Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Police Probe 9/11 Anniversary Link in Jewish Murders Tied to Boston Bomber

Boston-area authorities are investigating whether there was a connection to the tenth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks in a gruesome triple murder involving at least two Jewish victims that may have been linked to slain Marathon bomb suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Prosecutors are taking a second look at the brutal murders of three men, including two Jews and Tsarnaev’s best friend, in the wake of his involvement in last week’s bomb attack.

Erik Weissman

“We’re eager to pursue any new leads or information,” Stephanie Guyotte, spokeswoman for the Middlesex district attorney’s office, told the Boston Globe. “It has been reported that [Tamerlan Tsarnaev] knew one of the deceased victims. It remains an open investigation.”

The death certificates of the three murdered men say they were killed on September 12, 2011, which was the day they were found with their throats slit in an apartment in Waltham, Mass., just three miles from the campus of Brandeis University.

Friends told the paper that they have always believed the men were actually killed on September 11 because all three men — Brendan H. Mess, 25, Erik Weissman, 31, and Rafael M. Teken, 37 — abruptly stopped texting about a New York Jets vs Dallas Cowboys football game at the same time that evening.

“The three of them were definitely killed on Sept. 11,” the relative told the paper. “They all stopped using their cellphones at about eight o’clock that night.”

The discrepency didn’t matter much when the killings appeared to be either a crime of passion or a drug-fueled attack. Marijuana was found on the men’s bodies and neighbors suspected one or more of the victims was a dealer.

But investigators are now looking at Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s close friendship to Mess. If, as investigators suspect, the Chechen national was beginning to be influenced by radical Islam, they want to know if the killings could have been timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

It might also shed new light on why Weissman, who was outspoken about his Jewish faith, and Teken, who grew up in Brookline and attended predominantly Jewish Brandeis, were targeted by the killer. In 2008, Weissman was charged with possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, according to a police report.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.