Ibragim Abdulbakievich Todashev (Ибрагим Абдулбакиевич Тодашев; 22 September 1985 – 22 May 2013) was a Chechen-born former mixed martial artist, former amateur boxer and friend of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
He was shot dead at his apartment in Orlando, Florida, by FBI agent Aaron McFarlane on May 22, 2013, after being interviewed there for about eight hours. He had allegedly attacked the agent, with a pipe or stick, while writing a statement about the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombings and a triple homicide that took place in Waltham, Massachusetts, on September 11, 2011. The investigators involved in the incident said that Todashev had implicated both himself and Tsarnaev in the Waltham murders before he was killed.
The FBI blocked the release of the autopsy report for approximately nine months, released inconsistent information about his death, and did not give the family access to some of the evidence, finally releasing Todashev's clothing and some other evidence nine years later. The family and civil rights groups alleged there were civil rights violations and excessive use of force involved in his death. On March 25, 2014, the autopsy report was released and the Florida State Attorney and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced they had concluded the agent had fired in self-defense and would not face criminal charges. According to the autopsy report, Todashev was shot seven times and there was no evidence of the shots having been fired from close range.
Ibragim Todashev was born on September 22, 1985, in the Chechen-Ingush capital Grozny during the Soviet era, as the eldest of 12 children of Abdulbaki (or Abdul-Baki) Todashev and his two wives. During the 1990s, his family fled war-torn Chechnya to Russia's Saratov Oblast. They lived there until around 2006 before moving back to Grozny, where his father became a high-ranking pro-Moscow official in the city administration in 2008.
Todashev moved to the U.S. to study English on a J-1 non-immigrant visa, after four years of study in classes at Saratov State University and Chechen State University, as part of a student exchange program with Russia. He then applied for and was granted asylum in 2008 and permanent residence in March 2013. His father said his son had no reason to fear "oppression" back home as "he was too young to fight in the war [in Chechnya], and he has nothing to fear here now" from the authorities. He said: "Out of fear of the lawlessness in Chechnya, I sent him to the U.S. because it seemed like the safest country at the time."
In the United States, Todashev married an Armenian American, Reni Manukyan, who said she met him in 2010 through a mutual friend in Boston; Manukyan separated from Todashev in November 2012, but they had kept in regular contact with each other, and she was still supporting him with money. Todashev was an amateur boxer before turning to mixed martial arts (MMA) in the United States, but he quit his professional MMA career due to a serious knee injury. His father said that after that, his son had held various jobs in the Boston area before eventually moving to Florida.
His father said in an interview for Russia Today that his son was a "very calm" person who would never hurt anyone. Todashev's former MMA training partner, however, described him as a gifted athlete but also a "hothead". In 2010, the Boston Police Department detained Todashev for a violent road rage incident in Downtown Crossing; the police report states that the officers "witnessed several people struggling to restrain a white male, later determined to be the subject, Ibragim Todashev. Officers heard Todashev yell, 'You say something about my mother, I will kill you!' Officers struggled to physically restrain and handcuff Todashev." On May 4, 2013, shortly before his death, he was also briefly arrested by the Orange County Sheriff's Office in Orange County, Florida, after he got into a fight with two strangers during a dispute over a parking space at an outlet mall, knocking one of them unconscious and then leaving the scene (the man, who was hospitalized with serious head injuries but did not press charges, later said he was shocked "how accurate and quick his punches were" and "thought he was wearing brass knuckles, but it was just his fist"). The responding sheriff's deputy chased down Todashev's car, ordered him out at gunpoint and arrested him; the affidavit states that "Todashev said he was only fighting to protect his knee because he had surgery in March."
At the time of the shooting that killed him, Todashev was free on $3,500 bail for the Orange County incident, facing charges of aggravated battery. While his girlfriend had been ordered to return to Russia by an immigration judge, federal immigration officials granted her permission to stay in the United States for another year and released her from detention in August. After speaking to reporter Susan Zalkind about Todashev's death and relationship with the FBI, she was arrested and deported to Russia in October 2013. Todashev's friend who was also a housemate, Ashurmamad Miraliev, briefly charged in an unrelated case, was ordered to leave the country and left soon afterwards.
A triple murder was committed in Waltham, Massachusetts, on the evening of September 11, 2011. Three men, Brendan Mess, Erik Weissman, and Raphael Teken, were murdered in Mess's apartment. All had their throats slit from ear to ear, with such great force that they were nearly decapitated. Illegal marijuana worth thousands of dollars was left covering their bodies, and $5,000 was left at the scene. The local district attorney said that it appeared that the killer and the victims knew each other, and that the murders were not random.
The Boston Globe reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the deceased suspect in the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, had once introduced murder victim Brendan Mess as his best friend. After the bombings and subsequent revelations of Tsarnaev's personal life, the Waltham murders case was reexamined in April 2013 with Tsarnaev as a new suspect. Todashev's friendship with Tsarnaev then led to him being questioned for potential connection with the murders and other actions involving Tsarnaev.
Todashev's questioning and death
On the afternoon of May 22, 2013, law enforcement officers, including FBI special agent Aaron McFarlane from the Boston field office and two Massachusetts State Police (MSP) troopers, Curtis Cinelli and Joel Gagne, arrived at Ibragim Todashev's apartment in Orlando, Florida, and interviewed Todashev for approximately eight hours in his living room. NPR reporter Susan Zalkind stated that Todashev's friend Khusen Taramov waited outside Todashev's apartment during the interrogation, and was told to leave an hour before Todashev was shot. According to Todashev's father, Abdulbaki, the questioning took place two days before his scheduled flight to Russia; Abdulbaki's American attorney Eric Ludin said Ibragim Todashev had undergone multiple prior interrogations in Florida and was promised this would be the last one, and had canceled a planned trip to Chechnya earlier in May on the advice of the FBI. Todashev was questioned by the FBI agent regarding the 2011 Waltham murders and his connections to the Boston bombings suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev; both Todashev and Tsarnaev had trained at the Wai Kru MMA Gym and lived close to each other in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The investigators later said that Todashev implicated both himself and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the murders during the questioning soon after midnight. They reported that Todashev was beginning to write a formal statement when he asked to take a break, and then suddenly attacked the agent. Todashev was shot multiple times, and killed.
Officials initially claimed that Todashev picked up a knife or attempted to grab a samurai sword from the wall, but later said that it was unclear whether this was the case; one source said it was "a knife or a pipe or something". A number of later reports said that he was unarmed.