Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Old Teacher: ‘I Still Love Him’
It’s been two years since her former student bombed the Boston Marathon, but Becki Norris says she still loves — yes, loves — Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
In a widely-shared Facebook post that has since been adapted into a piece on WBUR, Norris wrote of her struggle to balance the awful violence of the bombings with the “beloved’’ student she used to know:
I have discovered the painful truth that when you care deeply for someone, that does not stop even if he does unfathomably horrible things. We humans are surprisingly good at holding two irreconcilable ideas in our psyches at the same time. Yes, he did the unforgivable. And yes, I still love him. And — this one is hard to fathom, I know — he is a human being who still needs love.
Last week, Norris was one of several teachers who testified on Tsarnaev’s behalf during the penalty phase of his death penalty trial. As a teacher at Community Charter School of Cambridge, Norris taught Tsarnaev for 7th grade math and science and was his advisor. She called him “bright’’ and “hard-working’’ and lauded his smiling personality.
“He wasn’t a rebel. If you asked him to do something, he would do it,’’ she said in testimony.
After that testimony, Norris posted a photo of an eighth-grade Tsarnaev holding her newborn baby daughter to her Facebook. She and her former student made eye contact and smiled at each other during testimony, she wrote, and it struck a chord with her:
I testified to help the jury see why he might be spared the death penalty. I also hoped to show him, in spite of what he has done, that someone cares about him as a person. Throughout that half hour of testimony, Dzhokhar made eye contact several times. We smiled at each other each time, as he heard me saying why I cared. I will hold onto those moments, and I hope he does too.
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