The Brothers (16 page)

Elena herself felt like she was finally settling into a good life. After two years in Germany she requested a transfer to Georgia: she had spent only a few years in Atlanta, but she felt like the city was home, both because Nyusha was there and because it was where Elena first landed as a Russian mail-order bride. She and seventeen-year-old Alex returned to Georgia in March 2013. She was now based at Fort Stewart, 230 miles southeast of Atlanta, and Elena immediately set about house-hunting in Savannah, the beautiful historic town about forty minutes away, toward the coast. A month later, she was closing on her first house. The date was April 15.

•   •   •

ELENA DID NOT BEGIN
to grasp the impact of the Boston bombing until two weeks later, when her daughter was detained at the airport on the way home. Reni-Nyusha told her mother that Ibragim had been called in for questioning and said that the FBI was following him everywhere he went. On May 10, during a visit to Reni, Ibragim came down to see Elena in Savannah. Reni had asked him to run some things of hers from Atlanta to her mother’s house. Ibragim struck Elena as depressed. She was also surprised to see he was still limping, ostensibly a consequence of a knee operation back in March. It might in fact have been the result of a fight he had had in an Orlando parking lot a few days earlier.

Around seven-thirty in the evening on May 21 someone knocked on Elena’s door. It was two FBI agents. “What’s our fools’ psychology?” she ranted to me a year later. “If we haven’t done anything wrong, we fear nothing. I even kept telling them they were doing good for the country.” Obviously, she let them into her house.

“They spent two hours asking me the same questions over and over again: Did they sleep together? Did they sleep on the couch together when they spent the night at my place? How religious was he? Did he abuse her? I told them that if anyone had so much as touched my baby in a bad way, I would have killed them. That’s exactly what I said.” That is easy to believe. Elena is a large, shapely woman with long blond hair—the very image of an all-powerful Russian matriarch, as well as of the ideal Russian mail-order bride, and the very opposite of her own daughter, who is slight, dark-haired, and soft-spoken.

After a couple of hours of circular questioning, Elena asked the agents to leave. She called her daughter.

“I just had a visit from them,” said Elena.

“So did I.”

Elena tried calling Ibragim, but he did not pick up.

•   •   •

AFTER TRYING IBRAGIM
unsuccessfully at five in the morning, Reni got ready for work and jumped on her motorcycle. As she left her apartment complex, she noticed a car. Everything about the car was conspicuous: the way it was parked, across two spaces, the man at the wheel, who was white—an unusual sight in this neighborhood—and the fact that he was sitting at the wheel of a parked car in the wee hours of the morning. Ibragim had mentioned being followed by the FBI, but Reni did not yet realize that overt, menacing surveillance is a typical FBI tactic that was being applied to several of Tamerlan’s friends. She did know that the man at the wheel had to be an agent. She raised the face shield of her motorcycle helmet and gave the guy a stare she hoped conveyed the depth of her disdain for him, and rode away. The car followed her, but she lost it easily and rode to the Holiday Inn, where she was working the morning shift. The FBI car, as it turned out, went to the Hilton, where she was supposed to work that afternoon and evening.

At seven o’clock Reni’s phone rang; it was a former supervisor with whom Reni had stayed friends. He was also a biker, and he, his wife, and Reni often took weekend riding trips together.

“What’s your husband’s last name?” he asked. “It says in the paper that a guy named Ibragim has been killed in Orlando.”

The thing about working at a hotel is that there is always a newspaper at hand early in the morning. Reni grabbed a copy of
USA Today
off the top of a stack and found the headline. The FBI agent called from the Hilton just then; she told him where she was, and he said he was coming. It took him forty minutes to get there. Meanwhile, Reni kept dialing her mother.

Elena had a training session that morning. She could not pick up when her daughter called or when an unknown number began showing up on her phone every few minutes. She finally picked up when the training ended, around seven-thirty in the morning.

“Hello. We were at your house last night.”

This was when she lost her cool. “You are going to start calling me at work now? I told you everything yesterday. I have nothing else to say to you.”

“We have something to tell you. Ibragim Todashev died of gunshot wounds this morning.”

Elena hung up and called her daughter. Reni was screaming into the phone: “Mama, they’ve killed him!”

