A disturbed man was caught with more than 200 explosives before the start of an annual Mass that is normally attended by the Supreme Court.
As reported by the Washington Post, 41-year-old Louis Geri, of Vineland, New Jersey, had an arsenal of homemade bombs inside of a tent that he set up on the steps of St. Matthew's Cathedral, where the Red Mass was held on Sunday.
Throughout a tense confrontation with police, Geri threatened to set off the explosives and handed over a notebook filled with hateful ramblings.
As police approached and told him to leave, he responded, "You might want to stay back and call the federales, I have explosives."
The bomb squad was called in, and a police sergeant tried to defuse the situation by agreeing to read from Geri's notebook. But the situation escalated sharply after the sergeant noticed a butane lighter and tried to open Geri's tent.
The man flew into a rage and began pulling out vials of yellow liquid with explosives taped to them, as he warned to "step away or there’s going to be deaths, I’m telling you now.”
The police backed up and formed a perimeter. The sergeant and another officer finally arrested Geri after he left his tent to urinate on a tree. He told police that he had a bomb in the front pocket of his fleece, and a bomb squad technician found the device along with a butane lighter.
The FBI found that some of the vials contained nitromethane, which is an explosive compound often used in improvised explosive devices, including the ones deployed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people. Other devices were modified bottle rockets with aluminum foil heads and treated in a pyrotechnic solution, but all of them were "fully functional.”
The man was apparently known to police and had been banned from the premises before Sunday's incident, according to the Catholic Standard, which is the newspaper of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington. The police found him during a security sweep before Mass.
Because of his threats, no Supreme Court members attended the Red Mass, where God's blessing is invoked to guide judges and others in the legal profession. The Red Mass falls on the Sunday before the first Monday in October to mark the start of the Supreme Court's term.
According to the Washington Post, Geri's notebook included hateful writings toward Catholics, Jews, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Supreme Court. Six out of the court's nine members are Catholic.
Last week, a man was sentenced to eight years in prison for trying to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who is Catholic.
Geri is facing charges of manufacture or possession of a weapon of mass destruction in furtherance of a hate crime. He was also charged with possession of a destructive device and false report of a weapon of mass destruction in relation to a previous incident at the church that led to him being barred from the premises.
A judge ordered him held without bond.
