The Roommates

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Speaker 19 It was a little after 5.30 p.m. on a Friday evening when the first 911 call came in.

Speaker 19 The property manager at a gated condo complex in Tampa sounded almost like she was asking a question when she told the operator that a man had walked into the leasing office and announced that he'd just killed two people.

Speaker 19 What a strange thing to say to a lobby full of maintenance technicians and a woman who was just trying to check her mail.

Speaker 19 Maybe it didn't quite sink in right away, but he meant it.

Speaker 19 He left the office and started walking. As she dialed 911, she followed him.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 The police were already en route when the second call came. The woman on the other end of the line this time was calling from a smoke shop in a strip mall across from the apartment complex.

Speaker 19 She was crying hysterically, barely able to get the words out.

Speaker 19 There was a man in the store pointing a gun at her.

Speaker 19 When the police arrived, Devin Arthurs was holding a handgun in one hand and a bottle of Coca-Cola in the other.

Speaker 19 He was ready to surrender, but he wanted to finish his soda first.

Speaker 19 Once he was in handcuffs, an officer asked him if anyone was hurt.

Speaker 19 He responded cryptically, saying that there were people he'd hurt out back.

Speaker 19 In the confusion, his hostages had seized the opportunity to run out the back door, away from this volatile situation.

Speaker 19 So the officer assumed that he meant one of those people had been injured. But they were all unharmed.

Speaker 19 The officer again asked him, who is hurt?

Speaker 19 He replied calmly,

Speaker 19 oh, the people in the apartment.

Speaker 19 But they aren't hurt.

Speaker 19 They're dead.

Speaker 19 I'm Molly Conger,

Speaker 19 and this is Weird Logai's.

Speaker 19 This is a story that I've mentioned in passing a few times before.

Speaker 19 It's always just a quick aside, a sort of hand-waving acknowledgement of that time two members of Atomwaffen were murdered by their roommate.

Speaker 19 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 Woffen.

Speaker 19 But I've never really bothered to explain it. I'm usually busy trying to get somewhere else.

Speaker 19 I was thinking about it again this week because I was thinking about Brandon Russell, the founder of Adam Woffen.

Speaker 19 These murders usually come up when I mention Brandon Russell because they're kind of what put him in federal prison the first time.

Speaker 19 Not because he committed them. He didn't.

Speaker 19 He wasn't even home when it happened.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I'm not psychic, so I couldn't tell you how long he's going away for this time around.

Speaker 19 But that upcoming sentencing got me thinking about how he ended up there.

Speaker 19 And that story starts with these murders.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Devin Arthur's shot and killed Andrew Onishuk and Jeremy Himmelman in the apartment they shared with Brandon Russell.

Speaker 19 All four men were members of Adam Woffen, and the investigation into the murders led to the discovery of the explosives in the garage.

Speaker 19 The explosives belonged to Brandon Russell, and he was federally charged for possessing them.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But then I remembered, this happened in Florida.

Speaker 19 People love to make jokes about the Florida Man. The idea that people in Florida are uniquely predisposed to committing bizarre crimes.
Florida Man throws live Gator at fast food cashier.

Speaker 19 Florida Man leads cops on high-speed horse chase. Florida Man robs convenience store dressed as Spider-Man.

Speaker 19 All real headlines.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And it painted a slightly different picture from the one I had in my head.

Speaker 19 But as always, let's start before the beginning.

Speaker 19 Adam Waffen was an international network of neo-Nazis.

Speaker 19 It was one of several organizations that formed out of relationships that started on an online forum called Iron March.

Speaker 19 Iron March first appeared online in 2011, launched by a Russian nationalist named Alisher Mukitnidov.

Speaker 19 In its six years online, it was an incubator for neo-Nazi ideology around the world.

Speaker 19 Fascist organizations like National Action in the United Kingdom, Adam Waffen in the United States, Skidus in Lithuania, and Antipodian Resistance in Australia were all born on this forum.

Speaker 19 Existing organizations grew and networked, and they recruited online posters into real-life terror cells.

Speaker 19 The site disappeared without explanation one day in November of 2017.

Speaker 19 There was plenty of speculation about why the site went dark, but Mukitnidov declined to answer any questions about it when he hung up on a reporter from the BBC in 2020.