“Then I knew that they weren’t kidding,” Elena told me. She rushed to do the paperwork for an emergency leave; her commanding officer was understanding, but bolting from work at an Army base still requires a lengthy bureaucratic procedure. Meanwhile, the two FBI agents from the evening before came.

“You don’t have to worry about your children,” said the one who usually did the talking. “Your family is safe.”

“Why? Why?” Elena remembers screaming, meaning,
Why was Ibragim killed?

“He became aggressive,” the agent told her.

“What are you telling me that my children are safe for when you just killed one of them? Look at me—I’m being aggressive now, too. Are you going to kill me?”

What Elena remembers the FBI agent doing next is this: “He placed his foot up on the chair right next to where I was sitting, and he hiked his pant leg up. He had a gun strapped to his shin. He said, ‘If you touch my gun now, my partner can kill you. He has that right.’ The gun was just about level with my face. It’s a good thing I didn’t reach for it then. Or I wouldn’t be talking to you today.”

•   •   •

WHAT EXACTLY
Ibragim Todashev did to get himself killed was not clear then and is not clear now. By the day of his death, he had been what the FBI called “interviewed” three times. The first time, on April 20, began with Ibragim on the ground on the condo complex’s bucolic lawn, with armed men crowded around him: this was the manner in which the FBI first ID’d him, though he was never arrested and all his conversations with the FBI were, technically, voluntary. From that point on he was under constant overt surveillance. In addition, the FBI took all of his electronics—but returned them a day later. At least at some points, the FBI appears to have had a drone follow him. And on May 16, his girlfriend, Tatiana Gruzdeva, was arrested.

The other women in Ibragim’s life seem to have had varying levels of awareness of Tatiana’s existence: Elena thought Tatiana was Ibragim’s roommate, and Reni thought she was the girlfriend of Ibragim’s best friend, Khusein Taramov. In any case, Tatiana was arrested for alleged visa violations, leaving Ibragim living in the apartment alone.

On May 21, Ibragim got a call from the FBI agent he had seen a few times over the preceding month. He said that a group of agents from Boston had come to Orlando and wanted to talk to Ibragim—and that this would be the last interview. Ibragim still did not want to make the trek downtown to the FBI offices, so the agents agreed to come to him. He wanted to meet at a hookah bar; they eventually settled on talking in his apartment. Ibragim was apparently scared of the FBI at this point: he asked Khusein, who was also from Chechnya, to come to his place and stay there during the interview.

The team from Boston consisted of one FBI agent and two state troopers. A Justice Department report later described them as a homicide team. They were in Orlando to investigate the triple murder in Waltham in September 2011, the one in which Tamerlan’s best friend, Brendan Mess, and another Rindge and Latin graduate were killed. Khusein was not allowed to be in the apartment; a Florida FBI agent kept him in the parking lot, talking. Ibragim lived in one of those Orlando planned communities that look like they have been airlifted from a place that never existed. The condos are small vertical affairs, but each has its own entrance and two levels. The facades are a combination of cheap texture paint and equally cheap siding, but the backs feature double-height windows and sliding doors that open onto a lake with bridges and a fountain. Khusein and the Florida FBI agent stayed in the working-class front; Ibragim spent his last hours sitting by the sliding door, looking out onto the aspirational back. At seven-thirty in the evening, the homicide team from Massachusetts began questioning Ibragim, just as the FBI agents in Atlanta and Savannah began questioning Reni and Elena. After the interviews in Georgia ended, the one in Florida went on—and on.

According to the report, around ten-thirty Ibragim slowly began confessing to having been Tamerlan’s accomplice in the triple murder. In another hour, he agreed to write a statement about it. Around midnight, one of the state troopers went out to the parking lot to get Ibragim’s phone from Khusein. While he was out of the building, something happened. Early reports had the remaining two officers saying, variously, that Ibragim had grabbed a broomstick and charged the officers with it, and that he had run to the kitchen area to grab a knife. The final official report said that Ibragim jumped up from the mattress on which he had been sitting composing his confession, threw a coffee table up in the air, knocked the FBI agent out of his chair, ran into the kitchen area, grabbed a metal utility pole, raised it over his head with both hands, and charged the trooper, who raised his hands to his face to protect it. The FBI agent fired seven shots at Ibragim, killing him.

