Report: Marathon bombings may have been prevented if Waltham murder case was solved

BOSTON (MyFoxBoston.com) -- A local writer is asking if the Boston Marathon bombings could have been prevented if the Waltham murder case was solved. In a recent Boston Magazine article, Susan Zalkind raised a provocative idea.

The triple murder in Waltham happened on September 11, 2011. The marathon bombings happened on April 15, 2013. It's suspected that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was responsible for the triple murders, and the idea is, if he was arrested for the Waltham murders, the marathon bombings would never have happened.

"If you believe the FBI then you have to believe that if the triple murder had been solved then we wouldn't have had the Boston Marathon. I mean, we don't have any other information than the small statements that are coming out from the FBI at the moment so if you take one fact then you have to swallow the other one, too," Zalkind said.

The article says that once the bombings happened, the FBI focused on Tamerlan Tsarnaev almost immediately, and that investigators never looked into the Tsarnaev lead beforehand.

The scene in Waltham looked like a revenge killing or a drug deal gone wrong and it seems that's the avenue investigators took when the triple murder went down. Since Tsarnaev didn't have a record, he was not on the radar of the FBI.

Months after, he took off to Russia for seven months.

Once the FBI had a name in the marathon investigation, they had something to look at and the friendship with Brendan Mess came to light. That took them to the Boston gym where Tsarnaev was a martial arts fighter, and that gave them Ibragim Todashev, the man the feds talked to in Orlando, Florida. He was shot and killed during an incident with a Boston FBI agent.

Cox Media Group