Surviving Suspect in Boston Bombing Is Walking, Talking and Claiming He's Innocent

The surviving Boston bombing suspect -- the one who was captured near his boat-side confession, who entered the hospital in critical condition only to speak a single word at his bedside hearing, then offered early excuses in the ongoing investigation before being transferred to a prison hospital -- has recovered enough to move about and speak freely, enough so that he's calling his mother to proclaim his and his brother's total innocence. 

The Associated Press interviewed Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, on Thursday afternoon, and she recalled a recent conversation with her son: "He didn't hold back his emotions either, as if he were screaming to the whole world: What is this? What's happening?" The younger Tsarnaev, it appears, is very confused: "I could just feel that he was being driven crazy by the unfairness that happened to us, that they killed our innocent Tamerlan," said the mother, who has been as frequently reliable of a source for media check-ins on the secret investigation as she has been an unreliable parent and arbiter of honesty. She has maintained that both of her sons are innocent since Dzhokhar's identification and subsequent capture.

The game of telephone with the press aside, word Dzhokhar's amnesic confusion doesn't exactly fit into previous reports regarding his knowledge about the case. Late last month Tsarnaev had enough wits about him to stop talking about the bombing after he was read his Miranda rights.Regardless of guilt or innocence, that clearly signals that the 19-year-old terrorism suspect knew the stakes of his interrogation -- and the careful wording to come.

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