The Twitter account of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, @j_tsar.At 8:04 p.m., five hours after the Boston Marathon bombings on Monday, the Twitter account belonging to the 19-year-old suspect captured Friday night posted this message:
Then, just after midnight, almost nine hours after the bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s account, called Jahar, posted another message:
The next day, a post complained that one of the stories circulating online about a bombing victim was untrue.
And, on Thursday, at 1:43 p.m., as President Obama was visiting with victims and their families at Mass General Hospital, this final post read:
Since opening up this Twitter account on Oct. 25, 2011, with a post about doing laundry in a college dorm, Dzhokhar has posted more than 1,000 public messages. Since he and his brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a gun battle with police, were identified as suspects in the bombing, the Twitter feed has been featured on Buzzfeed and has been the subject of much online discussion.
Both college and high school friends openly discussed his account among their surprise to learn that he was involved in the attacks. After the F.B.I. released photos Thursday night, one of his followers, who has since deleted her account, messaged him on Twitter: “lol, Is this you? I didn’t know you went to the marathon!!!!â€
While the Twitter posts offer a glimpse of the teenager’s day-to-day life and musings, they do not provide clear answers to the question that President Obama asked Friday night, about why the attack took place.
There are no obvious clues to indicate a motive or clear evidence of a plan. He also has Russia’s version of a Facebook page, where he says his worldview is Islam. He makes few references to his family on Twitter. In one post, he talks about missing his father, who had moved back to Russia from Cambridge. He barely mentions his 26-year-old brother, who exerted a strong influence on him, as our colleagues Erica Goode and Serge F. Kovaleski reported.
On the account, Dzhokhar expresses pride in his Muslim faith and his ethnic Chechen heritage but the posts do not discuss terrorism or Islamic extremists.
Blatant anti-American statements are not a consistent theme. But, last September, before he became a naturalized citizen on Sept. 11, however, he wrote a post
saying that he doesn’t understand “why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job.â€
Starting in the fall of 2011, he documents his life as a college student, including numerous posts about struggling with homework, mostly messages about girls, cars, rap music and two more posts about laundry. As Charles M. Blow notes in his column in The New York Times, the posts began to take a more serious tone starting last fall, “offering a window into a bifurcated mind â€" on one level, a middle-of-the-road 19-year-old boy, but on another, a person with a mind leaning toward darkness.â€
A number of the posts contained puzzling statements that became the subject of much discussion on the Internet starting Friday, including a message in February about killing Abraham Lincoln during a two-hour nap.
Lori Andrews, a lawyer and privacy expert, warns about the risks of examining messages on social media, when the context is unknown. “You can’t judge people in retrospect by their Twitter feeds,†said Ms. Andrews, author of a book called, “I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy.†“Context matters.†She also said that teenagers often do not understand the ramifications of what they post.
But multiple posts in the weeks before the attack are drawing scrutiny.
The weekend before the bombings, however, there were few clues of the mayhem that would come at 2:50 p.m., killing three people and injuring 170 others at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Among the tweets, he teased a friend about liking “Game of Thrones†and made a comment about getting a haircut.
