Aria Weissman sat down with Boston Public Radio's Jim Braude and and Margery Eagan Wednesday to talk about her brother, Erik Weissman, one of three people murdered on September 11, 2011 in Waltham.
That triple homicide remains unsolved and was further complicated by the FBI shooting this year of a Chechen man in Florida, Ibragim Todashev. Before he died, the FBI alleges that he confessed to the triple homicide and that he also implicated Boston Marathon Bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. But "there's something much bigger going on here," Weissman said her interview with WGBH News.
Weissman said she had never met Tsarnaev or Todashev, and didn't have enough information to judge whether or not they were involved in her brother's murder.
"My concern is that it is pinning it on the dead guy, and we're not getting much information on that," she said. "The most information we're receiving is through the media and the press, and that's not really an official statement ... I'm kind of in the same boat as the rest of the world, even though this is my brother."
She also blasted police investigators for their handling of the case and called for greater public scrutiny of the contradictory details of the murder in Waltham and the shooting in Florida.
"I don't see why, if there are two Massachusetts State Troopers in that apartment, that room [where Todashev was killed], what have you, why [Attorney General Martha Coakley] wouldn't investigate that," she said. "Why was Massachusetts in Florida in the first place?"
Weissman also says she feels her brother has been unfairly maligned by media portrayals of the three victims of the unsolved homicides in Waltham.
"In the beginning, I thought that people were pretty much on the case, and aggressive in trying to find an answer," she said. "And then I, too, felt like it just kind of faded off the map and got swept under the rug, and it wasn't really getting coverage, and then all of a sudden, there wasn't even enough time to process the April 15 bombing before it was immediately implicated that there may have been a connection to my brother and these other two guys' murder."
Weissman said her brother was a great teacher who inspired her to enter social work.
"He was an amazing guy," she said. "I give everything I know, probably, to him. He taught me so many things in life.
Related:
