Solving the Marathon Bomb Mystery, Part 2: Jahar Tsarnaev’s Blue Jeans

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

Much needs to be said about Jahar (Dzhokhar) Tsarnaev, one of the most incommunicado persons in the world today. He probably never imagined he would end up in a Supermax prison, unable to talk to anyone. Worse, no one is allowed to talk to him.

Jahar is under the post-9/11 “SAMs” – Special Administrative Measures. These came about when it was said that a “Muslim terrorist” involved in the 1993 (not 2001) bombing of the World Trade Center was trying to pass “plans” to his buddies in Egypt, or wherever.  Keeping certain “terrorists” incommunicado in prison is vital to the government in another sense, however. It prevents our finding out what really happened.

As claimed in Part I of this series, there’s a young man named Matanov in a Massachusetts prison whose “crime” was that he tried to tell the FBI some exculpatory things about his friends, the Tsarnaevs.

Matanov said he saw Tamerlan shortly after the Marathon, with a bearded face, not a clean shaven face as shown on TV by FBI. Matanov actually walked into Braintree Police Station, freely, to reveal that piece of exculpatory information. Of course the deduction one might make is that the videos shown of clean-shaven Tamerlan may be pictures taken two years earlier, before he grew a beard.

This article is about Jahar, not Tamerlan. Jahar does not have a beard issue, but he has a clothing issue. As shown in the photo above, Jahar was wearing blue jeans when he was captured by police at the boat in the backyard of David Henneberry in Watertown.

(Henneberry died last week, age 70. One hopes it was not a murder to silence him! The Powers That Be are well known silencers of persons who have INFORMATION THAT COULD INCRIMINATE them.)

The fact that Jahar is shown in blue jeans could pose a serious problem for the prosecution. They have shown a (supposed) CCTV film of him at a Shell gas station in which he wears black pants.

Timeline of “Official” Stuff

Here’s a quick timeline from the prosecution’s story. As you will see later, I don’t agree with it.

Monday, April 15, 2013. Boston’s annual Marathon race. Bombs go off at 2.39pm.

Thursday April 18, 2013. Around 5pm FBI Agent DesLauriers goes on TV and shows photos of Bomber One and Bomber Two.  [He pretends not to know their names, but later admits the FBI was involved with Tamerlan for years.]

Thursday, April 18, at 10.20pm, the boys, now in a panic, started to run –“with visions of bombing New York next.” Desiring an extra gun, they went to the campus of MIT and killed a cop, Sean Collier. Collier is found dead at 10.35pm.

Thursday, April 18, 2017, after 11pm. They found Dun Meng sitting in his parked car and carjacked it.

Around midnight.  Meng, Jahar, and Tamerlan stop for gas at a Shell station, and the CCTV films them near the pumps and also in Shell’s convenience store.

Friday, April 19, 2013. At 12.35am the boys appear on Laurel St, Watertown, attacking a group of cops, as it were. They “throw pipe bombs” and Jahar “jumps in Dun Meng’s car and runs over his brother” to escape.

Friday, for more than 17 hours, between 12.35am and 7pm, Jahar is nowhere to be seen.

Friday, April 19, 2013. When the governor calls off the shelter-at-home directive, David Henneberry goes to his yard for a smoke and sees a boy in his boat. A call to 911 brings the troops. Jahar emerges from the boat and is taken to hospital.

Disagreement

I think all aspects of the story are false (including some not mentioned here, such as Tamerlan’s purchase of five pressure cookers back in January at Saugus Mall).

I say there was no panic by the boys, no plan to go to New York, no killing of Officer Collier at MIT, no carjacking of Dun Meng, no scene at the Shell station, and no shootout.

Rather, I say, Tamerlan went to Mount Auburn St, Watertown (not Laurel St) with a friend and was arrested on the sidewalk and then stripped of clothing and put in a cop car naked.

I think Jahar was in the vicinity of Tamerlan’s arrest and was nabbed by police, kept in custody, and then placed in the boat, probably drugged. No one has ever heard Jahar’s side of the story.

Jahar’s Wardrobe Malfunction

As mentioned, Cabbie Matanov reported Tamerlan’s “facial-hair malfunction” to the police. Now here is a (possible) wardrobe malfunction of Jahar. In the prosecution photo, where  Jahar is shopping for snacks in the Shell convenience store, he has dark pants, maybe black, like track pants. So how did he change his costume to blue jeans?

Granted, the fact that he was missing (at least from the public’s eye) means there was an opportunity for a change of clothing.  But if he was panicked about having been “found out” as the Marathon bomber, he certainly would not go shopping for jeans.

There’s a photo of the alleged shoot-out, also. It was taken as a video by someone named @Katz, but in court only still pictures from the video were shown. Darkness prevents us from discerning the color of Jahar’s pants:

I think the shoot-out story is absurd. It is pathetic that the public would accept the media’s description of huge numbers of heavily-armed cops having a gunfight with two men, one of whom managed to escape. How is that possible?

The @Katz picture must have been in some way faked. Two guys could have been selected for their resemblance to the Tsarnaevs.

