The Tsarnaev brothers never finished their final meal together.
Plates of half-eaten food remained visible Saturday in the third-floor Cambridge apartment that authorities say served as the unlikely epicenter of the Boston Marathon bombing plot.
Exclusive Daily News photos of the siblings’ walkup apartment showed the once-anonymous pair shared a squalid existence before Dzhokhar, 19, and Tamerlan, 26, were spied with their backpacks at last Monday’s race.
Dzhokhar remained hospitalized with a gunshot wound one day after his big brother died in a fierce gunfight with law enforcement in Watertown, Mass. — a bloody finish to five terrifying days.
Their Apartment 3 sits behind a makeshift plywood door, up a rickety bannister and stairs, in a nondescript building tucked on a quiet residential block in Cambridge.
Though much of the apartment was in disarray, the remnants of the brothers’ uneaten final meal remained undisturbed — with two chairs alongside their dinner table.
The brothers never returned home after they were spotted Thursday night at a 7-Eleven. Authorities believe the pair subsequently killed a college police officer and carjacked an SUV before the shootout with authorities.
The apartment bore indications of the brothers’ athleticism — a set of skis, snow boots, boxing gloves, a basketball and assorted sneakers.
A bookcase with some cheap pottery stood near the dinner table, while a Crock-Pot — eerily reminiscent of the pressure cookers used in the homemade marathon bombs — was visible nearby.
The immigrant siblings left something else behind — stunned and scared neighbors.
“I lived right underneath them and they were making bombs,” said Albrecht Ammon, 18, who lived downstairs. “It’s scary.”
Ammon remained spooked by the thought of what went on in the apartment in the weeks before the twin blasts that killed three and injured another 183 victims.
“How could you do a bombing like that?” he asked Saturday. “They planned it out and they tried to hurt people …. They acted like a normal family.”
There were no lingering signs of anything exceptional in the home — just an old stereo, a gas can, a can of motor oil and boxing handwraps hanging from a wire.
The front lawn was muddied from the tracks of investigators pouring into the apartment on Friday. Ammon said the brothers were typically quiet and caused no problems in the building.
Tamerlan would honk his car horn as a hello when driving on the street. Although the older brother was married with a child, there was never any sign of his family at the apartment.
Ammon, who attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School with Dzhokhar, remained puzzled by one question about his old neighbors.
“I just wanted to know, ‘Why?’ ” he asked. “They had a nice life. I want to know why.”