Speaker 19 One theory popular among American neo-Nazis is that there was international governmental pressure to shut the site down because of these murders.

Speaker 19 The birth date of Adam Waffen is typically offered as October 12, 2015.

Speaker 19 That's the day Brandon Russell posted a thread on the forum formally announcing the group's existence.

Speaker 19 There were a handful of posts that refer to the group by name that predate that announcement thread, and there are photographs of Russell holding an Adamoffin flag that were taken in the late spring and summer of 2015.

Speaker 19 So it did exist prior to October,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 His co-founder was a teenage boy named Devin Arthurs.

Speaker 19 Devin Arthurs was young. He was born in 1999.

Speaker 19 His parents separated when he was five, but didn't actually file for divorce until 2010.

Speaker 19 The divorce was contentious, and it dragged on for years.

Speaker 19 The court appointed a Guardian ad Leitum, an attorney whose role is to advocate for the best interests of the child.

Speaker 19 In one letter to the court in 2011, the Guardian ad Leitum noted that Devin was taking the divorce much harder than most children in his position, and he was having behavioral problems.

Speaker 19 In 2012, his parents agreed in mediation that Devin should be evaluated by a child behavioral specialist, which his mother claimed in subsequent filings never happened.

Speaker 19 In the fall of 2014, when he was still living primarily with his father, he ordered a copy of Mein Kampf off of Amazon.

Speaker 19 When the package arrived in the mail, his father opened it, saw what was inside, and refused to let his son have the book.

Speaker 19 After Devin physically confronted his father over the text, his dad kicked him out.

Speaker 19 According to his mother's filings in the divorce case, his father abandoned him at her house.

Speaker 19 The estranged couple lived in different counties, so the sudden move meant that he had to change schools mid-year.

Speaker 19 He only ended up attending his new school for a few months. He dropped out of school later that year before finishing the 10th grade.

Speaker 19 Devin Arthur joined the Iron March Forum in March of 2015, just a few days before his 16th birthday and the same month he dropped out of high school.

Speaker 19 By April of 2015, Arthur and Russell were hanging out in person. after realizing they both lived in the Orlando area.

Speaker 19 In the fall of 2015, when Russell announced that Adam Woffen 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 40 members nationwide.

Speaker 19 A private message that Arthur sent another user around that same time, though, puts that number closer to 15, mainly in central Florida, though there was a small sell of just three guys in the Chicago area.

Speaker 19 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 Devin had gone to the University of Central Florida to hang up racist flyers.

Speaker 19 It was a group of two.

Speaker 19 But the pair were close.

Speaker 19 In separate police interrogations on the night of the murder, both Brandon Russell and Devin Arthur's told police that they were the best of friends, and they had been for years.

Speaker 19 When Russell joined the National Guard in 2016, he left Arthur's in charge of Adam Woffen.

Speaker 19 At first, things seemed to be going really well for Arthurs 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.

Speaker 19 In April, he exchanged messages with a prospective new member in the Boston area.

Speaker 19 one of the men he would murder a year later.

Speaker 19 In May of 2016, he organized a flyering campaign in in Boston.

Speaker 19 There were only two Adam Waffen 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 Onishuk.

Speaker 19 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 Mukitnidov.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 The post claims that there were two known Adam Waffen members in the Boston area, and that one of them was a student at MIT.

Speaker 19 The post didn't actually reveal her name, but she was panicking.

Speaker 19 How could they know any of that? What else did they know?

Speaker 19 She begged Slavros to wipe out her account history, writing, can can you delete my account here? Please? Or delete all my posts? Please. I go to university.
I cannot be involved with this.

Speaker 19 If they find me, my entire life is ruined.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He assured her that there was simply no way for anyone to access her IP address.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 She clicked it from a school computer, revealing her to be a student at MIT.

Speaker 19 Without knowing how this person knew exactly where she was, they had to consider the possibility that someone had sold her out.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 The forum was buzzing that week. The interim leader of Adam Waffen had announced his conversion to Islam.

Speaker 19 Sometime in May of 2016, Devin Arthur's updated his Iron March profile.

Speaker 19 Older archived versions of his user profile show that he'd listed his location as, quote, Dixieland and his ideology as Confederate National Socialism.

Speaker 19 With this new update, he now lived in a land of non-believers, and he identified as a Salafist National Socialist.

Speaker 19 There was apparently a bit of a blow-up over this conversion.

Speaker 19 In the massive data dump of leaked posts from Iron March,

Speaker 19 This thread isn't there.

Speaker 19 It was deleted by the moderators pretty quickly, so it wasn't there to scrape when researchers pulled everything off the site later.

Speaker 19 But the moderators didn't delete people's direct messages about the thread, and those private conversations are in the data.

Speaker 19 Despite what Devin Arthur's would later claim, his conversion to Islam wasn't a renunciation of his prior beliefs. It was a twisted evolution of them.

Speaker 19 In one direct message, a user who saw the thread before it was deleted said that Arthur's planned to convert other Adam Waffen members to Islam,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Slavros threatened to cut ties with Adam Waffen entirely, but several members of the group said they'd convinced Arthur's to step down as interim leader.

Speaker 19 Until Brandon Russell returned from Army training, two other members would step up to run the group.

Speaker 19 Ironically, one of those new interim leaders was also a Muslim convert.

Speaker 19 David Cole Tarkington had converted to Islam more than two years before Devin Arthur did, and it doesn't appear to have been a secret.

Speaker 19 Tarkington was a major recruiter for Adam Woffen, bringing in at least 11 new members to the group in 2016.

Speaker 19 including John Cameron Denton, the man who would go on to lead the group after Russell went to prison.

Speaker 19 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 Quran, he came to understand that there was no point in wanting to kill people of other races.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But I have a really hard time believing that.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And it seems like an obvious contradiction. How can a neo-Nazi be a Muslim? Don't white supremacists hate Muslims?

Speaker 18 They do, of course.

Speaker 19 But it's more complicated than that.

Speaker 19 It's a contradiction, sure.

Speaker 19 But plenty of people live in contradiction.

Speaker 19 And there's a lot of overlap, too.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 People whose commitment to armed extremism is appealing to them.

Speaker 19 And all of the finer points of syncretic fascism aside, Devin Arthurs didn't know what he believed.

Speaker 19 His conversion happened in a Minecraft chat.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 One of those friends later told Rolling Stone that Devin's version of Islam Islam was

Speaker 19 weird.

Speaker 19 Quote, it wasn't true Islam. It was more about idealizing the Prophet Muhammad as a white Aryan.
You know, Muhammad as an ideal male form.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 19 He says, you know, but I don't know what he's talking about.

Speaker 19 And it is unkind, I think, to cast doubt on the sincerity of someone's religious conversion.

Speaker 19 But I'm going to.

Speaker 19 He was extremely online.

Speaker 19 His exposure to Islam was through memes and jokes in a chat room populated by teenage gamers who met on 4chan.

Speaker 19 He was a high school dropout with absent parents. He was struggling with mental illness.
He never spoke to an imam about his religious path.

Speaker 19 When it came to reading the Quran, he was entirely self-taught, and it sounds like he didn't get it.

Speaker 19 But taken at face value, Devin Arthur's was Muslim, in his own way.

Speaker 19 The other neo-Nazis didn't like it, and he was kicked off the Iron March forum.

Speaker 19 He was forced to step down as interim leader of Adam Woffen, but he wasn't kicked out of Adam Woffen.

Speaker 19 And he didn't even stay off of Iron March.

Speaker 19 He still logged in to use the site under Brandon Russell's account.

Speaker 19 And he stayed stayed best friends with Brandon Russell.

Speaker 19 In October of 2016, months after this blowup, he and Brandon traveled to Massachusetts together to visit Adam Woffin's Boston cell,

Speaker 19 which at the time consisted of just two members, Andrew Onishuk and Jeremy Himmelman.

Speaker 19 They'd both joined the group that year and quickly became very close friends.

Speaker 19 Several of Jeremy's friends in Boston met Devin Arthur and Brandon Russell during that trip.

Speaker 19 And they all said the same thing.

Speaker 19 These guys are fucking weird. They cannot behave in a normal fashion.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Devin kept calling her a dumpster slut.

Speaker 19 Another friend of Jeremy's said, quote, it was very obvious that they were mentally unstable people.

Speaker 19 A few months later, in January of 2017, Jeremy Himmelman flew down to Florida to visit Brandon after he faked a suicide attempt as a joke.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So of course he dropped everything to be there when he believed Brandon had nearly died.

Speaker 19 Two months later, in March of 2017, back home in Massachusetts, Jeremy Himmelman attempted suicide for a fourth time after an argument with his roommates.

Speaker 19 He survived.

Speaker 19 His girlfriend and his parents say that it was a wake-up call for him.

Speaker 19 He was ready to leave Adam Waffen behind. It wasn't good for him.
These weren't his friends. This wasn't a path forward.

Speaker 19 But he didn't have any other path forward either. And he was having trouble cutting ties.

Speaker 19 He didn't leave the chats.

Speaker 19 He was still best friends with Andrew Onishuk.

Speaker 19 And he didn't have a lot else to do.

Speaker 19 So when Brandon Russell invited them both back to Florida,

Speaker 19 they went.

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Speaker 19 That same month, in March of 2017, Brandon Russell's grandmother co-signed a lease for him.

Speaker 19 It was a nice little condo in a gated community in Tampa.

Speaker 19 Sometime in early April, he and Devin moved in.

Speaker 19 And that's when he started begging Andrew Onishuk and Jeremy Himmelman to come down and visit, come down and spend the summer with us.

Speaker 19 He promised them a rent-free summer in Florida. They could go fishing, there was a pool, it would be fun.

Speaker 19 Andrew and Jeremy regretted it almost immediately.

Speaker 19 Barely a week into their stay, they were already talking about going home early. This two-bedroom condo wasn't big enough for four men.

Speaker 19 Andrew and Jeremy shared the smaller bedroom, Devin slept in the living room, and Brandon kept the larger bedroom for himself.

Speaker 19 Brandon was gone a lot. On top of being in the National Guard, he had a job at a shooting range.

Speaker 19 Andrew and Jeremy got temporary jobs at a recycling plant, but Devin just sat in the living room all day on the computer.

Speaker 19 The place was messy.

Speaker 19 No one did dishes.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 It was pushed up against the wall in the living room underneath the North Korean flag.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 This wasn't the fun Florida summer they'd imagined. Devin Devin was weird and annoying, and things were tense.

Speaker 19 They wanted to go home.

Speaker 19 On May 17th, Andrew Onishuk told his parents that he was going to come home early.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Just two days later, though, on Friday, May 19th, He'd changed his mind. He had to go, and he was going to leave on Monday.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 That same day, May 19th, Brendan Russell left the condo early in the morning. He had National Guard drill that weekend and had to report in that day.

Speaker 19 Devin was, as always, at home on the computer all day.

Speaker 19 Around 5 p.m., Jeremy was texting with his girlfriend back home in Massachusetts. At 5.04 p.m., she asked him if they could FaceTime.

Speaker 19 I'm hanging out with Devin and Andrew right now. Maybe later, he replied with a heart emoji.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 His phone was still resting on his stomach, under his right arm, when Crime Scene text photographed his body a few hours later.

Speaker 19 I can't tell you exactly what happened in the 15 minutes between 5.05 p.m. and 5.20 p.m.

Speaker 19 When Jeremy sent his last text to his girlfriend at 5.05,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 She knew all about the ongoing tension in the apartment. He would have mentioned it if anything out of the ordinary was happening.

Speaker 19 But at 5.20, Devin Arthurs called his father and told him that he'd just killed two people.

Speaker 19 There's no dispute about the basic facts.

Speaker 19 Devin Arthurs shot Andrew Onishuk and Jeremy Himmelman with a Wasser 10.

Speaker 19 That's a Romanian version of an AK-47.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Devin left the rifle on the couch in the living room, picked up a Glock 17, and walked out of the apartment.

Speaker 19 He walked over to the leasing office where he announced what he'd done to two maintenance techs, the property manager and a resident.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He's never denied what he did.

Speaker 19 Quite the opposite.

Speaker 19 All he wanted to do was tell people.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But as he continued to tell and retell this story,

Speaker 19 it changed a little.

Speaker 19 In a report written by the officer who transported him to the police station that night, it's noted that Arthurs was talking almost constantly, offering up spontaneous statements even though no one was asking him questions.

