While most of us were sound asleep, Andrew “You can call me Kitz” Kitzenberg took to Twitter to chronicle the most intensely watched news event in the world—all from his Massachusetts home.

12:55 a.m. Shoot out outside my room in Watertown. 62 Laurel st.

First off—who are these young men? 

From what I’ve been able to gather about the Tsarnaev brothers, only one direct link to Chechnya has emerged. Anzor Tsarnaev, their father—who claims to have spoken with one of his sons the day after the Marathon attacks—lives in Makhachkala, Dagestan, a small region of the Russian Federation that borders Chechnya on the Black Sea. The father has said that his elder son, Tamerlan, now dead, visited “relatives” in Chechnya last year. (U.S. officials report that Tamerlan flew to Moscow in January, 2012, and returned to the U.S. six months later.)

The young men’s father is said to be an ethnic Chechen, but born and raised in Kyrgyzstan—a former Soviet republic in Central Asia. (On Red Army Day in the winter of 1944, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands Chechens from their homeland—many died, but many who survived the journey resettled in Central Asia.) The Tsarnaevs' mother, who does not have a traditional Chechen first name, is said to be from Dagestan.  Tamerlan, the older brother, was reportedly born in Dagestan, while his younger brother, Dzhokhar, was born in 1993—in Kyrgyzstan. So it would seem—at this early point—that their ties to Chechnya were tenuous. It remains to be seen, if in fact Tamerlan Tsarnaev visited Chechnya last year, what he did during his time there.

As information trickles out about the two brothers named primary suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, some in the media are starting to observe that 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed Thursday night in a chaotic shootout with police, may be named after one of history’s most ferocious conquerors.

Amir Temur, also known as Tamerlane, was a Central Asian ruler and warlord who lived in the 14th and 15th centuries. Scholars estimate that his military campaigns throughout Central Asia, Africa, Europe, and the modern Middle East killed about 17 million people, or 5 percent of the world’s population at the time.

The killing of one suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings and the ongoing hunt for another have focused attention on the motivations and background of the suspects themselves. The revelation that the brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are of ethnic Chechen origin has led commentators to look to culture and history for clues about the sources of this week’s attack.

This angle is misguided, at least at this stage of the investigation and still-ongoing manhunt. In fact, any “Chechnya angle” to the story is overshadowed by the American one. The Tsarnaevs look much more like other homegrown terrorists—animal-rights extremists, white supremacists, anarchists, and lone-wolf ideologues—than like religious warriors fighting on a faraway and exotic frontier.

The Boston Marathon bombing was not another 9/11. Not close. The order of magnitude speaks for itself: three dead in Boston, nearly 3,000 in New York City. Still, in the aftermath of the Boston tragedy with what now appear to be links to conflicts half a world away in the Caucasus, it is impossible not to ask the same questions that came on the heels of 9/11: just how safe are we in our homes, in our workplaces, on our streets, and at our celebrations? Why on earth would the United States be targeted so often by so many people with so many grievances—why do “they” hate us? And given the destructive power now available to almost any lunatic, just how safe can we be?

A blazing gun battle with police in a Boston suburb early Friday morning left little doubt as to the identity of the two main suspects in the marathon attack: two young brothers, 19 and 26, whose family originally came from Chechnya. During the fighting, they exploded bombs made from pressure cookers, much like the ones used to attack the marathon finish line. The elder, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died in the firefight. The younger, Dzhokhar, who identified himself on VKontakte, a Russian-language social-network site, as a 2011 graduate of the prestigious Cambridge Latin School, is still at large.  

The investigators kept at it around the clock, pursuing thousands of leads.

“Working methodically and with a sense of urgency,” Richard DesLauriers, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the Boston division, later noted.

Two towns just outside Boston’s city limits became a fiery war zone overnight as two fugitives suspected in Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings shot and killed a policeman, hijacked a car, and engaged in a roiling gun battle with police.

Addressing reporters at an early-morning news conference, Col. Timothy P. Alben, superintendent of the Massachusetts state police, said the drama began with reports of a robbery at approximately 10:20 p.m. at a convenience store in Cambridge, just 15 minutes from the site of the first blast.

We know about the Cannibal Cop, the former New York City police officer convicted last month of planning to kidnap, torture, rape, and kill numerous women before cooking them up, slicing them apart, and eating them.

Now prepare to meet his online friend—a school librarian. And his Internet buddy who’s a police chief, too—and what is it with law enforcement these days anyway?
It turns out there may be a whole global village living online sharing similar dark fantasies.