Tamerlan Tsarnaev died from gunshot wounds and blunt trauma to his head and torso, a funeral home in Worcester revealed today.
Worcester funeral home owner Peter Stefan who was holding the body Tamerlan Tsarnaev read the details from his death certificate on Friday.
The certificate cites 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s “gunshot wounds of torso and extremities” and lists the time of his death as 1:35 a.m. on April 19, four days after Boston Marathon deadly bombings, Peter Stefan said.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after a gunfight with authorities who had launched a massive manhunt for him and his younger brother, Dzhokhar.
Police have said he ran out of ammunition before his younger brother dragged his body under a vehicle while fleeing.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died from gunshot wounds and blunt trauma to his head and torso
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s family on Friday was making arrangements for his funeral as investigators searched the woods near a college attended by 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was captured less than a day after his brother’s death.
The funeral parlor in Worcester is familiar with Muslim services and said it will handle arrangements for Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose body was released by the state medical examiner on Thursday night.
The body was taken initially to a North Attleborough funeral home, where it was greeted by about 20 protesters.
On Friday a woman answering a phone at the funeral parlor said it has since been removed and taken elsewhere, the Los Angeles Times reports.
“He was briefly here and he is no longer here. That is all the information we can provide,” said the woman who only identified herself by her first name of Nina.
Peter Stefan, owner of Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors in Worcester, an hour’s drive west of Boston, said everybody deserves a dignified burial service no matter the circumstances of his or her death and he is prepared for protests.
“My problem here is trying to find a gravesite. A lot of people don’t want to do it. They don’t want to be involved with this,” said Peter Stefan, who said dozens of protesters gathered outside his funeral home, upset with his decision to handle the funeral.
“I keep bringing up the point of Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh or Ted Bundy. Somebody had to do those, too.”
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Jean Henry, who worked at Connecticut Chief Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver’s office, was accused of bringing her husband in to gawk at the body of Newtown school shooter Adam Lanza and has been fired.
Dr. H. Wayne Carver dismissed Jean Henry, a processing technician, in a letter released Friday.
Jean henry was accused of showing Adam Lanza’s body to her husband on December 16, 2012.
Two days earlier, Adam Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and then turned a gun on himself.
It was reported in January that Jean Henry was put on administrative leave pending an investigation into the matter.
Morgue worker Jean Henry was accused of bringing her husband in to gawk at the body of Adam Lanza and has been fired
At that time, Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy said he was informed of the investigation, which the University of Connecticut Health Center conducted as the agency that handles personnel matters for the medical examiner’s office.
“I hope that was not true. The investigation is ongoing,” Dannel P. Malloy said
“I would be deeply disappointed if proven to be true and would expect, if proven to be true, that whatever steps are appropriate would be taken.”
The Hartford Courant first broke the story.
Dr. H. Wayne Carver wrote that, in bringing her husband into the morgue, Jean Henry violated the agency’s ethical mission and showed “extremely poor judgment”.
Chris DeFrancesco, a University of Connecticut Health Center spokesman, says a grievance process is underway and no further information is available.
The center handles personnel matters for the medical examiner’s lab.
After the 2001 attacks on New York City, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had to contend with thousands of bodies, many completely shattered and unrecognizable, buried among the wreckage of the crumbled buildings.
A huge 1.8 million tons was eventually moved to a landfill for workers to start sifting through, in the hopes of making positive IDs on the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks.
Nearly 11 years on, a small group of scientists are still desperately working to give grieving families the justice they crave.
More than 9,000 pieces of bone, some the size of just a Tic Tac, are kept at Memorial Park, a building on 30th Street in Manhattan, New York Magazine reported last year.
Nearly 11 years on, a small group of scientists are still desperately working to give grieving families the justice they crave
Five dedicated staff inexhaustibly sift through crushed remains of bone taken from the scene day after day, cross-referencing any clues they get with DNA samples from the victims’ families.
Last year, just two IDs were made, leaving 1,121 victims still unidentified. So far, the office has identified less than 60% of the 2,753 people who died on 9/11.
Just 17 of the remains were identified by sight alone, 305 were determined by fingerprints, 25 by photographs, 78 by personal effects, 534 by dental or body X-rays and six by tattoos.
The work also involves profiling the DNA of the victims to match against the bones. Samples were collected by taking DNA from toothbrushes or by swabbing living relatives.
Even though it is painstaking, families have praised the work as vital.
Jim Riches, a former deputy chief of the FDNY who lost his son on 9/11, told the magazine: “We recovered my son March 25, 2002 but it wasn’t all of him. I would want to bring all his parts back to Queens and put them all in one place.”
