DOSWELL, Va. — Martha Mullen was on her way to Starbucks on Tuesday when she heard on the radio that Massachusetts officials couldn’t find a cemetery willing to bury Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
“My first thought was, Jesus says love your enemies and not hate them after they’re dead,” Mullen, a Richmond mental health counselor and seminary school graduate, said Friday.
“My second thought was, okay, we can bury Adam Lanza, you know. Or the guy who shot up [Virginia] Tech,” added Mullen, 48. “And this guy for some reason is different. And the only difference that I can tell is that people think that he’s a terrorist or he’s a foreigner or he’s Muslim.”
Her third thought: Maybe she could help. With a flurry of e-mails and calls to faith leaders in Richmond and police officials in Massachusetts, she wound up facilitating Tsarnaev’s burial at a small Islamic cemetery in Doswell.
News trucks and photographers flocked to the site Friday, until a cemetery representative shooed them away. Bukhari ¬Abdel-Alim, vice president of Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia, the nonprofit organization that owns the site, declined to say which of the graves Tsarnaev occupied.
