The Roommates

woman who was just trying to check her mail. Maybe it didn't quite sink in right away that he meant it. He left the office and started walking as she dialed nine when One she followed him, telling the operator that he kept grabbing the back of his pants as he walked, as if there was something heavy tucked into his waistband. The police were already en route when the second call came. Woman on the other end of the line this time was calling from a smoke shop and a strip mall

across from the apartment complex. She was crying hysterically, barely able to get the words out. There was a man in the store pointing a gun at her. When the police arrived, Devon Arthur's was holding a handgun in one hand and a bottle of Coca Cola in the other. He was ready to surrender, but he wanted to finish his soda first. Once he was in handcuffs, an officer

asked him if anyone was hurt. He responded cryptically saying that there were people he'd hurt out back in the confusion, his hostages had seized the opportunity to run out the back door away from this ball little situation. So the officer assumed that he meant one of those people had been injured, but they were all unharmed. The officer again asked him, who is hurt. He replied calmly, oh, the people in the apartment. But they aren't hurt. They're dead.

I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, Little guys. This is a story that I've mentioned in passing a few times before. It's always just a quick aside, a sort of hand waving acknowledgment of that time two members of Adam Woffin were murdered by their roommate. It was a pivotal moment in the history of that now defunct neo Nazi terrorist organization. So it comes up in just about any story involving any member of Adam Woffin, but I've never really bothered to explain it. I'm usually busy trying

to get somewhere else. I was thinking about it again this week because I was thinking about Brandon Russell, the founder of Adam Woffen. These murders usually come up when I mentioned Brandon Russell because they're kind of what put him in federal prison the first time. Not because he committed them. He didn't. He wasn't even home when it happened, but it was his name on the lease at the condo, and it was his name written in sharpie on the

cooler full of explosives police found in the garage. Brandon Russell did his time for having that little bomb workshop, and he's since been convicted again, this time for conspiring to blow up the power grid in Baltimore. If you're listening to this episode the day it came out, he might be sitting in front of a federal judge right now receiving his sentence. I'm not psychic, so I couldn't tell you how long he's going away for this time around.

But that upcoming sentencing got me thinking about how he ended up there, and that story starts with these murders. I hadn't intended to focus so much on the murders themselves. I didn't think there was really all that much meat to the story. Most of the news articles I've read in the past kind of say the same thing, just those broad strokes. I was already familiar with Devin Arthur's shot and killed Andrew Onischuk and Jeremy Himmelman in the

apartment they shared with Brandon Russell. All four men were members of Adamoffen, and the investigation into the murders led to the discovery of the explosives in the garage. The explosives belonged to Brandon Russell, and he was federally charged for possessing them. His federal case doesn't have a lot of detail to it because he pled guilty pretty quickly, and Devin Arthur's criminal case wasn't federal. But then I

remembered this happened in Florida. People love to make jokes about the Florida Man, the idea that people in Florida are uniquely predisposed of committing bizarre crimes. Florida man throws live gator at fast food cashier. Florida man leads cops on high speed horse chase. Florida man Rob's convenience store a dressed as Spider Man all real headlines, But people in Florida aren't actually more likely than people from anywhere else to crash a car into a grocery store while

high on meth or whatever else. This mythical Florida man is getting up to. Florida just happens to have some of the broadest public records laws in the country, making it incredibly easy for journalists to quickly gain access to police reports and court records. I wish every weird little guy would do his weird little crimes in the state of Florida, because it makes my job so much easier.

