Tsarnaev met Barry during high school wrestling. | Robin Young/AP Photo Friend: Suspect 'a normal pot head'

The younger Boston Marathon bombing suspect seemed more interested in blunts than bombs while in college in Massachusetts, his classmate told POLITICO on Friday.

“He didn’t seem like a dangerous person at all,” said Chris Barry, a sophomore at UMass-Dartmouth, who became friends with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — now a bombing suspect — on their first day of school. “He was a pothead, a normal pothead. I couldn’t even imagine him being mad at someone, let alone hurting someone.”


Barry, 20, spoke to POLITICO after spending much of the day telling FBI and state police officers everything he knew about Tsarnaev. He discovered Friday morning that his “first friend” at school was implicated as one of two suspects in Monday’s bloody bombings. It was a connection Barry made while talking with his parents, who were under lockdown in suburban Boston as the hunt for Tsarnaev got underway. Tsarnaev’s brother, another suspect, already died in a shootout with law enforcement.

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Barry and Tsarnaev met through high school wrestling. While they didn’t hang out much at school — Barry said he hasn’t seen Tsarnaev this school year — they remained friendly after freshman orientation, he said.

“He never talked about politics. I know on his Facebook, it says he’s Islamic, but I didn’t really look into it,” he said.

As for religion? “He never brought it up. It seemed like he could care less,” Barry said, also noting in the interview that Tsarnaev was always friendly and “very, very nice.”

Tsarnaev “seemed a little tougher” than kids from Barry’s town — Newton, an affluent Boston suburb — but the only evidence of that edge seemed to be that he was a smoker, Barry said.

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“It didn’t seem like he was afraid of anything,” said Barry, who noted that he has been “shaking” since the news broke. “He would smoke cigarettes, smoke weed, everyday. It didn’t seem like he cared about anything. He seemed like a nice, relaxed kid.”

Zachary Levine-Caleb, also from Newton, wrestled the younger Tsarnaev in 2011 in the 135-pound weight class and said Tsarnaev took a passive approach to the sport.

“I could tell he was intimidated by me,” Levine-Caleb, now 20, told POLITICO. “There wasn’t a size disparity, he just kept backing up. I pushed him out of bounds, he was wrestling very non-aggressively.”

“He was just a kid who wasn’t spectacular at wrestling,” Levine-Caleb added.

Still, the Boston Globe noted that he was an all-star wrestler.