Younger suspect partied: Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev was at a party on Wednesday night amid a massive police investigation, fellow students said.
“He was just relaxed,” a student, who wished not to be named, told the Boston Globe on Saturday. The party he attended included some of his friends from intramural soccer.
He was also on the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth campus every day after the bombing until late Thursday, an official also told CNN.
Where Tsarnaev lived, at a dorm, some students joked on Thursday that the person in the FBI photos that were released could have been him.
“We made a joke like, that could be Dzhokar,” Pamala Rolon was quoted as saying. “But then we thought it just couldn’t be him. Dzhokar? Never.”
Rolon added that during the week, “he studied. He hung out with me and my friends. I’m in shock.”
Rolon said that it did not appear that Tsarnaev was heavily religious or involved in a political cause.
“I think he’s Muslim, but not so religious,” she told the paper. “He’s a normal city kid.”
Tsarnaev was the subject of a massive manhunt on Friday that lasted into the night before he was captured after being discovered in a boat. His older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed on Thursday night during a police shootout.
The New York Times reported that Tsarnaev was struggling at Dartmouth, getting several failing grades over three semesters.
Former classmate Sierra Schwartz told NPR that he was “friendly, quiet — but not in an alarming way, he was just soft-spoken. But very funny, very sweet, very sociable — always had someone to eat lunch with. He never seemed like an outcast, ever.”
