Marathon Bombing Suspect #1 Was Trying To Become A US Citizen

As the chaos continues with the hunt for Suspect #2, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, from the Boston Marathon bombings, information is started to be uncovered about the brothers.

Suspect #1, Tamerian Tsarnaev, who was killed Thursday night during their standoff with police in Watertown, MA was training to enter the Golden Gloves competition as a way to earn United States Citizenship.

This two-page spread was featured in a 2010 edition of the comment, the Graduate Student Magazine of Boston University’s College of Communication, and talked about Tamerian’s effort to become a naturalized American.

Here are a couple of facts about Tamerian from the article:

• Tsarnaev, who studies at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and wants to become an engineer, took the semester off from school to train for the competition.
• Family fled Chechnya in the early 1990s because of the conflict there. He lived in Kazakhstan before coming to the US as a refugee.
• In the absence of an independent Chechnya, Tsarnaev says he would rather compete for the US than for Russia.
• He liked the movie Borat, even though some of the jokes are a bit much.
• He doesn’t drink of smoke. “God said no alcohol.”

Maybe the most telling fact.

• Though he’s lived in the U.S for five years, Tsarnaev says, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.”

How does someone who was trying hard to represent the United States in the Olympics turn on our country? Tsarnaev lost to Lamar Fenner of Chicago by decision in the 201+ weight class in the 2009 National Championship and never made it back. Fenner passed away in 2012 because of a heart attack