According to Tampa Bay police, an 18-year-old neo-Nazi, who allegedly converted to Islam, shot two of his roommates who “disrespected his faith.” Police arrested Devon Arthurs Friday after he took hostages at a smoke shop near his apartment. While he was taken into custody, he said he did it because America was had “bomb[ed his] country.”
According to the Tampa Bay Times:
Arthurs stated that, prior to the killings, “he had been privy to neo-Nazi internet sites threatening to kill people, and he had developed a thinking that he should take some of the neo-Nazis with him.” Arthurs told police he had become angry about the world’s anti-Muslim sentiment and “wanted to bring attention to his cause.
However, when police went to the apartment crime scene, they found Brandon Russell, another roommate, returned from National Guard duty, crying at the scene. Arthurs told police that Russell was not involved in the shooting, but Russell was still arrested Sunday after police found explosives-making materials and a framed picture of Timothy McVeigh in his bedroom.
In interviews with detectives, Arthurs said he and Russell and the two deceased roommates, 22-year-old Jeremy Himmelman and 18-year-old Andrew Oneschuk, had shared neo-Nazi views in the past. “Arthurs stated that for some time before the murders, he had been privy to Russell participating in online neo-Nazi internet chat rooms where he threatened to kill people and bomb infrastructure.”
In the apartment’s garage, police found a “cooler-full” of an explosive known as HMTD as well as “explosive precursors including potassium chlorate, potassium nitrate, nitro methane and more than a pound of ammonium nitrate in a package addressed to Russell.” According to the complaint against Russell, he told investigators that the materials were for homemade rockets and weather balloons which were leftover from his time in an engineering club at the University of South Florida. An FBI investigator said that HMTD was too volatile for these purposes.
In Russell’s bedroom, police found a framed photo of McVeigh, who used a bomb with similar materials as those found in Russell’s garage in the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. Russell also admitted to police he was a national socialist and belonged to “a self-organized white supremacy group called the Atomwaffen.”
What a weird story.
(via Tampa Bay Times)