In this case, it means I was able to read hundreds of pages of police reports, watch police interrogation videos, and view court records not just for this murder case, but filings from the murderer's parents' divorce. And it painted a slightly different picture from the one I had in my head. But as always, let's start before the beginning. Adam Woffen was an international network of neo Nazis. It was one of several organizations that formed out of relationships

that started on an online forum called Iron March. Iron March first appeared online in twenty eleven, launched by a Russian nationalist named Alisher Mukitnadoff. In its six years online, it was an incubator for neo Nazi ideology around the world. Fascist organizations like National Action in the United Kingdom, Adam Woffen and the United States, Tschidas in Lithuania, and Antipodean

Resistance in Australia were all born on this forum. Existing organizations grew and networked, and they recruited online posters into real life terror cells. The site disappeared without explanation one day in November of twenty seventeen. There was plenty of speculation about why the site went dark, but Mukitnadov declined to answer any questions about it when he hung up on a reporter from the BBC in twenty twenty.

group's existence. There were a handful of posts that refer to the group by name that pre date that announcement thread, and there are photographs of Russell holding an Adam off and flag that were taken in the late spring and summer of twenty fifteen, so it did exist prior to October. But his claim in that post that the group had existed for three years already is unlikely, especially considering that he hadn't founded the group alone. His co founder was

a teenage boy named Devon Arthur's. Devin Arthur's was young. He was born in nineteen ninety nine. His parents separated when he was five, but didn't actually file for divorce until twenty ten. The divorce was contentious, and it dragged on for years. The court appointed a guardian ad item, an attorney whose role is to advocate for the best

interests of the child. In one letter to the court in twenty eleven, the guardian ad litem noted that Devan was taking the divorce much harder than most children in his position, and he was having behavioral problems. In twenty twelve, his parents agreed in mediation that Devon should be evaluated by a child behavioral specialist, which his mother claimed in subsequent filings never happened. In the fall of twenty fourteen, when he was still living primarily with his father, he

ordered a copy of Mine Kampf of of Amazon. When the package arrived in the mail, his father opened it, saw what was inside, and refused to let his son have the book. After Devon physically confronted his father over the text, his dad kicked him out. According to his mother's filings in the divorce case, his father abandoned him at her house. The estranged couple lived in different counties, so the sudden move meant that he had to change schools midyear. He only ended up attending his new school

for a few months. He dropped out of school later that year before finishing the tenth grade. Devon Arthur's joined the Iron March Forum in March of twenty fifteen, just a few days before his sixteenth birthday, and the same month he dropped out of high school. By April of twenty fifteen, Arthur's and Russell were hanging out in person after realizing they both lived in the Orlando area. In the fall of twenty fifteen, when Russell announced that Adam

Woffin was open for new members. He claimed the group already had chapters in Chicago, Texas, Boston, New York, Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio, Missouri, Oregon, and Virginia, with more than forty members nationwide. A private message that Arthur sent another user around that same time, though, puts that number closer to fifteen, mainly in Central Florida, though there was a small cell of just three guys

in the Chicago area. When Brandon Russell bragged in November that the group had met up to do quote a lot of activism, what he actually meant was that he and Devon had gone to the University of Central Florida to hang up racist flyers. It was a group of two, but the pair were close. In separate police interrogations on the night of the murder, both Brandon Russell and Devon Arthur's told police that they were the best of friends,

and they had been for years. When Russell joined the National Guard in twenty sixteen, he left Arthur's in charge of Adam Woffin. At first, things seemed to be going really well for Arthur's as the group's interim leader, he was recruiting and vetting new members, and he was even trying to get some new chapters off the ground. In April, he exchanged messages with a prospective new member in the Boston area, one of the men he would murder a year later. In May of twenty sixteen, he organized a

flyering campaign in Boston. There were only two Adamoffin members in the Boston area at the time, a woman who posted under the username Rexa, and the young man Arthur's had just approved for membership, Andrew Onischuk. A few weeks later, Rexa got a direct message from Slavros, the site's moderator, who is widely believed to be the site's founder, Alexander Mukitnadoff.

