Baraboo woman sends 14 letters to accused Boston Marathon bomber

35-year-old believes Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is innocent

BARABOO, Wis. — Accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is living in virtual isolation at the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Mass. He is being held with special administrative restrictions reserved for terrorism suspects. It prevents him from having contact with others held in the facility.

It has not, however, prevented him from being contacted by the outside world. In the last 12 months he’s been sent 14 letters from Baraboo.

“I let him know that he has a lot of people that support him, that we know he was innocent,” 35-year-old Crystel Clary said.

Clary wrote her first letter to Tsarnaev three weeks after the Boston Marathon bombing.

While law enforcement officials have developed a mountain of evidence implicating the Tsarnaev brothers in the deadly bombing, Clary believes the two are innocent.

“You need to let him know that there are people that believe in him, there are people that are standing next to him. He is not alone and that’s why I wrote the second letter and the third letter and the fourth letter,” Clary said.

She has handwritten 14 letters and cards to Tsarnaev. Three cards, two birthday cards and one Valentine card were returned to Clary with a letter from law enforcement explaining the cards were not allowed to be delivered.

“The letters didn’t get sent back to me so therefore I know he read them. He doesn’t need to write me back because I know he knows that we’re here supporting him,” Clary said.

While she hasn’t heard from Tsarnaev, she has heard from the community.

“I have people telling me that I should die for supporting Jahar, that I should be shot, I should be raped, I should be this, I should be that. I don’t care,” Clary said.

This is not Clary’s first contact with a person being held by law enforcement. In 2012 she was charged with delivering illegal articles to an inmate at a corrections facility in Wisconsin. Court documents show Clary made contact with an inmate at the Oakhill Correctional Facility through Facebook. In those documents Clary told law enforcement officials she purchased tobacco products for the inmate and dropped them off in the vicinity of the corrections facility. She is awaiting sentencing in that case.