BOSTON -- Federal prosecutors told jurors Monday that a student knew his friend Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was behind the deadly Boston Marathon bombings when the student removed materials from a dorm room that he thought had been used to make the bombs.
In the first trial involving the bombings that paralyzed Boston, the student, Azamat Tazhayakov, faces obstruction of justice and conspiracy charges.
Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, have been accused of making the bombs -- two pressure cookers filled with explosives and shrapnel -- that blew up near the finish line of the 2013 race, killing three people and injuring hundreds more.
During a manhunt, the police say, the two brothers shot and killed a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, carjacked a sport utility vehicle and led officers on a chase, throwing several pipe bombs from the vehicle. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found hiding in a boat in nearby Watertown, badly wounded.
On Monday in U.S. District Court, Tazhayakov, 20, wore a dark suit and leaned back in his chair, sometimes listening to an interpreter through an earpiece or writing on a pad of paper. He has pleaded innocent.
Tazhayakov is the first of three of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's college friends to go to trial on obstruction charges. The other two men are Dias Kadyrbayev and Robel Phillipos. Tsarnaev met Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev at the University of Massachusetts--Dartmouth, where Phillipos was also enrolled.
Trials for Kadyrbayev and Phillipos are scheduled for September.
In her opening arguments, Stephanie Siegmann, an assistant U.S. attorney, emphasized the friendship between Tazhayakov and Tsarnaev.
"They played video games on their Xbox," she said. "They especially liked FIFA, which is a soccer game. They smoked marijuana together."
Siegmann told the jury that, over dinner in March 2013, Tsarnaev told Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev that he knew how to build a bomb and that gunpowder would be needed. Siegmann said Tsarnaev also discussed martyrdom with his friends during the meal, saying, "You would die with a smile on your face and go straight to heaven."
Then, Siegmann said, less than two hours after the bombings, Tsarnaev texted Tazhayakov the words, "Don't go thinking it's me."
She then laid out the case against Tazhayakov, who is accused of working with Kadyrbayev to remove items -- including a backpack that contained fireworks from Tsarnaev's dorm room -- and of throwing the backpack into a trash bin after they realized he was a suspect in the bombings.
"When they removed all these things, the defendant thought that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was one of the Boston Marathon bombers," Siegmann said. "The defendant and his roommate took all these steps, removing evidence, hiding evidence."
Tazhayakov is not accused of having any involvement with the actual bombing -- a fact that his lawyer, Nicholas Wooldridge, made plain at the beginning of his opening argument.
"It's not about the bombing," Wooldridge told jurors. "Don't get sidetracked. Don't get shocked and awed."
Wooldridge tried to distance Tazhayakov from the act of removing items from Tsarnaev's room and discarding the backpack, saying it was his friend Kadyrbayev who had initiated the search of the dorm room because he was looking for marijuana, and who had taken the backpack and thrown it out at the request of his girlfriend, who has not been charged.
Tazhayakov "never took a backpack out of the dorm room, he never even touched that backpack, and he sure never tossed it," said Wooldridge, who said his client did remove a pair of headphones in the room that belonged to him and was watching a movie while Kadyrbayev threw the backpack away.
Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov are natives of Kazakhstan who entered the country with student visas.
According to the indictment issued last August, after the bombing and after a photo of the Tsarnaev brothers had been posted online by the FBI, Tazhayakov and other friends entered Tsarnaev's dorm room and "removed several items from the room, including Tsarnaev's laptop computer and a backpack containing fireworks."
The items were then taken to an apartment in New Bedford, where they stuffed the backpack and fireworks into the dumpster behind the apartment. By April 19, the FBI had identified Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in news reports as one of the two marathon bombers. On that day, Tazhayakov and a friend "watched as a garbage truck came to their apartment complex and emptied the contents of the Dumpster," according to the indictment.
Liz Norden, the mother of J.P. and Paul Norden, brothers who each lost a leg in the bombings, was present in the courtroom as a spectator. Wooldridge indicated that Tazhayakov's parents were also present.
Tsarnaev has yet to be tried but faces some 30 criminal charges, 17 of which carry the death penalty. His trial is scheduled for later this year.`
A Section on 07/08/2014