Boston Marathon explosions: Wife of slain suspect a mystery to neighbours

NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I.—Katherine Russell and her parents live in the kind of neighbourhood that has a bike path to the beach and where the lawns are neat and the dogs stay politely tucked behind electric force fields. Carved out of a tall pine forest, Coriander Lane has room for only seven oversized houses.

On Sunday, her lawyer told the The Associated Press that she did not speak to federal officials who came to her parents' home in North Kingstown, R.I., Sunday evening, where she has been staying since her husband was killed during a getaway attempt early Friday.

 “I spoke to them, and that's all I can say right now,” Amato DeLuca told the Associated Press. “We're deciding what we want to do and how we want to approach this.”

Soon after police identified the deceased bombing suspect as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, news reports surfaced that Russell not only was married to the 26-year-old Tsarnaev, whom she'd met in college, but that she had converted to Islam and that the couple had a 3-year-old daughter.

Russell's family late Friday issued a statement that read, “Our daughter has lost her husband today, the father of her child.”

It continued, “We cannot begin to comprehend how this horrible tragedy occurred. In the aftermath of the Patriot's Day horror, we know that we never really knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev. ... Our hearts are sickened by the knowledge of the horror he has inflicted.” The family asked for privacy.

DeLuca also offered new details on Tamerlan Tsarnaev's movements in the days after the bombings, saying the last day he was alive that “he was home” when his wife left for work. When asked by The Associated Press whether anything seemed amiss to his wife following the bombings, DeLuca responded, “Not as far as I know.” He said she learned her husband was a suspect in the bombings by seeing it on TV. He would not elaborate.

DeLuca said his client did not suspect her husband of anything, and that there was no reason for her to have suspected him. He said she had been working 70 to 80 hours, seven days a week as a home health care aide. While she was at work, her husband cared for their toddler daughter, DeLuca said.

“When this allegedly was going on, she was working, and had been working all week to support her family,” he told the AP.

He said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was off at college and she saw him “not at all” at the apartment they shared with her mother-in-law.

Katherine Russell Tsarnaev was attending Suffolk University in Boston when friends introduced her to her future husband at a nightclub, DeLuca said. They dated on and off, then married in 2009 or 2010, he said.

She was raised Christian, but at some point after meeting Tamerlan Tsarnaev, she converted to Islam, he said. When asked why she converted, he replied: “She believes in the tenets of Islam and of the Qur'an. She believes in God.”

By Saturday, neighbours in this hushed upscale suburb south of Providence were still trying to process the incredible revelation, reluctant to believe their neighbourhood's connection to the worst act of terror on U.S. soil in more than a decade.

“It's unbelievable,” said neighbor Pamela King, who stood in the doorway of her home and bent down every so often to gently block a black cat from escaping out the front door. King said she was out of town all week, following news accounts of the Boston Marathon bombing and manhunt from afar. A friend on Saturday warned her, “Be prepared when you get back to your neighbourhood.”

King, who has lived on the block 3 ½ years, said Katherine Russell's younger sister, Anna, once babysat for her but that she had never met the older sister or her husband. She said she never saw a young mother outside with a baby—with or without a stroller. King recalled seeing a moving van up the street more than a year ago, but said she couldn't be sure whether it had marked Katherine's arrival.

Karen Mather, her next-door neighbour, said she sees Russell's parents waving as she walks or drives by but that “they were really not here a lot” in recent years.

King said she's “outside all the time” and had no idea Katherine and her baby lived a few doors away.

Early Saturday afternoon, a reporter approached the Russell home's open garage door as two young women climbed into a car. One of the women yelled, “Are you kidding? Get off our property!”

A few moments later, a late-model Volvo with Massachusetts plates pulled out of the driveway and disappeared down the street, the passenger covered in blankets.

A few hours later, Judith Russell, Katherine's mother, appeared briefly. Asked by a reporter if her daughter was all right, she said, “Yeah, you know, in a sense.”

Katherine's father, Providence surgeon Russell Warren, refused to answer several questions yelled at him simultaneously, referring all questions to the family's attorney, who did not immediately return a call for comment.

King said she hopes the young widow can shed more light on the bombing.

“If she has any information that can help, I think she definitely needs to come forward,” she said.

With files from The Associated Press