He sent her a link to a now deleted post on Twitter showing that someone had made the connection between the flyers and the Iron March users who'd put them up. The post claims that there were two known Adam Woffen members in the Boston area and that one of them was a student at MIT. The post didn't actually reveal her name, but she was panicking, how could they know any of that? What else did they know? She begged Slavros to wipe out her account history, writing can you

delete my account here please? Or delete all my posts please? I go to university. I cannot be involved with this. If they find me, my entire life is ruined. But he refused, saying that it would only make her look even more guilty if the posts were deleted now, and she had nothing to worry about anyway. He assured her that there was simply no way for anyone to access

her IP address. They didn't know it at the time, but an anti fascist researcher had made an account on Iron March and tricked several users into clicking a link that recorded their IP addresses. She clicked it from a school computer, revealing her to be a student at MIT. Without knowing how this person knew exactly where she was, they had to consider the possibility that someone had sold

her out. She insisted in her messages with Slavros that despite Devin Arthur's recent conversion to Islam, they were still on good terms, and he assured her that he hadn't said anything to anyone. The forum was buzzing that week. The interim leader of Adam Woffen had announced his conversion to Islam. Sometime in May of twenty sixteen, Devon Arthur's updated his Iron March profile. Older archived versions of his user profile show that he'd listed his location as quote

Dixie Land and his ideology as Confederate national Socialism. With this new update, he now lived in the Land of non Believers and he identified as a Salophist national socialist. There was apparently a bit of a blow up over this conversion in the massive data dump of leaked posts from Iron March. This threat isn't there. It was deleted by the moderators pretty quickly, so it wasn't there to

scrape when researchers pulled everything off the site later. But the moderators didn't delete people's direct messages about the thread, and those private conversations are in the data. Despite what Devin Arthurs would later claim, his conversion to Islam wasn't a renunciation of his prior beliefs, it was a twisted evolution of them. In one direct message, a user who saw the thread before it was deleted said that Arthur's

plan to convert other Adam Waffen members to Islam. He failed to convince the forum that his newfound commitment to jihad was the right direction for American neo Nazis, and he was banned from the website. Slavrose threatened to cut ties with Adam Woffin entirely, but several members of the group said they'd convinced Arthur's to step down as interim leader until Brandon Russell returned from army training. Two other

members would step up to run the group. Ironically, one of those new interim leaders was also a Muslim convert. David Cole Tarkington had converted to Islam more than two years before Devon Arthur's did, and it doesn't appear to have been a secret. Tarkington was a major recruiter for Adam Woffen, bringing in at least eleven new members to the group in twenty sixteen, including John Cameron Denton, the man who would go on to lead the group after

Russell went to prison. But when Arthur's was being interviewed by that homicide detective, he said that after he converted, he realized his prior beliefs had been wrong, that the hate left his heart, and guided by the Koran, he came to understand that there was no point in wanting to kill people. Of other races. A lot of the news coverage takes his statements at face value. He killed his roommates because they were Nazis, and since his conversion he wasn't anymore. But I have a really hard time

believing that. We talked a little bit about the idea of this strange melding of neo Nazism and interest in Islamic extremism a few weeks ago, in the episode about Nicholas Young, the DC Metro transit cop with the Nazi tattoos who went to prison for trying to send gift cards to Isis. And it seems like an obvious contradiction. How can a neo Nazi be a Muslim? Don't white supremacists hate Muslims? They do, of course, But it's more complicated than that. It's a contradiction, sure, but plenty of

people live in contradiction. And there's a lot of overlap too. Even neo Nazis who would never entertain the idea of a conversion are willing to talk about the possibility of finding common cause with people they see as allies in anti Semitism, people whose commitment to armed extremism is appealing to them, and all of the finer points of syncretic fascism, aside Devon Arthur's didn't know what he believed. His conversion

happened in a Minecraft chat. Several friends he met through the online game converted around the same time, and it seems like for some of them it was a bit. One of those friends later told Rolling Stone that Devin's version of Islam was weird. Quote. It wasn't true Islam. It was more about idealizing the prophet Muhammad as a white arian. You know, Muhammad as an ideal male form.

