Boston Marathon Bomber's COVID Check To Go To Victims

BOSTON — On Thursday, a U.S. District Court judge allowed federal prosecutors to use convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's $1,400 COVID-19 stimulus check and money in his prison trust to help pay the money he owes his victims, the Wall Street Journal reported.

On Wednesday, a court filing through the U.S. attorney's office found that Tsarnaev received a $1,400 COVID-19 relief payment while in prison last summer.

Upon learning this information, Acting U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts Nathaniel Mendell filed an order asking the judge to move the payment from Tsarnaev's account to the Clerk of the Court "as payment towards his outstanding criminal monetary penalties, including unpaid special assessment and restitution."

Tsarnaev had $3,885 in his account as of Dec. 22, 2021, due in part to the stimulus check, and from also receiving money from dozens during his incarceration at a maximum-security prison in Colorado.

Mendell says Tsarnaev owes the government and the victims of the bombings a total of $101,129,627.

Tsarnaev was convicted in 2015 for the deaths of Krystle Campbell, 29, Lingzi Lu, 23, Martin Richard, 8, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 27, from the April 15, 2013 attack.

Boston Police Officer Dennis Simmonds, 28, was injured in the Watertown shootout in which his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed, died in April 2014.

To this day, the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to decide if Tsarnaev's death sentence will be reinstated after the death penalty was removed back in 2020, even after the Biden Administration tried to overturn the ruling in Oct. 2021.

So far, Tsarnaev has only paid $2,202 of the $3,000 special assessment and $101,126,627 in criminal restitution he was sentenced to pay in January 2016.