ANALYSIS: Dark side of remembrance

A week after her father, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, allegedly set off a bomb at the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring hundreds, three-year-old Zahara Tsarnaev was seen happily playing on a slide in her grandmother’s yard in Rhode Island.

Zahara is most likely oblivious to her father’s suspected crimes and perhaps to her father’s death in the early hours of April 19, when he was shot by police trying to apprehend him and his brother, Dzhokhar, who ran him over with a car in a desperate attempt to escape the police.

But, the children of other killers say, the father’s crimes will cast a long shadow over the girl’s life. Of course there will be questions about the man she knew and the road that led him to carry out extreme violence against innocents. But other questions will also arise: How does his crime relate to me? Is there an inherited element to his actions? Could I do the same thing?