Last year, nearly a decade after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, Youssef Eddafali wrote a letter. It had been years in the making, and he agonized over every word, but the hardest thing to figure out was the salutation.
Mr. Eddafali, 29, still was not sure who he was writing to. Was it the friend he had once thought of as a brother, whose journey as a young Muslim immigrant had seemed to mirror his own? Or the calculating killer who revealed himself on April 15, 2013, when he murdered and maimed innocent people in the name of the faith they both shared?
In the end, Mr. Eddafali concluded it was both, so he split his missive into two parts. The first he wrote to “the old Jahar,” the boy he had known. The second letter was written to a stranger. He addressed it to “The Monster.”
“Your betrayal broke me,” Mr. Eddafali wrote to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his former friend, who was sentenced to death in 2015 for orchestrating the bombing at the marathon finish line with his older brother, Tamerlan. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a gun battle with police four days later; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev remains on death row.
Three people were killed by the bombs loaded with nails and ball bearings that the Tsarnaev brothers had made: Lingzi Lu, 23, a graduate student from China; Krystle Campbell, 29, a restaurant manager from Medford, Mass.; and Martin Richard, an 8-year-old from Boston. Seventeen lost limbs and more than 250 were injured in the bombing, which led to a dramatic four-day manhunt that shut down the city; the brothers also shot and killed a campus police officer. An unknown number of spectators, runners and emergency responders still experience emotional trauma from that day.
Another group of people, Mr. Eddafali among them, were affected in a different way: They had known Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and considered him a friend. Many were young people in high school or college, on the cusp of adulthood, when the bombing abruptly turned the world they knew into a frightening and unfamiliar place.
Ten years later, as a changed city pauses to honor those who died and reflect on the passage of time, some of those who knew the Tsarnaev brothers still struggle to define how the experience changed them. A decade after they were plunged into guilt, anger, betrayal and shame, they know one thing: There will be no reconciling their before and after, no understanding how or why.
It is a dissonance felt in the wake of every mass shooting, by those who discover to their horror that they know the killer.
“I watch what people say every time it happens — that they had no idea — and I recognize it, because I’ve been there, too,” said Larry Aaronson, 82, who lived on the same street as the Tsarnaev family and taught history at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, where Mr. Eddafali and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, known as “Jahar,” graduated.
There is little research examining the psychic toll on people who had been close to those who kill. The marginality of their position — close to tragedy but connected to its source — can be alienating, stranding them on the outside as their communities gather to heal, and making it feel unsafe or insensitive to discuss their own baffling experience. A dozen people who knew Dzhokhar Tsarnaev declined to speak to a reporter even a decade later, or did not respond to requests for interviews.
“There’s an element of guilt by association, and a weird dichotomy, because the person they knew doesn’t exist anymore,” said Jaclyn Schildkraut, a researcher who has studied mass shootings and is executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government.
The experience “is like being knocked into a parallel universe,” she added, “and you can’t get back.”
