Et tu, Stephen?
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had to be thinking that. For two weeks, he has watched the heartbroken, the heroic, and the technically expert get up in federal court and testify against him. One after another, strangers stood before him and described how he had taken their legs or their loved ones. Police who shot it out with him and his brother, Tamerlan, pointed him out in court.
Tuesday was different. It was personal, because Stephen Silva took the stand, and Stephen Silva and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were good friends.
As Silva was sworn in, Tsarnaev stared at him.
They met in eighth grade, in Cambridge. When they graduated from Rindge and Latin in 2011, they posed together for a photo.
“Very, very close,” was how Silva described their relationship.
After high school, they both went to college, Silva to Tampa, Dzhokhar to UMass Dartmouth. They also became pretty big weed dealers.
Tsarnaev’s lawyer, Miriam Conrad, pointed out it was Silva who turned Tsarnaev onto weed in the first place. Silva said Dzhokhar smoked it, then sold it, willingly.
Silva said Dzhokhar was chill. He didn’t get angry much. Only time he remembers was when Dzhokhar was called a Russian refugee. He was proud of being Chechen.
“Don’t call me a Russian,” he told Silva.
Dzhokhar, for his part, called Silva a kafir, a nonbeliever.
Silva had shown Dzhokhar a gun he was holding for someone else, a Ruger pistol. He bragged about using it to rob other drug dealers. Silva said Tsarnaev came to him in early 2013, saying he wanted to borrow the gun, to do the same.
“He said he wanted to rip some kids from URI,” Silva said.
Silva said he gave Dzhokhar the gun in February 2013, and prosecutors say he and his brother kept the gun to use as part of their plot to bomb the Boston Marathon. It was used to kill MIT police Officer Sean Collier in his cruiser after the bombings, prosecutors say, and to shoot at the Watertown police who cornered the Tsarnaev brothers on Laurel Street after Collier’s murder.
As they arranged the exchange of the gun, Dzhokhar asked Silva about “food for the dog” — it was code language for ammo.
Silva had been hiding the gun for another of his ne’er-do-well friends and expected it back within a couple of weeks. But he said whenever he asked Dzhokhar about it, “he gave some excuse.”
As close as they were, Silva said he went to Dzhokhar’s house in Cambridge only once, in the summer of 2012. Silva and his twin brother needed a place to stay. They hung out in Dzhokhar’s room, watching “The Walking Dead” on his computer. The prosecution entered into evidence a photo of that room, showing on one wall a flag that has been used by extremist Islamic groups.
Silva said that in a high school class they took, during a discussion about whether terrorism was ever justified, Dzhokhar complained that American foreign policy fed the persecution of Muslims.
Turns out Silva never got the Ruger back. It was recovered on Laurel Street, where Tamerlan Tsarnaev hurled it at Watertown police Sergeant Jeff Pugliese after running out of bullets shortly before he was run over by Dzhokhar.
By the way, Silva didn’t step forward like a good citizen and share what he knew about his friend Dzhokhar Tsarnaev until he got jammed up with a heroin-distribution and gun possession charge more than a year after the Marathon bombing.
Conrad showed Silva for what he really is: an opportunistic, cynical drug dealer willing to trade his friend to reduce his prison sentence.
She pointed out that he had given an interview to Rolling Stone magazine, pinning the blame on Tamerlan, claiming that Tamerlan built the bombs then dragged Dzhokhar into the conspiracy.
“At the time,” Silva replied, “that’s how I felt.”
Many of Conrad’s most piercing questions were objected to by prosecutors, and sustained by Judge George O’Toole. But the jury heard them.
You knew Dzhokhar was easy to influence?
Objection.
Sustained.
Did he complain that his brother was keeping him on a short leash?
Objection.
Sustained.
Did he ever say he couldn’t let his car smell like weed because of his brother?
Objection.
Sustained.
“He said his brother was very strict, very opinionated,” Silva replied to one of the questions that wasn’t disallowed. “And that since I wasn’t a Muslim, he [Tamerlan] might give me a little [expletive] for that.”
Silva was an important witness for the prosecution, because he put the gun in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s hands. But he helped the defense’s narrative, that Tamerlan was the dominant, if not domineering, figure in their relationship; that Tamerlan was calling the shots; that Dzhokhar was submissive.
Conrad poured scorn on Silva, and by extension his government handlers. She said Silva was continuing criminal activity even while in custody, and the government was turning a blind eye. When she said he was brewing homemade alcohol in jail, Silva seemed shocked.
But he didn’t deny it.
Did it ever occur to you, Conrad asked, that Dzhokhar didn’t give the gun back because he didn’t have it anymore?
Objection.
Sustained.
What if he gave it to somebody else?
Objection.
Sustained.
Would you have loaned the gun if he told you it was for his brother?
Silva got to answer that one. He said, “No.”
Kevin Cullen can be reached at cullen@globe.com.