The burial of Boston Marathon bombing Tamerlan Tsarnaev inVirginia
DOSWELL, Va. - The Muslim cemetery where the remains of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev now lie is located off a gravel road in a region of central Virginia known for thoroughbreds, the Civil War, and the Kings Dominion amusement park.
The body of bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was in limbo at a Worcester funeral home before it was secretly taken to Virginia.
The Al-Barzakh Cemetery currently has 47 marked graves and four unmarked graves, one of which presumably now contains Tsarnaev’s body. Tsarnaev was buried here after his remains spent nearly a week in a Worcester funeral home, while relatives and funeral director Peter Stefan searched for a cemetery willing to accept the alleged terrorist’s body.
Tsarnaev’s burial caught officials in Caroline County by surprise, including Sheriff Tony Lippa, who arrived at the cemetery around 1:30 p.m. today, searching for someone at the cemetery to speak with.
Asked if he was blindsided by the burial, he said, “Of course, I am. Can’t you tell?”
He walked up to a neighboring house, where he thought the owner of the cemetery lived. No one answered the door.
In a statement, Caroline County Administrator Charles M. Culley Jr. said he had no say in the decision to bury Tsarnaev’s body in Doswell.
“Caroline County was not consulted or given any input into the decision-making process for determining a burial site for this individual,” Culley said. “We had no advanced notice of the decision and unfortunately learned of the selection of a burial site through the media.”
Doswell, an unincorporated village in Virginia, is bisected by Caroline and Hanover counties and lies roughly 25 miles north of Richmond.
“We would much prefer to be associated with positive news reports from the national media, but unfortunately had no say in the matter,” Culley said in the statement.
In a telephone interview, Gary Wilson, the Caroline County director of economic development and tourism, would not comment specifically on Tsarnaev’s burial location, but said the county’s residents have shared Boston’s pain in the bombings’ aftermath.
“Caroline County plays ‘Sweet Caroline,’ too, though not with the same regularity as Boston does,” Wilson said, referring to the Neil Diamond song played during the eighth inning of every Red Sox home game. “Now, we think of it differently, in solidarity with Boston.”
The gravesite is several miles off Interstate 95, past Kings Dominion, an amusement park with a fake miniature Eiffel Tower and several rollercoasters and in a region where legendary Triple Crown thoroughbred winner Secretariat was born.
On the way to the cemetery, there’s a green and white sign off the road that reads, “Al-Barzakh Islamic Cemetery.”
There are electric power lines overhead and one of the amusement park roller coasters is visible in the distance. This afternoon before news of the Tsarnaev burial was widely known, the cemetery was quiet, except for the chirping of some birds and the sounds coming from trucks from local television stations parked nearby.
But word was beginning to spread.
One man heard it on the news and drove out near the site. But he didn’t want to see the grave, saying if he did he would spit upon it.
“They should have burned him and sent him back to his mama,” said Wayne Pierce, a 61-year-old restaurant owner. “I just can’t believe this. I don’t know how they slipped him in like this.”
At the nearby Frog Level Market, reaction was mixed among shoppers who now face the prospect of seeing their community, which boasts of its connection to the famous racehorse, will now be known as the resting place for an alleged domestic terrorist.
“He’s a Muslim. We don’t need that here,” Margaret Stevens, a 68-year-old-retiree, said as she bought items at the market. “All that stuff started in Boston. It’s just not right. They shouldn’t have brought him. It didn’t happen here.”
She added, “I don’t care what they do with [the body] as long as they don’t bury him here.”
Robert Carter, a 66-year-old retiree who had just emerged from the same market, was more indifferent.
“I’m just kind of surprised,” he said. “Me? I wouldn’t [bury the body]. But if somebody feels like they should do it, it’s their rights.”
According to Martha Mullen, a 48-year-old Richmond woman, she was upset by the protests in Worcester at the Stefan funeral home and decided to help find a place for the suspected terrorist to be buried. She reached out to Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia, which agreed within an hour to provide a burial plot at its cemetery here, the Globe reported today.
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DOSWELL, Va. -- Authorities in the Virginia county where Tamerlan Tsarnaev is buried said this morning that they have reviewed his burial documents and the interment “appears to be legal.”
