Boston Marathon bombing

==== Personal backgrounds ====
Robel Phillipos (19) was a U.S. citizen of [[Ethiopian American|Ethiopian descent]] living in Cambridge who was arrested and faced with charges of knowingly [[making false statements]] to police.<ref name="businessinsider" /><ref name="USA.Friend">{{cite web|url=https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/01/boston-marathon-bombings-tsarnaev-phillipos/2127469/|title=Bomb suspect's friend Robel Phillipos: Who is he?|last=Winter|first=Michael|date=May 1, 2013|work=[[USA Today]] | access-date=January 2, 2015}}</ref> He graduated from high school in 2011 with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.<ref name="Auto9P-6" />
Dias Kadyrbayev (19) and Azamat Tazhayakov (20) were natives of [[Kazakhstan]] living in the U.S.<ref name="AutoLC-127" /><ref name="AutoQU-10" /> They were Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's roommates in an off-campus housing complex in [[New Bedford, Massachusetts]], where Tsarnaev had sometimes stayed.<ref name="businessinsider" />

Phillipos, Kadyrbayev, Tazhayakov, and Tsarnaev entered the [[University of Massachusetts Dartmouth]] in the fall of 2011 and knew each other well. After seeing photos of Tsarnaev on television, they traveled to his dorm room where Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov retrieved a backpack and laptop belonging to Tsarnaev, while Phillipos acted as lookout. The backpack was discarded, but police recovered it and its contents in a nearby New Bedford landfill on April 26. During interviews, the men initially denied visiting the dorm room but later admitted their actions.<ref name="businessinsider" /><ref name="usatoday" />