very positive guy, and they were not very Islamist. They were Muslim, but had a secular lifestyle.”

In a local news article in 2004, Tamerlan spoke about his boxing and his views of America.

“I like the USA,” Tamerlan was quoted as saying in The Sun of Lowell, Mass. “America has a lot of jobs. That’s something Russia doesn’t have. You have a chance to make money here if you are willing to work.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.