I don't know, he says, you know, but I don't know what he's talking about, and it is unkind I think to cast out on the sincerity of someone's religious conversion, but I'm going to He was extremely online line. His exposure to Islam was through memes and jokes in a chat room populated by teenage gamers who met on four Chan. He was a high school dropout with absent parents. He was struggling with mental illness. He never spoke to in

a mom about his religious path. When it came to reading the Koran, he was entirely self taught, and it sounds like he didn't get it, but taking a face value, Devin Arthur's was Muslim in his own way. The other neo Nazis didn't like it, and he was kicked off the Iron March Forum. He was forced to step down as interim leader of Adam Woffin, but he wasn't kicked out of Adam Woffin, and he didn't even stay off

of Iron March. He still logged in to use the site under Brandon Russell's account, and he stayed best friends with Brandon Russell. In October of twenty sixteen, months after this blow up, he and Brandon traveled to Massachusetts together to visit Adam Woffin's Boston cell, which at the time consisted of just two members, Andrew Onischuk and Jeremy Himmelman. They'd both joined the group that year and quickly became

very close friends. Several of Jeremy's friends in Boston met Devon Arthur's and Brandon Russell during that trip, and they all said the same thing. These guys are fucking weird. They cannot behave in a normal fashion. Jeremy Himmelman's sister begged him to get these people out of the apartment that the siblings shared they wouldn't stop drawing swastikas on things and making Holocaust jokes. Devon kept calling her a dumpster slut. Another friend of Jeremy's said quote, it was

very obvious that they were mentally unstable people. A few months later, in January twenty seventeen, Jeremy Himmelman flew down to Florida to visit Brandon after he faked a suicide attempt as a joke. It was a cruel joke. I mean, it would be cruel in any context, but Brandon almost certainly knew that Jeremy had tried several times in the last few years to end his own life, so of course he dropped everything to be there when he believed

Brandon had nearly died. Two months later, in March of twenty seventeen, back home in Massachusetts, Jeremy Himmelman attempted suicide for a fourth time after an argument with his roommates. He survived. His girlfriend and his parents say that it was a wake up call for him. He was ready to leave Adam Waffin behind. It wasn't good for him. These weren't his friends. This wasn't a path forward, but he didn't have any other path forward either, and he

was having trouble cutting ties. He didn't leave the chats. He was still best friends with Andrew on Ashuk and he didn't have a lot else to do, so when Brandon Russell invited them both back to Florida, they went that same month. In March of twenty seventeen, Brandon Russell's grandmother co signed e lease for him. It was a

nice little condo in a gated community in Tampa. Sometime in early April, he and Devin moved in, and that's when he started begging Andrew on Ashuk and Jeremy Himmelman to come down and visit, come down and spend the summer with us. He promised them a rent free summer in Florida. They could go fishing, there was a pool, it would be fun. Andrew and Jeremy regretted it almost immediately. Barely a week into their stay, they were already talking

about going home early. His two bedroom condo wasn't big enough for four men. Andrew and Jeremy shared the smaller bedroom, Devin slept in the living room, and Brandon kept the larger bedroom for himself. Brandon was gone along on top of being in the National Guard, he had a job at a shooting range. Andrew and Jeremy got temporary jobs at a recycling plant, but Devin just sat in the living room all day on the computer. The place was messy.

No one did dishes. I was going to say, I assume they didn't even own a vacuum cleaner, but I did see one in the crime scene photographs. It was pushed up against the wall in the living room, underneath the North Korean flag. They barely even had any furniture. The room that Andrew and Jeremy shared didn't have a bed. It was just a futon and a mattress on the floor. This wasn't the fun Florida summer they'd imagined. Devin was weird and annoying, and things were tense. They wanted to

go home. On May seventeenth, Andrew Anashuk told his parents that he was going to come home early. He told his mom that he planned to stay another week just to finish out his temp job. He didn't feel right walking away from it. Just two days later, though, on Friday, May nineteenth, he'd changed his mind. He had to go, and he was going to leave on Monday. Jeremy Himmelman called his girlfriend that day to lament Andrew's decision. He was going to miss Andrew, but things had gotten too

uncomfortable in the apartment. That same day, May nineteenth, Brandon Russell left the condo early in the morning. He had National Guard drill that weekend had to report in that day. Devin was, as always, at home on the computer all day. Around five pm, Jeremy was texting with his girlfriend back home in Massachusetts. At five four pm, she asked him if they could FaceTime. I'm hanging out with Devin and Andrew right now, maybe later, he replied with a heart emoji.