Speaker 19 The officer wrote,

Speaker 19 Arthur's continued to repeat his story and would add more details each time.

Speaker 19 Devin's account of the actual physical sequence of events remains pretty consistent, and it mostly matches up with the physical evidence.

Speaker 19 It's his recollection of his internal monologue and his motivations that change throughout the evening.

Speaker 19 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 Devin Arthurs.

Speaker 19 And by that time, he'd had plenty of time alone to think.

Speaker 19 And over the course of this two-hour interrogation, you can hear him convincing himself of the story that he's come up with.

Speaker 24 I hear Jeremy, he grabs my Quran up and the thing, and he says, You have your book of fairy tales here.

Speaker 24 And that set me over the limit. And I remember it in a blur.
I shot them both. And I didn't,

Speaker 24 I wasn't thinking clearly

Speaker 19 this part is probably pretty close to the truth it's the same thing he said in the back of the patrol car right after he was arrested he killed them because they made fun of him because they mocked his religion because they disrespected his faith because they were bullying him pretty relentlessly and he'd had enough.

Speaker 19 And there is plenty of proof that that had been going on. So it's no surprise that it would have happened again that evening.

Speaker 19 I think this first story is the truth.

Speaker 19 He was sitting in the living room cleaning the rifle when Jeremy and Andrew started teasing him again.

Speaker 19 He'd spent the entire day on the computer in an encrypted group chat full of other members of Adam Woffen.

Speaker 19 And on that particular day, the chat was making fun of him. Again,

Speaker 19 he was reaching a boiling point.

Speaker 19 And he snapped.

Speaker 19 And unfortunately, in the moment that he snapped, he happened to already have a rifle in his hands.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But as the reality of this situation settled in,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 24 I remember what Calvin, I was sitting in that cube or whatever. He was pacing back and forth.
And I'm like, and I'm like thinking to myself, which cube? The little,

Speaker 24 in the holding stuff, a whole

Speaker 24 weird data. I remember, like, I was thinking, like,

Speaker 24 you know, how could I have done this and stuff like that? And the only things that could that I could rationalize was, like,

Speaker 24 you know, if I hadn't done that, if I hadn't shut this organization down by doing this, there'd be a lot more people dead than just you people from that organization.

Speaker 19 I was really struck by this language.

Speaker 19 It's a little too on the nose that he keeps literally using the word rationalize as he's describing his thought process to the officer.

Speaker 19 I think he's still processing what he's done.

Speaker 19 I guess witnessing a murder is very traumatic, even if you're the one who did it.

Speaker 19 He's still processing that experience. He's still processing seeing his friends' dead bodies and he's coming to terms with it.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 24 And the thing that keeps me rational about this is that, like,

Speaker 24 I feel what I've done is horrible in the sense that

Speaker 24 human life has been lost. And I feel sad.
I feel like an animal. And I feel like I should be in a hospital somewhere to

Speaker 24 begin with medicine or something like that to help me.

Speaker 24 And I want you to know that I realize the full extent of like, you know, their families are going to feel very bad about this, their loved ones, and I feel the utmost bad about that.

Speaker 24 But I also realize that these people of what they were planning with the explosives that were down downstairs. Yeah, well, tell me about that.
What's that all about?

Speaker 24 Adam Thoffen Division is a terrorist organization. It's a neo-Nazi organization that I was a part of before I converted.

Speaker 19 By the time he's sitting in that interrogation room at one in the morning, he's the hero of the story.

Speaker 19 He understands that it was a great tragedy to have had to take those lives, but if you really think about it, didn't he save countless lives by doing it?

Speaker 19 I think it's the only way he can cope.

Speaker 19 He told one of the officers on the scene shortly after his arrest that he couldn't get the image of his friends' dead bodies out of his mind.

Speaker 19 He said he had no idea how much blood can come out of a human body.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But he's lying.

Speaker 19 An organization that he was part of before

Speaker 19 his conversion?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He went on group outings and road trips. When Adam Waffen went camping, Devin was there.
When Adam Waffen did training drills in the woods, Devin was there.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So you'll have to use your imagination to fill in the gaps here.

Speaker 19 Maybe they were selling guns purchased in Florida to members of the group operating in areas where it was harder to buy them.