Caroline County Sheriff Tony Lippa said he was up until 3 this morning examining paperwork from the burial and transfer of the body to the Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia, which handled Tsarnaev’s burial Thursday in Doswell, Va., about 15 miles north of Richmond.
“It appears at this point, from the documentations that we have here [that] the funeral home transportation of the body has been done properly,” Lippa told the Globe.
Caroline County officials said Friday that they had been blindsided by the body’s burial in their community and they would determine whether it had been buried in accordance with the law.
They also asked the Virginia attorney general to investigate the legality of the burial, but a spokesman for the attorney general’s office said Friday night that the office had no jurisdiction over the burial.
If any laws were broken, Caroline County officials said Friday, they would investigate removing Tsarnaev’s body. But if the laws were followed, they said, they would have little choice but to leave the body there.
Lippa said this morning he had spoken with Peter Stefan, owner of Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Parlors in Worcester.
He also has reviewed the transfer documents, which were signed by the Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia upon receipt of the body on Thursday morning. He said he was satisfied that those documents were completed as they should have been.
Lippa said he is waiting to talk with officials at the Islamic Center of Greater Richmond, who have spoken out in opposition to Tsarnaev’s burial. But it remains unclear, Lippa said, whether they would have any control over the body’s burial – or any legal ability to object to it after it has been buried.
Lippa said he also plans to speak with Worcester Police Chief Gary Gemme, although Lippa declined to say what concerns Gemme might resolve.
“This is going to be a sheriff to police chief talk,” he said.
At the cemetery, where Tsarnaev’s body lies under a small, rounded mound of clay-colored earth, it was quiet today, the stillness punctuated only by occasional gunfire from nearby hunters.
Sheriff’s deputies and state troopers made periodic visits in patrol cars, and curious residents from the surrounding rural area drove up a narrow gravel and dirt road to Al-Barzakh Cemetery, where they eyed the grounds briefly and left.
Charles H. Abdel-Alim, 63, a Richmond schoolteacher who donated the acre-size plot as a Muslim cemetery about 15 years ago, lives beside the graveyard and said he welcomed the decision to bury Tsarnaev’s body beside his home,
“The person is one thing; the body is another,” Abdel-Alim said. “Once we heard of this, the obligation came to us. I feel ashamed that they had to come all the way down here.”
Boston bomb suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev buried in Virginia cemetery
A flower is placed on the alleged burial site of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Doswell, Va. on May 10, 2013. Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of Tamerlan Tsarnaev said Tsarnaev was buried in the cemetery in Doswell, near Richmond. /Robert A. Martin,AP Photo/The Free Lance-Star
DOSWELL, Va. Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been buried in a cemetery in central Virginia, infuriating some members of the area's Islamic community who say they weren't consulted and flooring at least one neighbor who said she didn't even know she lived near a burial ground.
The secret interment this week at a small Islamic cemetery ended a frustrating search for a community willing to take the body, which had been kept at a funeral parlor in Worcester, Mass., as cemeteries in Massachusetts and several other states refused to accept the remains.
Tsarnaev, 26, was killed April 19 in a getaway attempt after a gunbattle with police. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, was captured later and remains in custody. They are accused of setting off two shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs April 15 near the marathon finish line, an attack that killed three people and injured more than 260.
Their uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., took responsibility for the body after Tamerlan's wife, Katherine Russell, said she wanted it released to her in-laws. He said his nephew was buried in a cemetery in Doswell with the help of a faith coalition.
"The body's buried," said the uncle. "That's it."
Tsarni told CBS News that several of his friends attended the burial and they were not hiding the funeral from anyone.
When called by his brother (Tamerlan's father), Tsarni said he told him: "Yes, it's over. He found rest in his own grave."
Tsarni has denounced the acts his nephews are accused of committing and has said they brought shame to the family and the entire Chechen community.
Dozens of communities approached about hosting a gravesite had refused, many with concerns about gravesite vandalism and backlash from the public. With costs to protect the funeral home mounting, Worcester police earlier appealed for help finding a place to bury Tsarnaev.
They had announced Thursday that "as a result of our public appeal for help, a courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide the assistance needed to properly bury the deceased."