She said she might take a nap, and he joked that she was probably going to fall asleep for seven hours again like she had last time. His phone was still resting on his stomach under his right arm when crime Scene Texts photographed his body a few hours later. I can't tell you exactly what happened in the fifteen minutes between five oh five pm and five twenty pm. When Jeremy sent his last text to his girlfriend at

five oh five, nothing was wrong. He seemed relaxed. He said that he was hanging out with his roommates, and he gave no indication that anything was amiss. She knew all about the ongoing tension in the apartment. Who would have mentioned it if anything out of the ordinary was happening. But at five point twenty Devon Arthur's called his father and told him that he'd just killed two people. There's

no dispute about the basic facts. Devon Arthur's shot Andrew Anoschuk and Jeremy Himmelman with a Wasser ten that's a Romanian version of an AK forty seven. Based on the medical examiner's report, both men would have died instantly from multiple shots to the head and torso fired from the rifle at close range. They were both in the bedroom they shared. Jeremy was lying on the futon and Andrew's

body was on the floor near the bathroom door. Devon left the rifle on the couch in the living room, picked up a clock seventeen, and walked out of the apartment. He walked over to the leasing office, where he announced what he'd done to two maintenance texts, the property manager and a resident, and then he walked across the street into the strip mall and entered the smoke shop, where he held the store clerk and two customers hostage at

gunpoint until the police arrived. He's never denied what he did. Quite the opposite. All he wanted to do was tell people. He called his dad, he called his mom. He told the people in the leasing office, he told the people in the smoke shop. He told every officer he encountered after his arrest. But as he continued to tell and

retell this story, it changed a little. In a report written by the officer who transported him to the police station that night, it's noted that Arthur's was talking almost constantly, offering up spontaneous statements, and though no one was asking him questions, the officer wrote, Arthur's continued to repeat his story and would add more details each time. Devon's account of the actual physical sequence of events remains pretty consistent,

and it mostly matches up with the physical evidence. It's his recollection of his internal monologue and his motivations that change Throughout the evening. It was a little after one in the morning, nearly eight hours after the murder, by the time a Tampa homicide detective turned on the camera

to record a formal interview with Devon. Arthur's and by that time he'd had plenty of time alone to think, and over the course of this two hour interrogation, you can hear him convincing himself of the story that he's come up with.

I think this first story is the truth. He was sitting in the living room cleaning the rifle when Jeremy and Andrew started teasing him again. He'd spent the entire day on the computer in an encrypted group chat full of other members of Adam Woffen, and on that particular day, the chat was making fun of him again. He was

reaching a boiling point and he snapped. And unfortunately, in the moment that he snapped, he happened to already have a rifle in his hands, and in that split second where he made the decision to pull the trigger, that's what he was thinking about. He shot them because they made fun of him. But as the reality of this situation settled in, that didn't really feel like a good enough explanation. It may not have even been a conscious choice.

He may have eventually convinced himself that this is true, but within an hour he's adding details to the narrative, and the more time he has to think about it, the clearer his new story becomes.

coming to terms with it. He's trying to understand his own actions and figure out how he's supposed to live with them, and he's externalizing that entire thought process in a recorded interview with a homicide detective.

a human body. He has to find a way to convince himself that there was a good reason for it. He feels like a monster, so he's trying to find a way to be a hero. But he's lying an organization that he was part of his conversion. He had converted a year ago, and he still lived with the group's leader. He still participated in the group's private chats. He was still privy to the group's secret internal operations. He went on group outings and road trips. When Adam