Speaker 19 If Devin Arthur had abandoned his prior beliefs, if he was so disgusted with neo-Nazism,

Speaker 19 why was he participating in this?

Speaker 19 He could have moved back in with either one of his parents. He could have called the FBI.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But he didn't do any of that.

Speaker 19 He's telling this officer now, in May of 2017, that he was no longer a member of Adam Woff and hadn't been since his conversion a year earlier. And I just don't think that's true.

Speaker 19 I think he's lying.

Speaker 19 Maybe even to himself.

Speaker 19 He sounds, for the most part, fairly lucid in this interview.

Speaker 19 But half a dozen psychiatrists and forensic psychologists would eventually agree that he was profoundly mentally ill.

Speaker 19 So a lot of this is maybe just trying to cope with his own actions.

Speaker 19 But I don't think it's just coping.

Speaker 19 I think he realizes he has a bargaining chip here.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 24 If I could get like a meeting with an FBI agent or something like that, I could shut down like not just Adam Vaufm, but several other organizations. Like

Speaker 24 we could probably facilitate that. I would very much like to do that.

Speaker 19 He's pretty relaxed through most of the interview, but several times he asks if what he's saying in the interview is confidential. And when he's talking about that, he gets very anxious.

Speaker 19 And the officer tells him that police reports do eventually become public record, but he assures him that sensitive information, like the things he's talking about, can be held back from public view.

Speaker 19 And he tells him that what you say to me here, just for the investigation, nobody's gonna see this video.

Speaker 19 Now, remember, cops can lie to you.

Speaker 19 Cops can always lie to you. It's always okay for them to lie.

Speaker 19 Because I watched the video of this officer telling Devon Arthurs that no one would ever watch the video.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 24 And then, on the other hand, if I somehow get some kind of plea bargain from this and then I get released, I might get killed by somebody else like that gets released, especially since they know that I

Speaker 24 unless whatever information you can provide shuts down this group entirely, and these guys are just out of commission. Well, that's the main thing.

Speaker 19 Um,

Speaker 24 that's why I'm mainly helping y'all

Speaker 19 Again, he's being very explicit here. You know, when he's rationalizing his actions, he says out loud, I'm rationalizing my actions.

Speaker 19 And now that he realizes he might have information to trade for favorable treatment, he says, hey, maybe I'll get a plea bargain out of this. He's saying the quiet part very loud.

Speaker 19 And what he's saying is that he wants to talk to the FBI about the bombs.

Speaker 19 I imagine a cop usually takes you pretty seriously seriously if you start talking about bombs, just in case. Even if you are spitting a pretty fanciful sounding tale.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Before Devin 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And on a shelf in the closet where you would normally keep sweaters or something,

Speaker 19 there were several Geiger counters, a significant number of batteries, and a lot of matches.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So they confirmed that the two victims were deceased and not in need of any medical help and that the apartment was otherwise empty.

Speaker 19 And then they evacuated the neighboring apartments while they waited for the bomb squad.

Speaker 19 And so backing up to this point in our timeline, when Devin Arthurs was arrested at the smoke shop, he was put into a police car.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And so as the police car is pulling up outside the condo, they can hear someone screaming inside.

Speaker 19 And as the officers are approaching the residence, a man dressed in military fatigues came out the front door.

Speaker 19 He is hysterical, unable to respond to their questions. He collapses onto the ground, sobbing, crying, and he's screaming, Jeremy is dead.

Speaker 19 That was Brandon Russell.

Speaker 19 He'd arrived home sometime 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.

Speaker 19 The property manager said that she saw him driving erratically through the parking lot when she was standing outside after dialing 911.

Speaker 19 So he had to have gotten home after 5.30, but before 5.45.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So around 6 p.m., those officers who first entered the apartment saw some things they thought they needed a bomb squad for.

Speaker 19 Brandon Russell and Devin Arthurs are both handcuffed and sitting in separate police cars right outside.

Speaker 19 And both men, separately and for their own reasons, voluntarily disclosed to the police that there are explosives inside the house.

Speaker 19 Devin 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 For Brandon, he's just trying to get out ahead of the problem he knows is coming.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He said that in the garage, there's potassium chlorate, thorium, which is a radioactive material, rocket propellant, and a compound called HMDT.

