James Holmes turned his apartment into a house bomb:
“This would be one of the first times I think we have ever seen what we can describe as a house bomb in the United States,” retired FBI agent Ray Lopez said on CNN Tuesday morning, a day after Holmes, 24, made his initial appearance in a Colorado court.
“We’ve seen them in places like Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Lopez, who was an explosives expert during his FBI career, which included a stint in Afghanistan. “But this is the first one that I can actually recall ever reading or seeing about in the United States where it was actually set to destroy the home.”
A law enforcement official who was on the scene during the weekend and has expertise in improvised explosives said the assembly of explosives and trip wires was extensive. Inside the apartment they found 30 aerial shells filled with gunpowder, two containers brimming with liquid accelerants and numerous bullets left to explode in the resulting fire.
Lopez said the array in Holmes’ apartment, which police believe was designed to kill first responders, required no special training to set up.
“This kind of information exists on the Internet,” Lopez said. “If you’re looking to wire explosives, it is on the Internet. With a little bit of common sense, and he has quite a bit of that, he’s very intelligent, he just put it all together and had something ready for the apartment.”
I can only imagine how much damage this “evil genius” could have done by using explosives and incendiaries rather than a rifle at that movie theater.
I have been saying that myself. Would the anti-gun folks rather he used pipe bombs? We are lucky he didn’t take out the whole place — for what that is worth to those he killed anyway.