Boston Jihadi Plot Gets Top ISIS Leader in Syria Killed
It was dark and dank early on the morning of June 2, 2015, as a pelting rain slicked the roads and pinged off the windows of a townhouse in the bucolic blue-collar Boston neighborhood of Roslindale. The noise woke Usaamah Abdullah Rahim with a start just before 5 a.m., but he was happy to be awake. It was a good day to die.
He had begun preparing for this day a week earlier with a buying spree on Amazon.com, purchasing three military-style knives, including the one he would tuck into a sheath at his back, a Model SP-6 Fighting Knife with an 8-inch double-edge blade. He also bought a knife-sharpening tool and a messenger bag to hide the blades. Total cost for his weapons of terror: $395.19.
Rahim was 26, a Brookline High School graduate who still lived with his parents in a complex surrounded by meticulously groomed landscaping and patrolled by guards around the clock. Six-foot-two and lanky, he had undergone in recent years a dramatic makeover from the gold chains and backward baseball caps he wore in high school. He now had a beard, shaved his head and face clean, and liked to wear long white robes, even when he wasn’t attending Friday prayers at the Islamic Society of Boston mosque.
When those massive blades arrived, Rahim gleefully shared the news with his nephew, David Wright, a former football player whose 6-foot-8 frame and massive gut could have made him a standout lineman. Except, his coach says, Wright took the “easy way out most of the time.” He graduated from high school, barely, and got a job, briefly, at Home Depot, but filed a discrimination complaint on his first day, claiming his manager was offended when he wouldn’t return her