Martha Mullen, of Richmond, Va., told The Associated Press in a brief telephone interview that she offered to help after seeing news reports about towns and cemeteries refusing to allow burial. She said she is not the only person who helped with arrangements.
"It was an interfaith effort," she said. "Basically because Jesus says love your enemies."
The cemetery is hidden among the rural woods and hills of Caroline County, about 30 miles north of Richmond, and contains only 47 graves in all. All were covered with reddish-brown mulch except for two that appeared newly dug, neither with any kind of marking and one of them presumably Tsarnaev's.
On one of the new graves lay a vase full of roses at one end and a single red rose at the other end. The other new grave was bare.
A news helicopter hovered overhead, along with a swarm of television news trucks in what is ordinarily a tranquil meadow in a large, wooded section within sight of a roller coaster at the Kings Dominion amusement park along Interstate 95.
It was not immediately clear who owned the cemetery in Doswell. The Virginia Cemetery Board, a government agency, regulates only for-profit cemeteries. Cemeteries owned by churches and government entities are not required to have a state-issued license.
Imam Ammar Amonette, of the Islamic Center of Virginia, said that his group was never consulted and that Mullen reached out to a separate group, the Islamic Society of Greater Richmond.
"The whole Muslim community here is furious. Frankly, we are furious that we were never given any information. It was all done secretly behind our backs," Amonette said, adding that it "makes no sense whatsoever" that Tsarnaev's body was buried in Virginia.
"It was a total surprise and shock to us," Amonette told CBS affiliate WTVR (Watch video below).
The Islamic Society of Greater Richmond didn't immediately respond to an email seeking confirmation that it was involved in the burial.
At least one neighbor was unaware the cemetery was even there.
Jaquese Goodall, who lives less than a quarter-mile away down a winding country lane, said a rope usually blocks the gravel road leading to the cemetery. She had no idea when the body was buried and never saw hearses enter or leave the property.
"If they didn't want him in Boston, why did they bring him all the way down here against our wishes?" said Goodall, 21, who has lived in the area all her life.
"I am worried because his people may come down here to visit and there will be a whole lot of problems from him being here," said Goodall, a Baptist.
Caroline County Sheriff Tony Lippa was concerned, too, that the grave site could become a target for vandals and a shrine for those who sympathize with Tsarnaev, forcing his lean department — rural Caroline County's primary law-enforcement agency — to use money and officers it doesn't have guarding the secluded, private cemetery.
"I know of no Virginia law enforcement agency that was notified. No one in county or state government was aware of this," Lippa said.
Desecrating the grave, he said, is a felony. Merely trespassing onto the private property of the cemetery is a misdemeanor, he said.
Floyd Thomas, the chairman of Caroline County's board of supervisors, considered Tsarnaev's possible burial a black mark against the county, where President Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was cornered and killed 148 years ago.
"This was a horrific act, a terrible crime," Thomas, speaking at a news conference, said of the Boston Marathon bombing. He said he didn't want Caroline to be remembered as the final resting place of one of the bombing's alleged perpetrators.
Local officials asked Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to look into whether any laws were broken in carrying out the hushed burial. If not, there's likely nothing they can do.
"If there were, I think we'd try to undo what's been done," Thomas said.
Lane Kneedler, an attorney who represented the Virginia Cemetery Association when the law was drafted to regulate for-profit cemeteries in the late 1990s, said private burial grounds only have to meet local zoning requirements. Mike Finchum, planning director for Caroline County, did not immediately return a voice mail message.
Kneelder said that once a cemetery is approved and operating, only its owner controls who is buried there. The Virginia Department of Health has no say on cemetery operations, spokeswoman Maribeth Brewster said.
Tsarnaev's death certificate was released Friday. It shows he was shot by police in the firefight the night of April 18, run over and dragged by a vehicle, and died a few hours later on April 19. Authorities have said his brother ran over him in his getaway attempt.
He was pronounced dead at a hospital in Boston, where he could have been buried under state law, because the city was his place of death. But Boston officials said they wouldn't take the body because Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen from Russia, lived in Cambridge, and Cambridge also refused.
His mother also said Russia refused to allow his body into the country so she could bury him in her native Dagestan, but Russian authorities would not comment on that contention.
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