The Brothers (17 page)

Then began a month of paperwork. Reni did not cry anymore. She had to take her husband’s body home to Chechnya, and the process required so many steps, each of which required so many documents that she really did not have to think of anything but getting the right letters and certificates to the right people. The original death certificate indicated that Ibragim was to be buried in the USSR, a country that had been defunct for twenty-two years. The certificate had to be reissued. The new version had Ibragim’s mother’s maiden name where Reni’s last name should have been; it had to be reissued again, and Reni began to suspect that all of this was being done on purpose. Delta Airlines, which operated the only direct flight from Miami to Moscow, refused to take the body on board. Reni was terrified of flying with a layover because she was convinced something would go wrong. She called a Delta supervisor to beg and argue. The explanation she was given, she told me, had to do with Ibragim’s alleged association with Tamerlan. Eventually, the Russian carrier Aeroflot agreed to fly the casket. Ibragim’s father, Abdulbaki, came to Orlando to fly back with Reni and the body. At boarding, Reni was taken aside and subjected to a complete body search.

It was just before takeoff that it all hit Reni: “He and I had talked about going home together one day. And here we were, he and I, flying home. Except I’m in the passenger cabin and he is in baggage. I’d been working all month to bring this about, but it’s like it wasn’t seeping in. I hadn’t slept all month. And now it all came, the tears and everything.”

•   •   •

THEY CHANGED PLANES
in Moscow and flew another couple of hours to Grozny. A group of men met them at the airport. Jamal Tsarnaev was among them: it seemed appropriate for the Tsarnaev family to be present, but it had not been clear if the Todashevs would want Anzor there.

The plane was late—it was almost four in the afternoon when they landed. It was the time of year when days are longest, but the men still thought they should hurry in order to bury Ibragim before sundown, in accordance with Muslim tradition. Tradition actually requires that people be buried by sundown on the day of death, and this was June 20, nearly one month later. With the coffin in a boxy Russian-made van, the men drove in a caravan to the Todashevs’ house to drop off Reni; women do not attend Muslim burials. Ibragim’s mother ran out of the house barefoot and rapped on the van door. One of the men let her in and she threw herself on the coffin, trying to grasp it in an embrace.

“Let me see him!” she wailed.

The men had discussed this earlier and decided that the coffin should stay shut to avoid traumatizing any of the women. The gunshot wound on Ibragim’s head had been stitched up, but they worried about the condition of the body after nearly twenty-four hours in transit.

“Then I want to be buried with him!” screamed his mother.

The men would open the casket later, at the cemetery, out of sight of the women—and later they would report that Ibragim looked fine, and even the smell of the embalming solution struck them as pleasant.

•   •   •

I MET RENI
in July 2014. She was living in a village about three hours outside the city of Volgograd (once called Stalingrad), in the desolate Russian countryside, the land of hopelessness and depopulated villages. In Volgograd itself, there was a lot of new construction: the city was slated to host the European soccer cup in another four years, and stadiums and hotels were going up. I stayed at a brand-new Hampton by Hilton. Reni walked into my hotel room and scanned it with a professional’s skeptical eye: “I see. An electrical teakettle in place of a coffeemaker. The pad and pen are missing. Otherwise, not bad.”

She was out of the hotel business, though, and out of the United States. After the funeral, she did not return. “I’m never setting foot in America again,” she told me. “Everyone is getting either deported or killed. I’m sure I have a mark next to my name and if I went back I wouldn’t be able to find a job.” Nor, she said, did she want to live in America. The realization must have come to Reni when she was already in Russia, because she asked me to take a few things back to the States for her, including a key to the car her brother was now driving in Atlanta. A friend, the bike-loving former supervisor who had called her with the news of Ibragim’s death, had sold her motorcycle for her. Khusein, who had a green card, had not been allowed to return to the United States after a visit to Chechnya, and Tatiana had been deported. Reni waited out her year of mourning and remarried; her new husband’s name was Ibragim, and he was Chechen. She now lived with his family in the Russian village and spent her days helping with the difficult day-to-day of a farm, looking after cattle and milking. She stayed in touch with Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, who gave her updates after each of Dzhokhar’s weekly Wednesday phone calls: he generally reported he was doing well. “I don’t want to tell her this, but I don’t believe they’re going to let him live,” Reni said to me. Like Zubeidat, she was sure of the Tsarnaev brothers’ innocence—they were “set up,” both women kept saying. “At least I know Tamerlan is in heaven,” she said, meaning he had been innocent and he had been murdered, just as Ibragim had been.

