Convicted Boston Marathon Bomber Received $1,400 COVID Check

Haley Cornell
Updated ·2 min read

BOSTON — Convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev received a $1,400 COVID-19 relief payment while in prison last summer, according to a federal court filing.

Now, federal prosecutors are asking the Bureau of Prisons to return the money being held in an inmate trust for Tsarnaev to the form of payment for the victims of the deadly 2013 attack.

Acting U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts Nathaniel Mendell has filed an order "authorizing the Board of Prisons to turn over all funds," adding that Tsarnaev owes the government and the victims of the bombings a total of $101,129,627.

Tsarnaev was convicted in 2015 for the deaths of Krystle Campbell, 29, Lingzi Lu, 23, Martin Richard, 8, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 27, from the April 15, 2013 attack.

Boston Police Officer Dennis Simmonds, 28, was injured in the Watertown shootout in which his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed, died in April 2014.

The Tsarnaev brothers set off two shrapnel bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Boylston Street in Boston, leaving hundreds injured.

According to the filing, Tsarnaev received a $1,400 COVID-19 relief payment on June 22, 2021.

The motion filed Wednesday claims that Tsarnaev has approximately $3,885 in his inmate trust account.

The new filing in U.S. District Court in Boston is seeking all of the $21,071 Tsarnaev has collected in his inmate account while awaiting a death penalty decision in U.S. Supreme Court.

Mendell said between May 2016 and June 2021, Tsarnaev received multiple deposits from the Office of Federal Defenders of New York, and various payments from more than 32 other individuals.

So far, Tsarnaev has only paid $2,202 of the $3,000 special assessment and $101,126,627 in criminal restitution he was sentenced to pay in January 2016.

To this day, the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to decide if Tsarnaev's death sentence will be reinstated after the death penalty was removed back in 2020, even after the Biden Administration tried to overturn the ruling in Oct. 2021.

This article originally appeared on the Boston Patch