As for the carjack story, it, too, should have raised great scepticism from Bostonians. It contains ridiculous aspects:

1. Just the right car was sitting there at the moment Tamerlan needed it? (Meng says he had pulled over to take a phone call.)
2. Tamerlan immediately confessed to Meng that he was not only the Marathon bomber but that he had just killed a cop? Nobody would confess to major crimes while “on the lam”
3. The boys discussed, in Meng’s earshot, a plan to do more damage in Times Square? What a joke.
4. The car just happened to need gas at that critical moment? It caused Jahar to have to use Meng’s ATM to steal $800.

Note: the ATM caper was probably arranged so that we would have “photographic proof” of jahar’s theft.  However, the model-boy they used is not the real Jahar, as anyone can see:

Dun Meng’s original “exposure” of the Tsarnaevs allowed the media at an early stage to get the basics of the narrative.  Dun Meng had been interviewed on TV, disguised and anonymous, telling about Tamerlan’s confession more than a year before the court case was held.

Note: it’s reported that Meng, when being questioned in court about the carjacking, kept his eyes trained on his Northeastern professor.  Did Meng need some assistance in order to perform properly?

Black Pants or Blue Jeans?

There was precious little cross-examination of anyone at Jahar’s trial in April, 2105. The defense accepted the idea of a carjacking and the shootout. They could, even now, ask “Why do we see Jahar at the boat-side in blue jeans, when the prosecution’s CCTV evidence shows him in black pants at the Shell station?”

This raises a question never pursued in court: Where did the panicky – and shockingly bereaved – Jahar hang out for the 17 hours between the shoot-out and the boat-side arrest?

Based on my speculation that everything about the Marathon bombing was scripted, it would make sense for the FBI to keep Jahar in its custody all day.  Time was needed for the governor, Deval Patrick, to teach everyone the meaning of shelter-in-place.

It is not known how Jahar got delivered to the boat.  The choice of Watertown was good; It meant that a house-to-house search could take place in that relatively quiet part of town. Most of the houses there are single or two-family. A search in Boston would have been less tidy – there are large apartment buildings and “miscellaneous people” walking around.

Also, by depositing Jahar into Henneberry’s boat, the opportunity arose for a signed confession to appear on the boat wall. It even had intriguing bullet holes so one would have to try to guess the missing words.

Jahar’s Wounds

There is a famous aerial picture of the inside of the boat, taken from an FBI helicopter. We can see that Jahar is motionless (perhaps drugged?). So the “law enforcement” people must have known that Jahar posed no danger to them.  Yet they shot 228 bullets into the boat!

Note: a normal way to capture a suspect is to pepper-spray him, or set a dog on him, or Taser him. One does not have to use bullets, as in days of old. This was done to increase the drama and increase the fearsomeness of the (poor, unarmed) suspect.

The number of bullets – 228 – is admitted by the police.  We can also see that the hospital report mentions “penetration wounds” which presumably mean from bullets.

Jahar Tsarnaev Should Be Interviewed

There is reason to contest the “evidence” of the “carjacking” that helped a jury convict Jahar, insofar as his costume in the Shell gas station video is not the same as in the boat-side capture scene. (There is also a need to think about the excessive force used in his capture – not to mention the unprecedented aspects of the house-to-house searching.)

The time has come, after exactly four years and a half years of imprisonment, for Jahar to be interviewed. We have many questions to ask him, such as how he got into the boat. Such matters were never aired at the trial. There is no reason why the government should forbid us to learn of the boy’s itinerary that day. After all, he’s on Death Row.

At his sentencing hearing, the already-convicted Jahar made a confession and an apology. This could very well have been under duress. (History has recorded many false confessions, often done to relieve family members of threats.)  When you are already convicted – as Jahar had been for weeks prior to the sentencing — you know that your physical fate is at the mercy of your jailers.

Despite Jahar’s apology, the case against the Tsarnaevs is so flimsy as to be an absolute joke.  Not only does Jahar deserve justice but millions of people need to discover that they were falsely led to believe it was those “two Muslim brothers,” rather than better-equipped criminals (guess who) that made bombs go off during the Marathon.

There is a rumor that Jahar has died in custody. We hope not, but it cannot be ruled out. He cannot be visited or receive mail. He may not even be able to pass messages out through other inmates, as he is in a federal Supermax prison and does not get to socialize (as far as we know). This silencing business is totally un-American.

Fear

What causes the public to go along with media’s nonsense? Most likely it is fear. We all have an amazing fear of challenging the party line. That’s true even when the matter is inconsequential, but here there’s the added fear that if you speak out, you’ll meet violence (as Cabbie Matanov did). For the record: I myself am scared stiff.

“They” have so much power – clearly, the power to control judges and governors. But are “they” secure in their position?  I don’t think so. They at least go to the trouble of trying to make us turn our brains off. That implies that they worry that we will catch them out.

The mathematics of the situation need to be recalculated. Yes, they have power, and weapons, and have probably caused many a citizen’s cultural expectations to change. But they are a tiny minority compared to the whole population.

I think we should recognize our fear. If we could see that fear is the real stumbling block we would be able to attend to that as our main task now.  Alexandr Solzhenitsyn famously said “Oh how we burned in the camps” — lamenting that “we Russians” had not acted sooner against a relatively small group of thugs. He was imprisoned for decades in the Gulag, suffering every manner of torture.

Are you young? Do you want to spend decades burning in the camps? If not, get brave and take chances. You may lose if you act against these thugs, but you are definitely going to lose if you don’t try.

–Mary W Maxwell asks you to read her recent items at GumshoeNews.com and get involved