Boston bombing suspect: Details of fight with girlfriend

WASHINGTON -- Nearly four years before he allegedly detonated one of two bombs at the Boston Marathon, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was arrested after he admitted to police that he slapped his girlfriend.

“Yes, I slapped her,” he told police after his girlfriend called police in hysterics and complained about domestic abuse, according to new details from the Cambridge, Mass., police report.

Records from the Cambridge Police Department show that in July 2009 his girlfriend called 911 on her cellphone and that when police arrived, she told them she was “beat up” by her boyfriend. The couple was sitting in a car on Norfolk Street, and “she stated she was beat up by her boyfriend and was crying hysterically,” the police report states.

Officers separated the couple. “The suspect then stated,” the record says, “that the victim was yelling at him because of another girl.”

Officers asked Tsarnaev if he hit her.

“Yes, I slapped her,” he replied.

The woman, whose name was redacted from the police report, said he struck her on the left side of the face. Though she declined medical treatment, Tsarnaev was arrested and placed inside a police wagon and driven to jail. Dan Riviello, a Cambridge police spokesman, said Wednesday that the case was later dismissed in court.

Tsarnaev, 26, died early Friday after a shootout with police during which he was also run over by a car driven by his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was fleeing the scene. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested Friday night and has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction in the bombing that took three lives. An MIT police officer was killed shortly before the shootout, a shooting that police believe is linked to the brothers.

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richard.serrano@latimes.com