Woffin went camping, Devin was there. When Adam Woffin did training drills in the woods, Devon was there. Just a month before the murders, he accompanied Brandon Russell on a trip to Detroit, Chicago, and Boston for the purpose of buying and selling guns. Remember, they live in Florida. It's pretty easy to buy a gun in Florida, so I don't think they were buying guns in places like Chicago or Boston. So you'll have to use your imagination to

fill in the gaps here. Maybe they were selling guns purchased in Florida to members of the group operating in areas where it was harder to buy them. If Devin Arthur's had abandoned his prior beliefs, if he was so disgusted with neo Nazism, why was he participating in this. He could have moved back in with either one of

his parents. He could have called the FBI. He could have just stayed home when the neo Nazi terrorist group went out into the woods to practice shooting drills for the race war, but he didn't do any of that. He's telling this officer now in May of twenty seventeen, that he was no longer a member of Adam Woffen and hadn't been since his conversion a year earlier, and I just don't think that's true. I think he's lying,

maybe even to himself. He sounds, for the most part, fairly lucid in this interview, but half a dozen psychiatrists and forensic psychologists would eventually agree that he was profoundly mentally ill. So a lot of this is maybe just trying to cope with his own actions. But I don't think it's just coping. I think he realizes he has a bargaining chip here, because throughout the interview he keeps asking to speak with the FBI, and he says he has important information that they'll want to hear.

nobody's going to see this video. Now. Remember, cops can lie to you. Cops can always lie to you. It's always okay for them to lie. Because I watched the video of this officer telling Devin Arthur's that no one would ever watch the video. He wants to tell the FBI everything he knows about Adam Woffen, but he's very worried that people will know he talked. He's worried that members of the group will target him if they find out.

are spinning a pretty fanciful sounding tale. And in this case, even though what he's saying does sound a little far fetched, they're listening carefully because they know there's some truth to it, because they've already seen the explosives. Before Devon Arthur's ever mentioned the presence of explosive material inside the condo, the officers who arrived first on the scene saw enough to

make them cautious. The first officer to enter the apartment wrote in his report that on his initial walkthrough of the scene, he opened the closet in the other bedroom, the one that belonged to Brandon Russell, and on a shelf in the closet where you would normally keep sweaters or something, there were several Geiger counters, a significant number

of batteries, and a lot of matches. Another officer found a backpack near the front door that contained electric matches and some kind of device that looked like it might be an ied. They weren't entirely sure what they were looking at, but they knew enough to know that somebody else needed to be the one looking at it. So they confirmed that the two victims were deceased and not

in need of any medical help. The apartment was otherwise empty, and then they evacuated the neighboring apartments while they waited for the bomb squad And so backing up to this point in our timeline, When Devon Arthur's was arrested at the smoke shop, he was put into a police car and he told the officers that his two roommates were dead inside their home, which was in the complex across

the street, but he couldn't remember the unit number. They'd only just moved in a month before, but he offered to show them which one it was if they would drive him there. And so, as the police car is pulling up outside the condo, they can hear someone screaming inside, and as the officers are approaching the residence, a man

dressed in military fatigues came out the front door. He is hysterical, unable to respond to their questions, collapses onto the ground, sobbing, crying, and he's screaming, Jeremy is dead. That was Brandon Russell. He'd arrived home some time in that very small window of time after the murders, but before the police arrived. He wasn't there when it happened, but by the time the police get there, he is.

The property manager said that she saw him driving erratically through the parking lot when she was standing outside after dialing nine one one, so he had to have gotten home after five thirty, but before five forty five. He was detained by the officers on the scene for obvious reasons. They just watched him walk out of an apartment with two dead bodies inside. They don't know what they're dealing with.

So around six p m. Those officers who first entered the apartment saw some things they thought they needed a bomb squad for Brandon Russell and Devon Arthur's are both handcuffed and sitting in separate police cars right outside, and both men, separately and for their own reasons, voluntarily disclosed to the police that there are explosives inside the house.