A lawyer with an organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations, with offices in Orlando, was, more than a year after Ibragim’s death, still working on a report and a possible lawsuit to be filed on the family’s behalf. In Russia, the Todashev family had also engaged a young Chechen Moscow-educated lawyer named Zuarbek Sadokhanov. I met with him in Grozny the day after the funeral; he was simultaneously jazzed and heartbroken at the prospect of going up against the FBI and the U.S. government itself. “When the state acts unlawfully, this destroys democracy,” he told me earnestly over espressos in a café in a city that had long been the capital of lawlessness in a profoundly lawless country. But this was precisely Zuarbek’s point: “I’m sad. I feel like I’m watching the last perfect justice system in the world destroy itself.”

•   •   •

ON MARCH 25, 2014
—ten months after Ibragim Todashev’s death—the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and a Florida state attorney, Jeffrey Ashton, released separate reports, both of which concluded that the FBI agent who shot Ibragim had acted in self-defense and in defense of the state trooper, and that his actions had been justified.

The 161-page Florida report included detailed interviews with the FBI agents and the Massachusetts policemen as well as neighbors who had noticed something going on in Todashev’s apartment during the wee hours of the interview. The image of Ibragim that emerges from the report is radically different from the image of the gentle, innocent man painted by Elena: in the document he is frightening. More to the point, the officers were frightened of him. Before traveling to Florida they had viewed five videos of Ibragim’s fights, studied the physical traces the fights had left on his body—his broken nose and the “cauliflower ears” deformed from being repeatedly boxed. The fights they watched are indeed scary: filmed in poor lighting, from below, they show lithe, extremely muscular men attacking each other in a cagelike ring. The men wear shorts, boxing gloves, and nothing else, and what they do to each other looks as fierce as a street brawl, and as regulated as one. In one of the videos, Ibragim is knocked to the ground at the very beginning, then pounded by his opponent, but around minute three gets up as though possessed of some superhuman power—and the fight goes on for a couple of minutes more, until he loses.

The officers also viewed a video of the May 4 fight in the Orlando parking lot that had led to Ibragim’s arrest, his second. Ibragim had already been under surveillance for two weeks. The Florida FBI agents filmed him beating up two men until the police arrived. Ibragim, for his part, knew he was being watched, if not filmed. The agents who showed their Massachusetts colleagues the video also explained that they had interviewed people at the gym where Ibragim trained and had been told that “they thought he might be retarded, ah, because of the level of force and, ah, injuries that he was taking and he wouldn’t submit.”

The officers were scared going in, but the interview went better than they could have expected. The report included text messages sent and received by one of the state troopers.

“He signed Miranda. About to tell is [
sic
] his involvement,” he wrote at 10:28.

“Amazing,” someone responded a minute later. An hour and twenty minutes later—four and a half hours into the interview—the trooper grew positively giddy.

“Okay he’s writing a statement now in his apt,” he wrote at 11:53.

And two minutes later: “Whos your daddy.”

And immediately after: “Whos your daddy.”

And: “???”

And half a minute later: “Getting confession as we speak.”

In seven minutes, his mood shifted drastically. He texted the FBI agent and the other trooper: “Be on guard. He is in vulnerable position to do something bad. Be on guard now. I see him looking around at times.”

In another minute, whatever it was that happened that night began happening. Ibragim had stopped writing the confession and had gotten up. The trooper, who had gone from giddy to worried, was now apparently so terrified that he fumbled with his holster. The FBI agent shot Ibragim three times, and he went down. Then the trooper saw exactly what he had seen in one of those fight videos: Ibragim, wounded and bleeding, rose again, like some sort of deathless monster. The FBI agent fired four more shots, one of them hitting Ibragim in the top of the head and three of them hitting him in the back.

