NORFOLK, Va. (Aiexpress) — A federal judge in Virginia said that a man who is accused of keeping the most finished bombs in FBI history and using a picture of President Joe Biden as a target must stay in jail until his trial because he has “shown the capacity for extreme danger.”
Brad Spafford, 36, is being held on a federal firearms charge because he is said to have a short-barrel weapon that is not registered. prosecutors say he could face more charges for the explosives, which included devices found in a backpack with the hashtag “#nolivesmatter” on it.
Court records show that Spafford, who has two young girls, also kept an extremely unstable explosive substance in a garage freezer next to “Hot Pockets and frozen corn on the cob.”
Late on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen in Norfolk said that Spafford lost three fingers in an accident in 2021 that involved home-made explosives. This was something that Spafford’s defense lawyers have not denied.
Allen wrote, “Mr. Spafford has made it clear that he doesn’t believe in government regulation when it comes to guns, and he purposely ignored the rules for registering short-barrel rifles.” “The Court is not sure that Mr. Spafford would follow the conditions of his release any more carefully.”
Lawyers for the defense said that the government hadn’t shown any proof that Spafford was going to do violence. It was also said that Spafford has no crime record and is married with a steady job as a machinist.
His lawyers also didn’t think the explosives found on Spafford’s land could be used because “professionally trained explosive technicians had to rig the devices to explode them.”
There is no proof that Mr. Spafford ever made threats against anyone, and the idea that someone could be in danger because of their political views and words is ridiculous, his lawyers said in a recent filing.
At Spafford’s detention meeting last week, his lawyer, Jeffrey Swartz, said that investigators had been gathering information on him since January 2023, even though Spafford had never made any threats.
“What did he do in those two years?” Swartz said. “He bought a house.” He took care of his kids. He’s happily married. All of those things are still there for him, and he has a great job.
Federal authorities said in a filing Tuesday that investigators didn’t know much about the homemade bombs until the informant went to Spafford’s house.
“However, the government moved quickly after the defendant said on a recorded wire that he had an unstable primary explosive in the freezer in October 2024,” the prosecutors wrote.
When police checked Spafford’s home in Isle of Wight County in December, they found more than 150 pipe bombs and other homemade bombs, the prosecutors said in court documents.
Court papers say that most of the bombs were found in a detached garage along with tools and materials for making bombs, such as fuses and pieces of plastic pipe.
“Several more apparent pipe bombs were found in a backpack in the home’s bedroom, completely unattended,” prosecutors wrote. He lives with his wife and children in this house.
According to court papers, the investigation began in 2023 when someone told the police that Spafford was hiding weapons and ammunition. The witness, a friend and police officer, told the police that Spafford was practicing shooting targets with pictures of the president and that “he thought political assassinations should be brought back,” according to the prosecutors.
On December 17, a lot of police officers and bomb technicians searched the house. Court papers say that the agents found the rifle and the explosives. Some of the devices were marked as “lethal” by hand, and others were put into a wearable vest. Most of the devices were set off on the spot because technicians thought it would be unsafe to move them. Some were kept for analysis, though.
Last week, federal Magistrate Judge Lawrence Leonard decided that Spafford could be freed on house arrest at his mother’s house. However, he agreed to keep him in jail until the government makes more arguments.
To this, the prosecutors said that Spafford “is not known to have engaged in any apparent violence.”
But they said Spafford “has certainly shown interest in the same through the making of “lethal” pipe bombs, the possession of riot gear and a vest full of pipe bombs, the support for political assassinations and the use of pictures of the President as targets, and his belief that “no lives matter.”
In his decision on Tuesday, Allen said that Spafford was “extremely dangerous” to his family and the community as a whole. He also talked about “the sheer scale of the enterprise.”
“The Court has not found a comparable case in terms of scale,” she wrote, “but even cases with fewer destructive devices and other factors that were in the defendant’s favor have led to detention.”
