It was a grisly scene inside Apartment 3722 at the Hamptons, a gated community in Tampa, Florida.
One body lay face up on the floor, wedged between a wall and an air
mattress. A handgun was stuffed in a holster on the dead man’s waist.
The other body, clad in a black T-shirt and shorts, was slumped back on a
futon, a shattered and bloody iPhone on his lap. A police investigator
would later write that the two men had been “shot multiple times at
close range with an assault rifle.”
There were some obvious clues that this was no ordinary double
homicide. Tacked to the wall near the bodies was a large black-and-white
flag bearing the insignia of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, Adolf Hitler’s
elite paramilitary unit. On a nearby shelf was a black Stahlhelm, the
distinctive helmet worn by Nazi soldiers during World War II. There were
multiple copies of “Mein Kampf” and a prominent place was
reserved for “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel of race war in
America that has inspired generations of terrorists, among them Timothy
McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. A framed picture of McVeigh sat on a
dresser.
On that night in May 2017, the police quickly took two suspects into
custody and developed a rough outline of what had happened. One of the
suspects, Devon Arthurs, 18, said the victims were his roommates, and
members of a neo-Nazi group called the Atomwaffen Division. Arthurs said
that he’d decided to leave the group, and that he’d killed the men to
keep them from carrying out what he said were their plans for violence.
The second suspect detained by police, Brandon Russell, also lived in
the apartment. Russell told the authorities he’d just returned home
from a weekend of training with the Florida Army National Guard. And
then Russell revealed something that should have set off alarms among
federal investigators assigned to track the growing threat from armed,
violent right-wing extremists. He said, and the police quickly
confirmed, that the single-car garage attached to the apartment was full
of explosives.
Explosives experts from the Tampa Police Department and the local FBI
field office soon found components of a crude pipe bomb as well as
radioactive materials. The search turned up ammonium nitrate and
nitromethane, the mixture used by McVeigh to destroy the federal
building in Oklahoma City in 1995. There were sacks of explosive
precursors, including potassium chloride, red iron oxide and potassium
nitrate. There were homemade fuses fashioned from brass 5.56 mm rifle
cartridges. In a closet, they found two Geiger counters.
And there was a cooler with the name Brandon scrawled on the lid in
black marker. Inside, the investigators discovered HMTD — hexamethylene
triperoxide diamine — a potent, highly volatile peroxide-based
explosive. It has become a favored tool of terrorists both here and
abroad, who cook it up in small batches using recipes circulating on the
internet and in improvised weapons manuals.
At Tampa police headquarters, investigators put Arthurs and Russell
in separate interrogation rooms. They wanted to know about the killings,
about the neo-Nazi group and about the explosives.
Arthurs said the apartment had served as a nerve center for
Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist organization of 60 to 70 people
that has spoken openly of its hopes of igniting race war in the United
States. If the authorities could access the group’s encrypted online
chats, Arthurs said, “it’d be easy to track down each member.” The
interrogation was videotaped, and a recording was obtained by ProPublica
and Frontline.
“The things that they’re planning were horrible. They’re planning
bombings and stuff like that on countless people, they’re planning to
kill civilian life,” Arthurs said. A detective asked if Atomwaffen had
drawn up a list of specific targets. “Power lines, nuclear reactors,
synagogues, things like that,” Arthurs replied.
“I’m telling you stuff that the FBI should be hearing,” Arthurs said, adding that he thought lives could be saved.
To this day, it is unclear if the FBI talked with Arthurs or what
steps it took to shut down Atomwaffen. The FBI declined repeated
requests to discuss the case. But this much is clear: Within months of
Arthurs’ warnings, Atomwaffen members or associates had killed three
more people.
https://www.propublica.org/article/an-atomwaffen-member-sketched-a-map-to-take-the-neo-nazis-down-what-path-officials-took-is-a-mystery?fbclid=IwAR31XtZdIkgRdQ1fSpT0ivQFSgN8AXCrD-ypPGfbQpvvfeQo1zWFpiTfcL8
This was a damning read. Florida pd genuinely dropped the ball here
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