Devon is starting to realize that he wants the police to know that the people he killed were very bad men, and that maybe they were going to use those bombs to hurt innocent people. And at this point he adds that I wouldn't kill innocent people. I had plenty of opportunities tonight to kill innocent people, even those responding officers, and I didn't do it. For Brandon, he's just trying to get out ahead of the problem he knows is coming.

The cops already saw some suspicious material inside the condo, but they hadn't looked in the garage yet, so he told a detective that they would find some things in there that they should know about. He said that in the garage there's potassium chlorate thorium, which is a radioactive material, rocket propellant, and a compound called h M D T Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine is a highly volatile explosive compound. It

is dangerous to handle, it is dangerous to store. It is insane to keep it in your garage when your garage is directly underneath your living room. He did fail to mention to the officer that there was also some ammonium nitrate in there, but the bomb squad found it anyway. Russell told the officer on scene that they are going to find that stuff in the garage, but he wants them to know that it's only there for fueling model rockets.

But as he's sitting there in handcuffs trying to convince the officer that those explosives in the garage are just for his hobby, he asks if he's ever going to see his family again, because he knows what this looks like, and it looks bad. He's stuck to the li though he's just a model rocket enthusiast having a very traumatic day.

At some point, both men were separately transported to the police station to await their interrogations, and during Devin's interrogation, he has a very clear idea of exactly what the bomb squad is going to find in the house. He knew what was in the house, where it was and how it got there.

stop them before they could hurt innocent people. And of course the detective did specifically ask about the model rockets.

to go about carrying out their own attacks. It's not at all hard to believe that he was thinking about and talking about these things as he's building bombs in his garage in twenty seventeen and wasn't a model rocket enthusiast. He did work on a project involving a model rocket as a member of the engineering club at the University of South Florida, but that was in twenty thirteen and he had since dropped out because he couldn't pass calculus.

There were no model rockets in the condo. An explosives expert wrote in a report that no one would use HMTD to power a model rocket. It's too volatile. It's too volatile for pretty much everything. The military doesn't use it. It fell out of favor in mining decades ago, but it is possible to make it home if you're not afraid of accidentally blowing your fingers off if the workshop

gets too warm, so it's still popular among terrorists. At the end of his interview, Arthur says, again quite plainly, if I hadn't done this, there would have been attacks. He's sure of it now. That's why he did it. He's sure at this point that he'd actually always thought that, and that was what he was thinking before it happened. Throughout his interview, Arthur's is asking to speak to the FBI.

He's insisting that they need to hear what he has to say, and they keep sort of pushing him off, saying, yeah, we can think about that. You know, we'll get to that. That's later. He doesn't know that an FBI agent is watching a video feed from the next room, and he's right. The FBI was very interested in what he had to say, because shortly after that interview wrapped up, the same detective sat down with Brandon Russell, and this time that FBI agent is in the room. They talked to Brandon for

a little over an hour. The detective had him sign a form confirming that he'd been informed of his Miranda rights, but he was also told that he wasn't in custody, he wasn't being detained, he's not under arrest, and he's free to leave it any time. He signed the form, and he agreed to talk without a lawyer, which I'm fine with him doing, but you listener, never talked to the police without a lawyer. They talked a lot about the murders. Obviously, he's talking to a homicide detective in

a homicide investigation. They talked about Devin and Andrew and Jeremy, how they all come to be friends, how they met online and then in person, how that friendship had fallen apart over Devon's conversion to Islam. Brandon says Devon's conversion was never an issue for him, and I think that's true. He insisted that what was going on in the house was all just banter, just regular ball busting, teasing between friends.