The Florida report included a screenshot of the trooper’s phone with the text messages, but the messages following his warning one—“Be on guard”—were redacted, covered with rectangular bars applied to the graphic. A blogger then did what most people with a computer could do: he removed the bars to reveal the messages. (Several journalists successfully repeated the trick.) The next message the trooper sent to his fellow officers—the other trooper and the Massachusetts FBI agent—went out the evening of May 22, nineteen hours after Ibragim died:

“Well done this week man well done joy some time at home and in will talk soon.”

A minute later: “That was supposed to say well done men we all got through it and are now heading home. Great work.”

The un-redacting of the report also revealed the name of the FBI agent who shot Ibragim—and
The Boston Globe
then meticulously verified his identity. He was Aaron McFarlane, he was forty-one years old, and he had been with the FBI since 2008. Before that, he had been a police officer in Oakland, California. While there, he was accused of falsifying a police report, and the Oakland Police Department was sued twice by former suspects who claimed he had physically assaulted them. The Oakland police settled each of the lawsuits for $32,500, and McFarlane left in 2004, with a lifetime annual pension of $52,000.

•   •   •

OF COURSE
they sent a killer to interview Ibragim,
thought Elena.
And look at those text messages in which they congratulate each other for killing him!
Her view of America had changed radically in the months that passed between Ibragim’s death and the publication of the text messages and information about FBI Agent McFarlane.

Elena returned to Fort Stewart in late June 2013, after Reni finally left for Chechnya with Ibragim’s body: Elena’s emergency leave had lasted a month. On June 26, she told me, she was at a doctor’s appointment on base when two sergeants from her unit came to fetch her. “They took me somewhere. A woman came out and, without introducing herself, started to search me and told me to hand over my phone and keys. She said, ‘You can’t take anything with you if you are going inside.’ I said, ‘I’m not planning to go anywhere, at least not alone.’ One of the escorts, a female sergeant, said she’d go in with me, so she was also frisked. When we went in, I saw one of the agents who came to my house before. He said, ‘We have received information that you are planning to buy a gun and shoot FBI agents.’ I said, ‘Tell me, is it illegal to have a gun in the house?’—‘No.’—‘Okay, that’s the only question I have for you, and I have no answers for you anyway.’” The agent did not try to keep her in the room.

Elena told me she had never owned a gun and had no desire to have one.

Three weeks later, the agent called again. Elena hung up as soon as he introduced himself, then recorded his number in her phone as “Terrorist.” He did not call again, though.

In another month, Elena’s commanding officer summoned her to inform her, apologetically, that the FBI had flagged her as being under investigation. As she understood, that essentially meant she was being placed on indefinite paid leave: she could neither carry out her work duties in the military nor be reassigned or promoted as long as she was so “flagged.” The next day, Elena accepted a medical discharge from the Army. She was now forty-four, retired, and, she felt, a lot wiser than she had been a few months earlier.

America’s promise of fairness, openness, and honesty had turned out to be a ruse, she concluded. It was not a better country than Russia; it was just a better liar. Elena had grown up and begun raising her own children in a country that was capable of anything: bombing its own cities out of existence, as it did with Grozny in 1995 and 1999; blowing up more than three hundred people in order to secure an election, as it did in 1999; killing its own citizens abroad and endangering dozens of lives in the process, as it did with a former secret agent in London in 2006. America had said it would be different—its laws were firm, its courts were fair, and its respect for human life was absolute. Nothing in Elena’s lived experience had taught her that a country could really be like that, but as both an immigrant and a new Army recruit, she had accepted the premise enthusiastically.

But the minute she heard her daughter screaming into the phone—“Mama, they killed him!”—she knew she had been fooled. The same rules applied in this country as in the old one. The secret police killed people when they wanted to; a reason could always be found later. The secret police could and would engineer tragedies to their own ends, or to the government’s; someone to blame could always be found later.