(Boston Magazine)

Hours before he and his older brother exchanged fire with police in Massachusetts, Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote to his mother that he expected to die.

According to court records, Tsarnaev "sent an email to his mother in which he told her he loved her and ended with, 'Inshallah [i.e. God willing] if I don't see you in this life I will see you in the akhira [i.e. afterlife].'"

Prosecutors inserted the email into a court document that challenges Tsarnaev's motion suppress evidence collected from his computer and from the family's apartment on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, Mass.

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Federal prosecutors said that sending that email, and taking certain other actions in the hours before he was caught, indicates "that when Tsarnaev left the Norfolk Street apartment on April 18, he did not expect to return alive, and thus abandoned his expectation of privacy in everything left behind."

Defense attorneys had argued prosecutors were over-broad and vague when they applied to search the apartment. They also argued Tsarnaev had a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Prosecutors said Tsarnaev moved out of the apartment in 2011 and into a dorm room at UMass-Dartmouth and therefore could no longer claim what belongings of his were left should have been kept from the authorities.

Prosecutors also reiterated that Tsarnaev had sent a friend a text message saying "'if y[o]u want y[o]u can go to my room and take what's there,' indicating that he was abandoning his possessions."

Three people died, including an 8-year-old boy, and more than 260 were injured in the dual bombings at the Boston Marathon last April. Dzhokhar's older brother and alleged co-conspirator, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed in the police shootout days after the blast. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has pleaded not guilty to 30 charges related to the bombing and to the murder of an MIT police officer.