Information about the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing continues to stream in from a variety of sources.

Harvard student and staff writer Jared T. Lucky reports that one of the alleged culprits was once an employee at the school:

While hundreds of police units worked to track down Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, former high school classmates remembered him as quiet and polite—a far cry from the suspected terrorist who has left the greater Boston area in a state of fear-ridden lockdown.

“He was pretty much a friend to everyone, because he was so down to earth and friendly,” said Conor R. Paterson ’16, one of Tsarnaev’s former classmates at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, a public high school just blocks from Harvard. During high school he was employed by the University, working intermittently as a lifeguard as recently as the summer of 2012, a Harvard official told The Crimson.

The 19-year-old Cambridge resident, an immigrant from Chechnya who news outlets report moved to the United States about a decade ago, is suspected to have planted one of the two bombs that killed three people and injured 176 at the Boston Marathon Monday. The search for Tsarnaev and his brother, the other man identified Thursday as a suspect in the bombing, developed into a police chase across Cambridge and Watertown last night that left an MIT policeman dead and a transit officer wounded. On Friday morning authorities said they believed Tsarnaev was armed and on the loose, prompting officials to urge residents to remain in their homes for their safety.

Tsarnaev’s acquaintances from high school remembered him as a shy but normal teenager who went by the nickname “Jahar” and excelled at athletics. All five former classmates interviewed by The Crimson said the person they went to school with was nothing like the “white hat suspect” that the FBI identified on a surveillance video walking away from the blast-zone at the marathon.

Paterson said he saw Tsarnaev as recently as November 2012, when the two acquaintances played pick-up basketball at a local Massachusetts park. Paterson said that although Tsarnaev had recently dropped out of University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth at the time, he appeared to be doing well. He was the “same old Jahar,” Paterson said.

Paterson said he thought nothing about Tsarnaev’s conduct or demeanor hinted that he might be capable of the violent acts for which the 19-year-old is currently a prime suspect.

“I had never even seen him be rude to someone else,” he said.

..Hannah S. Firestone ’16, who attended both elementary and high school with Tsaernaev, said the two were briefly members of the same gymnastics program at Cambridge Rindge. She remembered him as a “really nice, quiet guy,” and noted that he had seemed anything but dogmatic.

“I was never under the impression that he was particularly religious,” she said.