On April 15, 2013, what was meant to be a celebratory moment concluded in carnage. The bombing of the Boston Marathon killed three people and injured 281 more, and where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is now—the then-19-year-old perpetrator—continues to make headlines.
Born in Kyrgyzstan on July 22, 1993, at age eight Tsarnaev traveled with his family to the United States on a tourist visa in 2002 and claimed political asylum. He became a US citizen on September 11, 2012, the year after he was enrolled at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth initially to study marine biology but switched to nursing. Classmates remember him as “a normal American kid” per a Rolling Stone feature; finding it difficult to believe he could be capable of such horrible crimes less than a year later.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the tragedy, director Floyd Russ (Zion, Malice at the Palace) and executive producer Tiller Russell (Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, Waco American Apocalypse) created a three-part series around the tense, terrifying days that followed the attacks, assembling a minute-by-minute recounting of the manhunt from thousands of hours of closed-circuit video, police radio, and cell phone footage, as well as testimony from the police officers, FBI agents, and ordinary citizens whose heroics led to the killers’ capture. Offering historical context, expert insight, and emotional details from those who knew the bombers personally, American Manhunt told the full story of how the people of Boston came together in their darkest hour to reclaim their city—and the men and women whose lives will never be the same.
Where is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev now?
Where is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev now? Tsarnaev remains behind bars at USP Florence ADMAX, a supermax security prison in Florence, Colorado, and his status is still classified as “death sentence”.
Courtesy of Netflix
On the day of the bombings, Tsarnaev, known as Jahar to his friends, and his brother detonated two pressure cooker bombs packed with shrapnel near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three people were killed and more than 260 others were injured. The FBI released surveillance images of the suspects but the two men remained at large for nearly a week before Tsarnaev was found wounded in a boat after a violent confrontation with police that had killed his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan. It would take authorities nearly three hours to convince him to surrender. Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty to 30 federal charges, including conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death and possession and use of multiple firearms. At the conclusion of his trial on April 8, 2015, he was found guilty of all 30 charges and a month later, he was sentenced to death. In July of that same year, he was placed in a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. The facility, ADX, also houses Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, shoe bomber Richard Reid, and 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. Eventually, Tsarnaev will be sent to prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where federal death row inmates are executed, but he has so far managed to avoid death row.
In July 2020, a three-judge panel overturned Tsarnaev’s death sentence, saying that the judge who oversaw the case did not adequately screen jurors for potential biases. “But make no mistake: Dzhokhar will spend his remaining days locked up in prison, with the only matter remaining being whether he will die by execution,” Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson wrote in the ruling, more than six months after arguments were made, per AP. An attorney for Tsarnaev said they are grateful for the court’s “straightforward and fair decision: if the government wishes to put someone to death, it must make its case to a fairly selected jury that is provided all relevant information.” “It is now up to the government to determine whether to put the victims and Boston through a second trial or to allow closure to this terrible tragedy by permitting a sentence of life without the possibility of release,” David Patton said in an email.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Photo provided by FBI via Getty Images
Come March 4, 2022, the Supreme Court reinstated the bomber’s death sentence. “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, made up of the court’s six conservative justices, per local news outlet WPRI.com
In dissent for the court’s three liberal justices, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, “In my view, the Court of Appeals acted lawfully in holding that the District Court should have allowed Dzhokhar to introduce this evidence.” Breyer has called on the court to reconsider capital punishment. “I have written elsewhere about the problems inherent in a system that allows for the imposition of the death penalty … This case provides just one more example of some of those problems,” he wrote in
In January 2023, Tsarnaev’s attorney again urged a federal appeals court to throw out the death sentence because of alleged juror misconduct, including one juror retweeting a post online that called Tsarnaev “a piece of garbage”. Jurors are not permitted to comment on active cases publicly. “This case was tried in Boston on a promise … that despite the extraordinary impact of the marathon bombing on this community,” a thorough questioning of potential jurors would remove anyone unqualified, Tsarnaev attorney Daniel Habib told the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals judges, per local news outlet WPRI.com. “That promise was not kept.”
American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing is available to stream on Netflix.
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