Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old Boston Marathon bombing suspect who was killed Thursday, was friends with a man who was killed in a gruesome unsolved triple homicide in 2011 — a murder that Tsarnaev's violent end has brought back into the spotlight.

Tsarnaev, who once said, "I don't have a single American friend, I don't understand them," in photo essay about his boxing, did consider 25-year-old Brendan Mess his "best friend." According to a Boston Globe profile of Tsarnaev and his brother, the elder Tsarnaev introduced Mess to the owner of a gym he attended, and described him as his best friend.

Mess was found dead in his apartment in Waltham, Mass., on September 12, 2011, as was Raphael Teken, 37, of Waltham, and Erik Weissman, 31, of Cambridge, Mass. Police said the killings were "targeted and not a random act of violence," and two other men were in the apartment before the murder, but those two men have never been identified.