Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev befriended a brain-damaged anti-U.S. government conspiracy theorist through their mother's health care aide job years before the deadly attack, a lawyer said Tuesday. 
 
 Attorney Jason Rosenberg, who represents the family of Donald Larking, said Larking shared publications with the brothers, especially Tamerlan, and discussed theories including that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school shooting didn't happen or the U.S. government was behind them. 
 
 The attorney said the Tsarnaev family had a relationship with the Larkings that started years ago when the brothers' mother began working as a personal care assistant for Larking's wife, a quadriplegic since birth. 
 
 Rosenberg said Larking, who lives in West Newton, just west of Boston, was shot in the head in 1974 in an attempted robbery while working in a convenience store. He said Larking suffered brain damage that led to problems with his decision-making and judgment. 
 
 Authorities say the Tsarnaev brothers orchestrated the April 15 marathon bombing, in which two pressure cookers loaded with shrapnel exploded near the race's finish line, killing three people and injuring more than 260 others. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty last month to charges including using a weapon of mass destruction to kill. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after a shootout with police a few days after the bombing. 
 
 Rosenberg said Tuesday the Tsarnaev brothers got to know Larking while substituting for their mother sometimes by helping to care for his wife. The attorney said the brothers "were very helpful, very kind" to the couple and Larking shared his views with them as he found anti-U.S. government websites and became angrier and irrational. 
 
 The attorney said Larking, who has many Jewish friends, also has literature that questions if the Holocaust happened. 
 
 The lawyer's account first emerged in a Wall Street Journal article, which included Tamerlan Tsarnaev's former landlady talking about publications that had been in his Cambridge apartment. 
 
 Landlady Joanna Herlihy told The Associated Press she salvaged publications after authorities had finished searching the apartment and items were discarded. She confirmed that among them were an Alabama-based publication that uses a Confederate flag on its website and a weekly publication that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls anti-Semitic. 
 
 Rosenberg said Tuesday he doesn't think Larking helped the Tsarnaev brothers, ethnic Chechens from Russia, formulate ideas but may have made them believe others felt as they did. 
 
 "(They) were seeing someone who was Caucasian and was born in America who was saying the same things," the attorney said. 
 
 Rosenberg said he doesn't know if the Tsarnaev brothers understood how seriously Larking's brain was affected from the long-ago shooting. He said he's talked to Larking since the Boston Marathon bombing but doesn't think his friend comprehends what happened. 
 
 The brothers took Larking to their mosque, and he converted to Islam and still attends the mosque, Rosenberg said. 
 
 Larking seemed close to Tamerlan, and Tamerlan made sure to help Larking, who wears braces on his legs, when they attended the mosque together, said Nicole Mossalam, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge. 
 
 Mossalam said it becomes obvious during conversation that Larking has a disability because he's unusually open and "childlike" and often says politically incorrect things without seeming to realize it. 
 
 "He loves to sit down with people and talk, and there's basically no filter," she said. 
 
 In a federal indictment in June, authorities alleged they found on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's computer a publication written by someone known as the Father of Global Jihad that advocates violence to terrorize Islam's perceived enemies. 
 
 Prosecutors also alleged he downloaded an article from a publication that "glorifies martyrdom in the service of violent jihad" and a magazine that had directions for building bombs using pressure cookers. ||||| The Boston area held funerals for two more of its dead Friday _ including an 8-year-old boy _ as more details emerged from U.S. officials and family members about how the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects may have been swayed by a radical, anti-American strain of Islam. 
 
 Mourners hug as they depart St. Patrick's Church in Stoneham, Mass., following a funeral Mass for Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, Tuesday, April 23, 2013. Collier was... (Associated Press) 
 
 Pallbearers carry the casket of fallen Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier into St. Patrick's Church before a funeral Mass, in Stoneham, Mass., Tuesday, April 23, 2013. Collier... (Associated Press) 
 
 Mourners enter St. Patrick's Church in Stoneham, Mass., before a funeral Mass for Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, Tuesday, April 23, 2013. Collier was fatally shot on... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - This undated photo provided by Bill Richard shows his son, Martin Richard, in Boston. Martin Richard, 8, was the youngest of three people killed in the explosions at the finish line of the Boston... (Associated Press) 
 
 Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officers march as they depart St. Patrick's Church in Stoneham, Mass., following a funeral Mass for MIT police officer Sean Collier, Tuesday, April 23, 2013.... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - This combination of undated file photos shows Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, left, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19. The FBI says the two brothers are the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, and are also... (Associated Press) 
 
 In Washington, Senate Intelligence Committee member Richard Burr, R-N.C., said after his panel was briefed by federal law enforcement officials that there is "no question" that older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev was "the dominant force" behind the attacks, and that the brothers had apparently been radicalized by material on the Internet rather than by contact with militant groups overseas. 
 
 Younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's condition was upgraded from serious to fair as investigators continued building their case against the 19-year-old college student. He could face the death penalty after being charged Monday with joining forces with his brother, now dead, in setting off the shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs that killed three people. 
 
 Martin Richard, a schoolboy from Boston's Dorchester neighborhood who was the youngest of those killed in the April 15 blasts at the marathon finish line, was laid to rest after a family-only funeral Mass. 
 
 "The outpouring of love and support over the last week has been tremendous," the family said in a statement. "This has been the most difficult week of our lives." 
 
 A funeral was also held for Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 26, who authorities said was shot to death by the Tsarnaev brothers on April 18. A memorial service for Collier was scheduled for Wednesday at MIT, with Vice President Joe Biden expected to attend. 
 
 More than 260 people were injured by the bomb blasts. About 50 were still hospitalized. 
 
 Authorities believe neither brother had links to terror groups. However, two U.S. officials said Tuesday that 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev _ who died last week in a gunbattle _ frequently looked at extremist websites, including Inspire magazine, an English-language online publication produced by al-Qaida's Yemen affiliate. The magazine has endorsed lone-wolf terror attacks. 
 
 Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly. 
 
 Family members reached in the U.S. and abroad by The Associated Press said Tamerlan was steered toward a strict strain of Islam under the influence of a Muslim convert known to the Tsarnaev family only as Misha. 
 
 After befriending Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing, stopped studying music and began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to family members, who said he turned to websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind 9/11. 
 
 "Somehow, he just took his brain," said Tamerlan's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., who recalled conversations with Tamerlan's worried father about Misha's influence. 
 
 "You could always hear his younger brother and sisters say, `Tamerlan said this,' and `Tamerlan said that.' Dzhokhar loved him. He would do whatever Tamerlan would say," recalled Elmirza Khozhugov, the ex-husband of Tamerlan's sister. He spoke by telephone from his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan. 
 
 The brothers, who came to the U.S. from Russia a decade ago, were raised in a home that followed Sunni Islam, the religion's largest sect, but were not regulars at the mosque and rarely discussed religion, Khozhugov said. 
 
 Then, in 2008 or 2009, Tamerlan met Misha, a heavyset bald man with a reddish beard. Khozhugov didn't know where they met but believed they attended a Boston-area mosque together. 
 
 Hoping to learn more about the motives, U.S. investigators traveled to southern Russia on Tuesday to speak to the parents of the two suspects, a U.S. Embassy official said. 
 
 The parents live in Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim province in Russia's Caucasus, where Islamic militants have waged an insurgency against Russian security forces for years. 
 
 A lawyer for the family, Zaurbek Sadakhanov, said the parents had just seen pictures of the mutilated body of their elder son and were not up to speaking with anyone. 
 
 In Massachusetts, the state House turned aside a bid by several lawmakers to reinstate the death penalty in certain cases, including the murder of police officers. In a 119-38 vote, the House sent the proposal to a study committee rather than advance it to an up-or-down vote. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writers Bridget Murphy and Bob Salsberg in Boston, Lynn Berry in Moscow, and Adam Goldman, Eric Tucker, Matt Apuzzo and Eileen Sullivan in Washington contributed to this report.
– Did a brain-damaged American help turn the Boston bombing suspects against the US? The far-right and conspiracy theorist publications found in Tamerlan Tsarnaev's apartment appear to have been supplied by an elderly man befriended by the brothers through their mother's job as a home health aide, the Wall Street Journal finds. A lawyer for the family of Donald Larking, a 67-year-old who suffered brain damage when he was shot in a robbery 40 years ago, says Larking was obsessed with conspiracy theories and shared publications with the brothers that questioned the Holocaust and accused the US or Israeli governments of being behind 9/11 and the Newtown school shooting. Larking also supplied the brothers with copies of a white supremacist newspaper published in Alabama. He became so close to Tamerlan that he converted to Islam and began attending the local mosque with him, says the lawyer, who stresses that the shooting badly impaired the elderly man's "awareness of the realities of the world" and his ability to make decisions, the AP reports. Larking, who still attends the mosque, has sunk into "depression and anger" since the Boston Marathon bombing and believes his friends were the victims of another conspiracy, the lawyer says.