After the detective rephrases the question half a dozen times, he reluctantly agrees that, yeah, Jeremy and Andrew crossed the line sometimes. Maybe they were bullying him and Devin was having a hard time with it, but he said it had never gotten physical and he never thought anyone would get hurt. He also said Adam Waffin was just a club for people with shared political interests, and they liked

to do outdoor activities together. He did agree that those shared beliefs were national socialism, and he got a little animated when he started complaining that schools only teach lies about Hitler. For the most part, though, Who's mumbling and his body language is guarded and anxious. He's sitting sort of folded in on himself, slouching down with his legs

crossed and his arms folded tightly across his chest. He's tired, he's traumatized, but he's scared, and he insists throughout this conversation that everything they found was legal, It was legally obtained, he wasn't planning to do anything nefarious with it, and it was all related to his hobby of building model rockets. After about an hour of this, the detective's tone changes.

He's been sort of yes, ending him, just letting him talk, getting him to open up, talking about his hobbies, not passing any kind of judgment, and Brandon Russell has been portraying himself and his organization as what the detective calls, you know, knuckleheads horsing around, you know, just kids having fun. But if we look on your computer, what are we going to find? Is it just jokes and camping trips or are we going to find that you've made explicit threats?

Are you saying things like he'll all jews right? What are you saying? Are you making the kind of threats that could lead to federal charges? And at first Brandon tries to answer the question. He says, you know, only ever as a joke, I've never said that non satirically, and they press him a little hard what kinds of things are you saying? And then he just mumbles that maybe he needs a lawyer, So the questions stop there.

He's not under arrest, he can leave at any time, and if he wants a lawyer, they're not going to ask him any more questions. He can go, but he can't go home though. The ATF has only just arrived and they still haven't finished clearing the house of explosive material. And until the ATF clears the scene, the medical examiner can't take the bodies away, so he's not going to be able to get into that condo anytime soon. So

Russell asks the detective to call his dad. He doesn't ask if he can use the phone to call his dad. He a twenty two year old member of the military, is asking this other adult man, will you call my dad? He doesn't actually know his dad's phone number, and his cell phone is still inside the condo, but he says, you know, you can just call the Palm Beach County Sheriff's office and ask for him by name. He's a deputy there, or maybe it's West Palm Beach. He can't

actually remember he and his dad aren't close. He wasn't around when Branda was a kid, and they don't really get along now. But he tells the FBI that he's going to drive to Palm Beach and stay with his dad. His mom still lives in the Bahamas, so he doesn't really have anywhere else nearby he can go, so a little after six am on Saturday morning, a Tampa police officer dropped Russell off outside the condo. The Explosive Ordnance Disposal team had finished with the scene, so detectives were

just now arriving to conduct their search. One of those detectives went inside and got his keys for him. In her report, she notes that when she entered his bedroom to look for his keys, she saw a large framed photograph of Timothy mcveay on his dresser. An explosives enforcement agent from the ATF confirmed to the FBI sometime early Saturday morning that the materials they found did meet the

legal definition of a destructive device. What they found in that garage was enough to bring federal charges, but by the time the ATF agents were done examining the scene and writing of their findings, the FBI had already let him go he was gone. He said he was going to his dad's house in West Palm Beach, but he didn't. When FBI agents contacted his family, they said they hadn't heard from him. Instead of going to his dad's house to get some rest, he'd driven straight to the home

of another Adam Woffin member. He told him about the murders, and he said he needed to get away for a while to clear his head. But his friend didn't just toss a few T shirts and a toothbrush into a backpack like you might expect someone to do for a spur of the moment weekend away. Instead, he withdrew all of the money from his bank account, quit his job,

and got into Russell's car, heading south. When deputies apprehended Russell in the Florida Keys a day later, the rifles they'd bought at a sporting goods store were still in their manufacturer's packaging. We'll pick back up next week with the year's long ordeal in court of resolving Devon Arthur's mental competency and Brandon Russell's first trip to federal prison. Hopefully by then we'll know how his story ends. He is scheduled to be sentenced for his second foiled plot

on August seventh. Until then, I don't know. Make sure your teenage son isn't accidentally converting to a memified version of Islam in a neo Nazi Minecraft chat, and don't store volatile explosives in a cooler in your garage. Weird Little Guys is the production of cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and accorded by me on the kunger Our. Executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Bory Gigan. The theme

music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys