Mother and child of Satan

Last year there was this guy that blew himself up and was in the hospital for some time but ultimately recovered. The speculation at the time was that he used Tannerite and he was extremely stupid in the application.

Even if the stupid part was correct it turns out that it wasn’t Tannerite. Darwin was unable to cure his stupidity and now the Federal Government is attempting to address the symptoms. He was arrested Monday and the affidavit for his arrest was unsealed yesterday with interesting details. His explosives included Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP) which is sometimes known as Mother of Satan because of its high susceptibility to accidental detonation.

Other interesting stuff in the affidavit indicates the world would have been much better off if Darwin had been successful. This guy appears to be someone many would characterize as a child of Satan.

Update: I found the following interesting as well. This is from the list of items to be searched for and seized in the affidavit. Notice that nearly every home has the precursor chemicals to make explosives. This is one of the reasons I say the TSA explosives tests cannot be effective and are a waste of time. Explosives can be easily made from common household materials. If the TSA were to screen for these they would generate so many false positives that the “pat downs” and extensive searches would raise the cost of TSA to even higher levels and create even more public outrage. Since they don’t test for these chemicals explosive devices can be easily made and detonated on board commercial flights at will.

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9 thoughts on “Mother and child of Satan

  1. Part of “particularly describing” the items to be searched for MUST include a statement in the affidavit about how those items are connected to the purported crime. Was there such a statement in this affidavit?

  2. What can the criminal justice system do with a guy like this? At his age (21), ten years in prison is going to provide him with one heck of a criminal education. He’ll come out of prison even more dangerous than he was going in.

  3. That list is absurd. Icing sugar? Diesel fuel? Baking soda? Hydrogen peroxide? I’ve got all of that stuff. It’s a wonder my house hasn’t gone up in pieces yet.

  4. Joe, I just read the entire affidavit. Aside from the legally weak “in my training and experience” catch-all phrase, which shows up several times throughout the dozens of pages of the affidavit (and which I was taught to use sparingly, because I would have to actually EXPLAIN my training and experience to the issuing magistrate), I see ZERO connection between the common household items and the manufacture of the bomb in question. They would have to be excluded if seized and contested in a prelim hearing. The other thing I noted was some carelessness towards the end of the items to be seized list, in that Smokeless Powder was listed as a “high” explosive, when it isn’t, and can only explode when tightly confined (as will almost any oxidation-reduction reaction, as you probably know).

    In all fairness to the Feds, they probably bagged a dangerous guy here, but he was (1) Mostly dangerous to himself and (2) Connected to Jihad by only the most tenuous of “wannabe” links. Note that in one of the email exchanges, some suspicious Islamist questioned his Islamic conversion, and Brice failed to answer. It would be easy to demonstrate that Brice was only using the Islamic connections as a path to acquire knowledge of how to make explosives.

    He’s a small fish, but the links are VERY instructive to show just how wide a net these Feds can cast with their “training and experience” and get away with that. They get away with it because the judges are weak, and fail to question the vague references to “training and experience”.

    Were I getting a search warrant, I would NOT use the explosives part of this one as a model. It’s basically buzzword bingo in that section, BUT, OTOH, the section on computers shows a VERY high state of preparation and knowledge on the part of the affiant. I WOULD use that part as a model in a heartbeat.

    Overall, I grade the affadavit a “B-minus”. It contains HUGE overkill. The Feds and the Sheriff did a great job of connecting the guy to the bomb and the bomb materials to his SSID and computer. They had this guy six ways to Sunday BEFORE they decided to seize his icing sugar and household nail box. If I’m the Federal Judge, I grill the Federal Attorney severely, and ask him to get the affiant to re-write the whole thing to do the job, and just the job the warrant needs to do.

  5. Ubu52)

    Can you back that up with anything? Movies don’t count.

  6. What a maroon.

    I too read the whole afidavit. I’ve seen many cases of local, state or federal law enforcement radically over reacting to a young male expressing a more or less innocent fascination with energetic chemistry, completely bereft of any intent to cause harm. This ain’t one of those cases.

  7. I don’t know if Ubu52 would like my suggestion, but *my* solution for punishing this young man would be to require him to pay for his care, and for any property damage he may have caused, and to pay into a fund that would help care for others who were hurt by explosions.

    If he kills someone later because of his continued experiments, require him to recompense for the lives of those he harmed and/or outright took, by paying for the loss of income that each person would have earned, had that person been fully healthy and/or alive. Also, declare him an outlaw, and let him know that at any moment, an “avenger of blood” for each person killed will have the right to kill him *at any moment*, for *any* reason.

    We *can* develop a legal system that simultaneously recompenses the victims (rather than just ignore them) and get rid of prisons entirely. Will we set up such a system, though? I doubt it–too many people are satisfied with what we currently have!

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