Convicted Boston Marathon bomber received $1,400 COVID relief check, ordered to hand over to victims

by mcardinal

Chris Lange, FISM News

 

Convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been ordered to hand over a COVID-19 relief payment he received last summer to victims of the deadly attack, according to a federal court filing.

Judge George O’Toole on Wednesday sided with State’s Attorney for Massachusetts Nathanial Mendell’s motion to have the money seized and distributed to the victims of the 2013 act of domestic terrorism that killed three and injured more than 260. 

“By Congressional mandate, the United States has a statutory duty to collect restitution owed to crime victims,” Mendell wrote.

Tsarnaev, a Kyrgyz-American national of Chechen descent, now 28, is currently being held at Colorado ‘supermax’ prison and is among 1.5 million inmates who received COVID stimulus checks in 2021. He was sentenced to death for the attack in 2015 and subsequently ordered to pay $101,129,627 in compensation to his victims. Prior to the ruling, he had paid only $2,202. 

Court documents show that, as of Wednesday, the convicted killer had $3,885.06 in his prison inmate account. In the six years since his conviction, Tsarnaev has received over $21,000 from multiple individuals, including $11,230 from the Office of Federal Defenders in New York. From those funds, he has spent $13,000 on purchases for himself and gifts to his siblings, according to reporting by the Daily Mail.

Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, both radicalized Muslims, planted homemade explosives at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in April 2013. Spectators watched in horror as the bombs detonated, blowing apart the bodies of multiple victims. Spectators Krystle Campbell, 29, Lingzi Lu, 23, Martin Richard, 8, lost their lives in the attack while over 200 others were maimed or injured, many of whom lost limbs.

A nationwide manhunt ensued, during which the brothers shot and killed Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 27. Tamerlan was killed during a subsequent shootout with law enforcement in Waterton, during which Boston Police Officer Dennis Simmonds, 28, was injured. Following his capture and arrest, Tsarnaev admitted that he and his brother had intended to plant more bombs in Times Square.

A Federal Appeals Court vacated Tsarnaev’s death sentence in July 2020, citing improper juror screening by the trial judge. To date, the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to make a determination as to whether that ruling should be overturned. Tsarnaev is currently serving a life sentence.

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