NYT: Katherine Russell Went From 'Social Butterfly' To Alleged Bomber's Wife

Two weeks after Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed and his brother, Dzhokhar, was found hiding in a dry-docked boat in a backyard in Watertown, Mass., Katherine Russell – Tamerlan's widow – and her young daughter remain at her parents' house on Coriander Lane in North Kingstown.

Questions abound about Russell, most specifically: did she know anything about the bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon the Tsarnaev brothers are accused of setting. The two bombs killed three people and nearly 300.

There are few answers, although officials said the DNA and fingerprint samples Russell gave earlier this week did not match what was found on bomb fragments recovered at the scene, The New York Times reported Friday. 

The NYT article quoted former middle school classmate Stephen Constantine, who played alto saxophone with Russell in the band at Wickford Middle School, as saying she was popular and a good musician.

“She could play more complex music than I could and learn it faster, and her sound was warmer and fuller bodied,” he said. In high school, she won an award for her drawing of a cat menacing a mouse. “It was a large colored-pencil drawing of a black cat with its paw raised and a gray mouse scooching out of the way,” her art teacher, Amos Trout Paine, recalled. She quoted a David Bowie song, “Quicksand,” in her high school yearbook.

The NYT article also noted the difference from her upbringing – "in a comfortable home on a leafy street" – to her life as a the young married woman who lived on public assistance and food stamps for a while. 

She moved into his family’s run-down apartment in Cambridge, trading her old life of New England comfort and privilege — her father and grandfather both went to Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale — for the struggles of an immigrant family, with money so tight that they were on public assistance at times.

The article does mention one previous bit of trouble Russell ran into after she graduated from NKHS in 2007. 

Shortly after graduating, she had a brush with the law: she was arrested and charged with shoplifting five items worth $67 from an Old Navy at the Warwick Mall, according to a police report. She performed community service and paid money toward a general restitution fund that benefits crime victims, and the case was dismissed. The lawyer who represented her, J. Patrick O’Neill, who serves in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, said he could not recall details of the case or much about Ms. Russell.

The NYT quotes one classmate's description of Russell from that freshman year.

When Katherine Russell arrived as a freshman at Suffolk University just over five years ago, she seemed to bond so well with her new roommates in their lively dorm opposite Boston Common that one classmate likened them to sitcom characters. “They reminded me of the show ‘Sex and the City,’ ” he recalled. “Two of them were free-spirited, one was materialistic and Katherine was the social butterfly.”

Sometime after that, Russell met Tamerlan Tsarnaev. She converted to Islam and they were married in 2010.

To read the full New York Times article, by Michael Cooper, Serge F. Kovaleski, Richard A. Oppel Jr., and John Eligon, click here.