The bright young man who comes here and tries to build something

"The Tsarnaev brothers offer a grisly story of American immigration and integration, and Danny offers another ..."

New Yorker: ... A sedan swerved in behind him, a man banged on his window, the door opened, a pistol appeared, and soon they were off.

Danny is an immigrant from China who came to Boston as a graduate student. He now works for a start-up in Kendall Square. The Tsarnaev brothers offer a grisly story of American immigration and integration, and Danny offers another: the bright young man who comes here and tries to build something. It’s twinned in some ways with the tale of Lingzi, who also came from China as a graduate student. “Do you remember my face?” Tamerlan yelled at Danny at one point in the car. “No, no, I don’t remember anything,” Danny lied. “It’s like white guys, they look at black guys and think all black guys look the same,” Tamerlan said.

One of the mysteries of the case has been why the brothers killed a cop but didn’t kill the man whose car they had stolen. Now we know. Danny kept his cool when they picked up Dzhohkar and the trunk was loaded with heavy bags. The three men then drove through Boston, and the brothers asked Danny if he could take them to New York. Eventually, they pulled up to a gas station, hoping to use Danny’s credit card. The station took only cash, so Dzhohkar got out to pay. Tamerlan, allegedly an aspiring mass murderer and a man known by some as the best boxer in Boston, put his gun in the door pocket for a moment. Seeing his chance, with one motion Danny unbuckled his seat belt and opened his door. And then he raced off at an angle, fearing a bullet in the back. In a moment he was across the street in another station, and the attendant there was on the phone as the Tsarnaevs drove off. Cops would come, the shoot-out would commence, and the horrible saga would end with no more innocent people killed. If Danny hadn’t had the courage to run or if he hadn’t gotten his seat belt off, more people would have likely died—very possibly including Danny.

... “I don’t want to be a famous person talking on the TV,” he told Eric Moskowitz of the Globe. “I don’t feel like a hero … I was trying to save myself.”