•   •   •

IT WAS
THE BOSTON GLOBE
that first reported that law enforcement seemed to be investigating Tamerlan’s possible connection to the September 2011 triple murder. The newspaper’s source was a relative of one of the victims, who had been questioned by police following a months-long lull during which the investigation seemed to have gone dormant.

In the spring of 2011, after nearly a year of marriage, Reni had demanded that Ibragim find a way to make money. He went to Boston that summer and worked as a van driver for an adult-care center. According to the law enforcement narrative that eventually emerged, he left the city immediately after the killings.

Reni told me Ibragim had actually left Boston earlier and was not there on September 11, the day the three men were murdered. She said she could see that from the records of their joint checking account: the charges Ibragim was making using his debit card showed he was elsewhere. Reni has the kind of memory and attention to detail that make her quite certain of things like this. But the bank, she said, had already deleted records for 2011 by the time she tried to get proof of Ibragim’s alibi.

Nearly a year after Ibragim’s death, the confession he did not finish writing would be leaked to the media. Written in slanted Russian-style cursive on a pad of white ruled paper, it said:

My name is IBRAGIM TODASHEV. I wanna tell the story about the robbery me and Tam did in Waltham in September of 2011. That was [illegible] by Tamerlan [illegible] went he [illegible] to me to rob the dealers. We went to their house we got in there and Tam had a gun he pointed it [illegible] the guy that opened the door for us [illegible] we went upstairs into the house [illegible] 3 guys in there [illegible] we put them on the ground and then we [crossed out] taped their hands up

This short description contains four details that are inconsistent with what little is known about the murders. First, it was clearly not a robbery: five thousand dollars in cash and even more in marijuana had been left behind. Second, if Tamerlan had a gun, why did he not use it to kill the men instead of slashing their throats? Third, two of the bodies had signs of struggle, while this confession seems to describe them as lying down on the floor and allowing themselves to be immobilized without resisting. Finally, the men were not found with their hands taped up—nor were they found all together: the bodies were laid out in separate rooms and their blood had pooled there, suggesting that those were the rooms in which they were killed.

There may be explanations for all of these discrepancies. Tamerlan may have, for example, initially told Ibragim that the crime he was planning was a robbery. Indeed, he may have done this in order to persuade Ibragim to help. It is conceivable that Tamerlan had a gun he could not or did not want to fire, for reasons either technical or conceptual. The struggles may have occurred when the men were being taken to different rooms. And the killers may have removed the tape after the victims were dead. Alternatively, the confession may have been written, or dictated, or both, by someone who lacked specific information about the murders.

Two things are certain. One, Reni is quite sure that the handwriting is Ibragim’s: the document is genuine. And two, Ibragim is dead and so is Tamerlan, which means it is virtually impossible that the facts of the Waltham murders will ever be fully known.

•   •   •

WHEN SHE WAS
at last able to leave the base, Elena had to drive to Savannah to change into civilian clothing. Then she drove the two hundred fifty miles to Atlanta, straight to the Holiday Inn. Reni was in one of the hotel rooms with the FBI agents and her manager; she was afraid to be alone with the agents. “I kept saying to them, ‘Show me what you say he wrote with his own hand,’” Reni told me. “They kept saying, ‘We don’t have anything here.’”

That afternoon Elena drove her daughter the four hundred–plus miles down to Orlando. Reni’s phone kept ringing, and she kept trying to tell people what she knew but finding herself unable to speak. She’d cried and screamed so much that morning that she still had not regained her voice. She phoned Ibragim’s mother, whom she called Mama. “Mama, they have killed him.”

In Orlando, they met up with Khusein, who told them what he knew. They drove to the medical examiner’s office. “When I asked them how many bullets,” Reni told me, “I sure didn’t expect to hear that kind of number. I fell facedown on a table and I wailed. I said, ‘I want to see the body.’—‘Are you sure?’—‘I’m sure.’ They wheeled him in on a gurney, he had a sheet covering him up to his neck. They had us standing on the side where you couldn’t really see the wounds. His eyes were still open, and they were this murky gray color. His upper jaw looked clenched but the mouth was slightly open. And I started saying, ‘Mama, why isn’t he getting up? When has this ever happened that we are all standing around him and he is not getting up?’ It was like I knew everything but I couldn’t believe anything.”