What Really Motivated the Boston Marathon Bombing?
“There’s another side to people that no one ever sees,” says Boston Police Department Superintendent Billy Evans at the beginning of American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing—a lesson relearned just about every day in this country, where mass shootings and heinous massacres are committed not by loud-and-proud psychopaths but by angry, disillusioned and deranged individuals who hide their true selves and motivations from the public so they can successfully execute their atrocities.
The monsters are hiding in plain sight, and that was absolutely true when it came to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two Chechen brothers who committed the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon Bombing, killing four and injuring an additional 260+ during their four-day reign of terror.
Arriving on the heels of Waco: American Apocalypse—and timed to the 10-year anniversary of its subject—American Manhunt (April 12) continues Netflix’s effort to build a library of definitive docuseries about modern media-filtered spectacles. Executive-produced by Tiller Russell, director Floyd Russ’s three-part non-fiction investigation strives for comprehensiveness via an array of archival footage and interviews with virtually every principal player involved in the saga. As a three-dimensional account of those fateful days in Boston and nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, it’s about as exhaustive as possible—and, just as satisfyingly, as suspenseful as it is stirring.
American Manhunt features a who’s who of talking heads that were in the thick of the hunt for Tamerlan and Dzhokhar: Evans; Boston Police Department Commissioner Ed Davis; FBI Special Agent in Charge Rick DesLauriers; U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz; FBI Cyber Division supervisor Kevin Swindon; FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge John Foley; Watertown police officers John MacLellan and Jeff Pugliese; investigative reporter Phillip Martin; Boston Globe reporter David Filipov; Tamerlan’s boxing trainer John Allan.
And then there’s Danny Meng, who was kidnapped by the Tsarnaevs in his car, and whose daring escape from captivity at a gas station was the catalyst for the showdown that resulted in Tamerlan’s death (under the wheel of an SUV that his brother was driving) and Dzhokhar’s flight into the surrounding neighborhood, where he was eventually found hiding in a backyard boat and apprehended. Meng’s commentary, like that of Kevin and Karen McWatters (the latter of whom lost a friend and part of her leg at the marathon), does much to amplify the material’s intimate, up-close-and-personal perspective.
Director Russ relays his tale from every available angle, including from local imam Ismail Fenni and college student Youssef Eddafali, who discuss how, once the bombings took place, they feared that a new strain of post-9/11 Islamophobia would encourage authorities to try, as Eddafli says, “to pin it on Islam.” As it turned out, making such connections required no nefarious intent, since Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were Islamic terrorists with political and personal grievances against the United States.
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If there’s a failing to the series, it's not pointedly questioning Eddafali about his insinuations that an anti-Muslim bias was at play here, given that when it comes to key strategic investigative decisions—most notably, whether or not to release photos of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar to the public—Russ takes a rewarding journalistic tack by asking Davis, Ortiz and DesLauriers about their differing outlooks on important maneuvers, as well as if, in hindsight, they’d do things differently.
For the most part, however, American Manhunt is a thorough hour-by-hour chronicle of the attack and the all-hands-on-deck response to it by local and federal agencies. Russ balances on-the-ground testimonials with a wealth of available video and audio footage of these events, some of which proved central to cracking the case. Culling together thousands of hours of recovered clips (and untold still snapshots) from cell phones and security cameras resulted in the initial evidence that identified Tamerlan and Dzhokhar. Once the culprits’ faces were broadcast on TV and splashed across newspapers, the killers resorted to ever-more-extreme measures, first murdering MIT campus police officer Sean Collier in an attempt to steal his gun, and then holding Meng hostage in order to use his ATM card to acquire cash and his brand-new Mercedes as a getaway car.
American Manhunt boasts a clarity and urgency that keeps tension high, peaking with the Watertown firefight between MacLellan, Pugliese and their fellow officers against Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, who threw firebombs at their adversaries. The proceedings’ first-hand reports convey the intense madness and horror of this entire affair. Director Russ complements that action-oriented immediacy by also addressing the immigrant brothers’ backstory as a means of figuring out what compelled them to choose their monstrous path.
While no great revelations are forthcoming about the “why” of it all, the docuseries recounts how Tamerlan’s fizzled-out boxing career and trip to Dagestan may have spurred his radicalization, and then driven him to coerce his brother Dzhokhar—a popular kid whom everyone says wasn’t an ideologue—into partnering on the bombing.
Tamerlan’s role in a prior September 11, 2011 drug-related triple homicide (in which his best friend Brendan Mess was slain) is raised as a perplexing secondary element of this calamity, albeit in far more cursory fashion than in Hulu’s 2022 eye-opener The Murders Before the Marathon.
American Manhunt isn’t interested in surprises, or even in positing novel theories. In the end, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were simply angry young zealots who blamed their shortcomings and dissatisfaction on America and global Jewish conspiracies, and viewed violence as a holy vehicle for channeling that fury and misery. Instead, the series is merely content to be a complete multiple-POV overview for those who know little about the incident.
As such, American Manhunt’s main calling card is its lucid and engaging storytelling—even its dramatic recreations, in which Tamerlan and Dzhokhar are depicted with fuzzed-out faces in order to avoid glorification and maximize creepiness, are rare and well-executed—as well as its focus on the diverse array of human experiences that together make up its tale. Those narratives are a testament to the courage and selflessness demonstrated by everyone involved in this nightmare, and serve as a reminder that, often, the worst situations bring out the best in people.
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