the brothers tsarnaev

My only connection to Boston is the New England Patriots, my favorite sports team for the last decade or more.  And then I know Conan is from there, and so is Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and there was a tea party once, and Harvard is somewhere near there.  But now, I know more.  There is a famous marathon, on Patriots Day, a state holiday.  And then on Patriots Day this year, 2013, near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, two brothers left a couple of bombs that ended up killing three people, including an 8-year old boy, and injuring over a hundred.  There were lost limbs and the like.  The two brothers were immigrants who have been here for about ten years, from near Chechnya.  Yeah, I had to Wikipedia Chechnya to find that it is a federal subject of Russia (and I had to Wikipedia federal subject of Russia too).  Apparently Islam is the primary religion among Chechens, and these brothers, despite outward appearances of being fully assimilated American-raised young men, left online hints that they are radical Islamist sympathizers.  The law enforcement made quick work in identifying and locating them.  Less than four days after Patriots Day, the older brother is dead from a shootout, and the younger brother went on the lamb, caused the entire city of Boston to be on lock-down mode for a day, and was eventually taken into custody after hiding out in a boat in someone's backyard.  He was discovered by the owner of the house who came out to the backyard to take a breath of fresh air from the lock-down and found blood on his boat.  And then there are lots of stories from the marathon itself about acts of heroism, how people went out of their way to help each other, how tragedy brings out the best of people, how dreams were dashed but faith in human spirit were renewed.  I saw on tv a story about this young woman who was running her first marathon.  About half way in, her knee started to bother her.  She persisted on.  Then about half a mile from the finish line, the marathon got shut down and she couldn't finish, nor could she find her family.  She sat on the sidewalk of a side street crying to herself.  Another marathoner who did finish was walking by with his wife, saw the sobbing young woman and without hesitation gave her his hard-earned medal.  He said to her, "You're a finisher."  Yup, this is all high drama, like a Russian novel, except real.