If the New York Times wants to know why their readership has plummeted in recent years, it’s largely because of stories like this, in which the Times tells an exculpatory sob story about Tamerlan Tsarnaev murdering and maiming people at the Boston Marathon … thanks to supposedly xenophobic boxing rules. Seriously. According to the Times, Tamerlan was ineligible to enter boxing’s national Tournament of Champions as he was not a United States citizen. Tsarnaev had won two consecutive titles as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England in 2009-10.

Tsarnaev had entered the tournament in 2009, but in 2010 the rules for entry changed, and legal permanent residents, including Tsarnaev, who had been born in Soviet Russia,  were disallowed, shutting out a number of fighters. Tsarnaev had lost in 2009 after flooring his opponent, and was bitter about not having a chance for redemption. He dropped out of boxing.

Let’s take a look at the Times and how they eulogize a cold-blooded murderer:

Mr. Tsarnaev now lies in the state medical examiner’s office, his body riddled with bullets after a confrontation with the police four days after the bombings.

Mr. Tsarnaev seemed to abandon his once avid pursuit of the American dream. He dropped out of community college and lost interest not just in boxing but also in music; he used to play piano and violin, classical music and rap …

The sensitive artist is revealed.

When Dzhokhar used to come home on Friday night from the dormitory, Tamerlan used to hug him and kiss him — hold him, like, because he was a big, big boy, Tamerlan,” their mother, Zubeidat, 45, said last week, adding that her older son had been “handsome like Hercules.”

Handsome like Hercules, a kind brother, said the woman convicted of felony shoplifting.

His wife primarily supported the family through her job as a home health aide, scraping together about $1,200 a month to pay the rent. While she worked, Mr. Tsarnaev looked after their daughter, Zahira, who was learning to ride the tricycle still parked beside the house, neighbors said.

And while Zahira learned how to ride her bicycle, Daddy was learning how to maim people.

And it’s not just Tamerlan that is to be pitied:

But then the father’s life had not gone as planned, either. Once an official in the prosecutor’s office in Kyrgyzstan, he had been reduced to working as an unlicensed mechanic in the back lot of a rug store in Cambridge. “He was out there in the snow and cold, freezing his hands to do this work on people’s cars,” said Chris Walter, owner of the store, Yayla Tribal Rug. “I did not charge him for the space because he was a poor, struggling guy with a good heart.”

Wait, there’s more about Tamerlan: “A photograph of him as a baby shows a cherubic child wearing a knit cap with a pompom, perched on the lap of his unsmiling mother, who has spiky black bangs and an artful pile of hair.”

More on the artist who was Tamerlan: “During registration for a tournament in Lowell, he sat down at a piano and lost himself for 20 minutes in a piece of classical music. The impromptu performance, so out of place in that world, finished to a burst of applause from surprised onlookers. ‘He just walked over from the line and started playing like he was in the Boston Pops,’ his trainer at the time, Gene McCarthy, recalled.”

Another child prodigy who turned to mass murder. It’s disheartening.

The eternal focus on the environmental factors in murders’ lives by the mainstream media is more than a denial of genuine evil; it’s a vicious slap in the face to their victims. The New York Times has been leading the charge for years, and they’re not done yet.