Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is still trending in social media, but soon his name will fade from memory — taking with it those horrific images of streets stained crimson with blood, faces contorted with pain and fear and limbs mangled beyond recognition.
Boston and the rest of us might forget the details of who Tsarnaev was during the 19 years before his misguided spasm of violence changed everything for hundreds of people — but we can’t forget what he did. There’s no glory here, just sadness.
More and more, the angry young man with the big body count seems to have become a part of our lives in places like Boston, Aurora, Newtown, Charleston. So much so, there is a movement to avoid uttering the names of the killers and the accused: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, James Eagan Holmes, Adam Lanza, Dylann Roof.
When I write about Holmes, my Twitter feed is set upon by people demanding I join their movement and not publish his name. They are well-intentioned, but I can’t avoid the facts.
As the people Tsarnaev hurt and robbed of loved ones walked one by one to the courtroom podium Wednesday and shared their pain, each of them referred to Tsarnaev as “the defendant.” A handful said they could find forgiveness in their hearts, but many probably never will. What he did is unforgivable.
Why they choose not to speak his name is understandable. But I must.
Concealing facts, however unsavory, merely gives those facts more power, I’ve learned. And so, I will continue to name the bad guys — not to glorify them, but so we can all know these young men and judge them even if we can’t understand them. To do anything less would be irresponsible.
Bill “Teko” Harris, a political radical from another era, once told me what he’d learned with 20/20 hindsight. Harris was a founder of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the people who kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. He’d once been an idealistic young man, out to change the world. He wound up in prison for, among other things, his role in a bank robbery in which the wife of a doctor was shot and killed.
“Did I accomplish anything?” Harris mused years ago over a breakfast of eggs Benedict. “Yeah, I accomplished ignominy.”
So it will be with Tsarnaev and a holy war fueled by the Internet’s false prophets.
At a time when we’re struggling with what to say or do about all these armed, angry young men, U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole nailed it, with the help of Verdi and Shakespeare. By invoking the classics in his parting words to Tsarnaev, he reminded us that evil has walked among us for a very long time.
“One of Shakespeare’s characters observes: ‘The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.’ So it will be for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,” the judge began.
Tsarnaev may have believed he’d gain paradise wrapped in glory, but as the judge so clearly pointed out, destiny took him in another direction. This holy warrior is headed to death row.
O’Toole imposed the jury’s sentence: The death penalty times six.
“Whenever your name is mentioned, what will be remembered is the evil you have done,” O’Toole told Tsarnaev.
“No one will remember that your teachers were fond of you. No one will mention that your friends found you funny and fun to be with. No one will say you were a talented athlete or that you displayed compassion in being a Best Buddy or that you showed more respect to your women friends than your male peers did.
“What will be remembered is that you murdered and maimed innocent people and that you did it willfully and intentionally. You did it on purpose.”
How’s that for taking the long view? But O’Toole was just getting warmed up.
He told Tsarnaev that his attempts to justify what he did by convincing himself his victims were not innocent “was a monstrous self-deception.”
To get there, Tsarnaev had to redefine who he was, with tragic consequences. “You had to forget your own humanity, the common humanity that you shared with your brother Martin and your sister Lingzi.”
Martin Richard was 8 when he was standing on the marathon sidelines, and his 70-pound body took the full brunt of the blast from Tsarnaev’s homemade pressure cooker bomb. He’d placed it in a backpack right behind the boy and stood there for four minutes. Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old grad student from China, wasn’t far away; the blast tore through her lower body, too.
Both bled to death on Boylston Street, and the sounds and images of their final moments will haunt everyone who witnessed this trial.
And then, the judge turned his attention to the late Anwar Al-Awlaki and other extremists whose violent Internet message incites young men like Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, to carry out lone wolf missions of jihad.
“It is tragic, for your victims and now for you, that you succumbed to that diabolical siren song,” the judge said. “Such men are not leaders but misleaders. They induced you not to a path to glory but to a judgment of condemnation.”
No God worth following would embrace violence, the judge added, quoting from Verdi’s “Otello.” In the opera, the evil character Iago tries to justify his malevolence, singing, “Credo in un Dio crudel.”
The judge is a huge opera fan, but the meaning of Iago’s words was lost on no one in that courtroom: “I believe in a cruel God.”
“Surely someone who believes that God smiles on and rewards the deliberate killing and maiming of innocents believes in a cruel God,” O’Toole said. “That is not, it cannot be, the God of Islam. Anyone who has been led to believe otherwise has been maliciously and willfully deceived.”
Those are the words I carry away from this trial.