Speaker 19 Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine is a highly volatile explosive compound. It is dangerous to handle.
It is dangerous to store.

Speaker 19 It is insane to keep it in your garage when your garage is directly underneath your living room.

Speaker 19 He did fail to mention to the officer that there was also some ammonium nitrate in there, but the bomb squad found it anyway.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But as he's sitting there in handcuffs, trying to convince 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.

Speaker 19 Because he knows what this looks like and it looks bad.

Speaker 19 He stuck to the live though.

Speaker 19 He's just a model rocket enthusiast having a very traumatic day.

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Speaker 19 At some point, both men were separately transported to the police station to await their interrogations.

Speaker 19 And during Devin's interrogation, he has a very clear idea of exactly what the bomb squad is going to find in the house.

Speaker 19 He knew what was in the house, where it was,

Speaker 19 and how it got there.

Speaker 24 Yes, there is nuclear materials

Speaker 24 in that garage. There is some nuclear materials.
What's in that garage?

Speaker 24 In that garage,

Speaker 24 HMTD, yeah, those explosives. Yeah, some ammonium nitrate, I believe.
And I know that there's some radiated materials that he was able to bring in through the Bahamas.

Speaker 24 And because he's a Bahamian citizen, he was able to bring it, bring it in.

Speaker 19 And more than that, he was willing to tell anyone who would listen what the group planned to do with those materials.

Speaker 24 But the things that they were planning were horrible. They're planning bombings and stuff like that on countless people.
They're planning to kill civilian life. What did they do?

Speaker 24 Were they specific in their plans?

Speaker 24 On

Speaker 24 power lines, nuclear reactors,

Speaker 24 synagogues, things like that.

Speaker 19 He knew all the details of the group's plans.

Speaker 19 He knew what Adam Woffen was going to do because he was a member of Adam Waffen. He's in the chats where these things are being discussed.

Speaker 19 He's in the living room where these things are being discussed. And by the time he's in that interrogation room, he's convinced himself that that's why he murdered his roommates.

Speaker 19 It wasn't some petty personal dispute. It wasn't because they were bullying him.

Speaker 19 It was because he had to do it. He had to stop them before they could hurt innocent people.

Speaker 19 And of course, the detective did specifically ask about the model rockets.

Speaker 24 You guys don't build model rockets and go out in the back and shoot them off into the, you know, or the fireworks or 4th of July kill them.

Speaker 24 Nothing about that. None of that.
It's all literally there specifically to kill people.

Speaker 19 Is this probably the truth?

Speaker 19 I think so. To some degree, yeah.

Speaker 19 Not to spoil the ending, but Brandon Russell was convicted earlier this year for a separate plot to destroy electrical infrastructure.

Speaker 19 He's also alleged to have co-authored some of the Terrogram Collective manuals that advise other neo-Nazis on how to go about carrying out their own attacks.

Speaker 19 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 2017.

Speaker 19 And he 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 2013.

Speaker 19 And he had since dropped out because he couldn't pass calculus.

Speaker 19 There were no model rockets in the condo.

Speaker 19 An explosives expert wrote in a report that no one would use HMTD to power a model rocket. It's too volatile.

Speaker 19 It's too volatile for pretty much everything.

Speaker 19 The military doesn't use it. It fell out of favor in mining decades ago.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He's sure at this point that he'd actually always thought that, and that was what he was thinking before it happened.

Speaker 19 Throughout his interview, Arthur says asking to speak to the FBI. He's insisting that they need to hear what he has to say.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He doesn't know that an FBI agent is watching a video feed from the next room.

Speaker 19 And he's right. The FBI was very interested in what he had to say.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He wasn't being detained. He's not under arrest.
And he's free to leave at any time.

Speaker 19 He signed the form and he agreed to talk without a lawyer, which

Speaker 19 I'm fine with him doing, but you, listener, never talk to the police without a lawyer.

Speaker 19 They talked a lot about the murders. Obviously, he's talking to a homicide detective in a homicide investigation.

Speaker 19 They talked about Devin and Andrew and Jeremy, how they'd all come to be friends, how they met online and then in person,

Speaker 19 how that friendship had fallen apart over Devin's conversion to Islam.

