Via Instapundit there is this disturbing news of the personal struggle for self improvement that the Tsarnaev brothers were on:
In the wake of the Marathon bombings, Middlesex County began to probe a link between the elder Tsarnaev and Brendan Mess, one of the three men killed in the gruesome slaying on Sept. 11, 2011. Officials said Mess and two men were found in a Waltham residence with their throats slit and their bodies covered with marijuana. Tamerlan and Mess were once roommates and did boxing and martial arts training together.
Now law enforcement officials tell ABC News that some crime scene forensic evidence provided a match to the two Tsarnaev brothers. The officials also said records of cell phones used by the Tsarnaevs appears to put them in the area of the murders on that date.
Their throats were slit. Which seems to be a thing for jihadis dealing with enemies, doesn't it?
Mind you, I'm just a history and political science major, so take my amateur psychology speculation with all the salt you want, but was this crime part of the "radicalization" of the bombers? The obvious explanation is that the murders were done on September 11, 2011 because the brothers were already radicalized and this was just an earlier (the first?) jihadi attack they carried out. But it is possible that the date is a coincidence. Or that the date simply made it easier to think of escalating a personal dispute to the level of murder with no prior planning.
Did a personal dispute--rather than some anger at American policy--that led to murdering three people shake the brothers so much that they sought to cloak their killings in the justification of jihad? Killing isn't that easy on the brain, I've read. So making the murders part of the jihadi would have a lot of appeal to the brothers even if they weren't consciously aware of their motives. Carrying out another act of violence for the jihad--the Boston Marathon bombing--would make the earlier killings easier to set into the jihadi template and remove the murders from the realm of crime and sin, would it not?
And if the brothers killed those men on September 11, 2011, it makes it easier to understand why there was no escape plan after the Boston Marathon bombing. They stayed in place after the September 11, 2012 killings. Why not repeat what worked? Why assume they'd be caught if they weren't caught then? Why not stay put?
This is just a lead. There is nothing firm from the authorities on linking the brothers to the murders, let alone supporting my sheer speculation of both what might have happened and motives. But it bears following.