Speaker 19 Brendan says Devin's conversion was never an issue for him.

Speaker 19 And I think that's true.

Speaker 19 He insisted that what was going on in the house was all just banter, just regular ball-busting teasing between friends.

Speaker 19 After the detective rephrases the question half a dozen times, he reluctantly agrees that,

Speaker 19 yeah, Jeremy and Andrew crossed the line sometimes. Maybe they were bullying him, and Devin was having a hard time with it.

Speaker 19 But he said it had never gotten physical, and he never thought anyone would get hurt.

Speaker 19 He also said Adam Woffen was just a club for people with shared political interests, and they liked to do outdoor activities together.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 For the most part, though, he was mumbling, and his body language is guarded and anxious.

Speaker 19 He's sitting sort of folded in on himself, slouching down with his legs crossed and his arms folded tightly across his chest.

Speaker 19 He's tired. He's traumatized, but he's scared.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And it was all related to his hobby of building model rockets.

Speaker 19 After about an hour of this, the detective's tone changes.

Speaker 19 He's been sort of yes-and-ing him, just letting him talk, getting him to open up, talking about his hobbies, not passing any kind of judgment.

Speaker 19 And Brendan Russell has been portraying himself and his organization as what the detective calls, you know, knuckleheads horsing around, you know, just kids, having fun.

Speaker 19 But if we look on your computer, what are we going to find?

Speaker 19 Is it just jokes and camping trips? Or are we going to find that you've made explicit threats? Are you saying things like, kill all Jews, right? What are you saying?

Speaker 19 Are you making the kind of threats that could lead to...

Speaker 19 federal charges?

Speaker 19 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 harder.

Speaker 19 What kinds of things are you saying?

Speaker 19 And then he just mumbles that maybe he needs a lawyer. So the questions stop there.

Speaker 19 He's not under arrest. He can leave at any time.

Speaker 19 And if he wants a lawyer, They're not going to ask him any more questions. He can go.

Speaker 19 But he can't go home, though.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So he's not going to be able to get into that condo anytime soon.

Speaker 19 So Russell asks the detective to call his dad.

Speaker 19 He doesn't ask if he can use the phone to call his dad. He, a 22-year-old member of the military, is asking this other adult man, will you call my dad?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He's a deputy there.

Speaker 19 Or maybe it's West Palm Beach. He can't actually remember.
He and his dad aren't close.

Speaker 19 He wasn't around when Brandon 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.

Speaker 19 His mom still lives in the Bahamas, so he doesn't really have anywhere else nearby he can go.

Speaker 19 So a little after 6 a.m. on Saturday morning, a Tampa police officer dropped Russell off outside the condo.

Speaker 19 The explosive ordnance disposal team had finished with the scene, so detectives were just now arriving to conduct their search.

Speaker 19 One of those detectives went inside and got his keys for him.

Speaker 19 In her report, she notes that when she entered his bedroom to look for his keys, she saw a large framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh on his dresser.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 What they found in that garage was enough to bring federal charges.

Speaker 19 But by the time the ATF agents were done examining the scene and writing up their findings,

Speaker 19 the FBI had already let him go.

Speaker 19 He was gone.

Speaker 19 He said he was going to his dad's house in West Palm Beach,

Speaker 19 but he didn't.

Speaker 19 When FBI agents contacted his family, they said they hadn't heard from him.

Speaker 19 Instead of going to his dad's house to get some rest, he'd driven straight to the home of another Adam Waffen member.

Speaker 19 He told him about the murders, and he said he needed to get away for a while to clear his head.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Instead, he withdrew all of the money from his bank account, quit his job, and got into Russell's car heading south.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 We'll pick back up next week with the years-long ordeal in court of resolving Devin Arthur's mental competency and Brandon Russell's first trip to federal prison.

Speaker 19 Hopefully by then we'll know how his story ends. He is scheduled to be sentenced for his second foiled plot on August 7th.

Speaker 19 Until then,

Speaker 19 I don't know.

Speaker 19 Make sure your teenage son isn't accidentally converting to a meme-ified version of Islam in a neo-Nazi Minecraft chat.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 don't store volatile explosives in a cooler in your garage.

Speaker 19 Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Mona Conker.
Our executive producers are Sophie Licherman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 19 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.

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