A Florida attorney pleaded guilty on Friday to using a rifle to try to detonate explosives outside the Chinese embassy last year in Washington, D.C.
Christopher Rodriguez also bombed a sculpture of communist leaders Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong in a courtyard outside the Texas Public Radio building in San Antonio, Texas, in 2022, according to a court filing accompanying his guilty plea.
Rodriguez, 45, of Panama City, Florida, is scheduled to be sentenced in Washington by Chief Judge James Boasberg on Oct. 28.
Under the terms of his plea deal, Rodriguez and prosecutors agreed that seven to 10 years in prison would be an appropriate sentence.
My guess is that the phone network was so jammed up that the signal couldn’t come through. It may have been made perfectly well, but apparently on that day, especially when things started going down, the cell network was totally overwhelmed and nothing could go through it. I think I remember watching a reporter when the rioting first started happening discuss that their phone wasn’t working, and also people were trying to stream Trump’s speech and it couldn’t come through.
From the description of the bomb, it was not a phone call triggered. It was a very simple time bomb made using a mechanical kitchen timer. Kitchen timers are available anywhere, making tracing a purchase or former owner very difficult (especially if the bomber salvaged a perfectly functional timer from the trash, that would render it untraceable to the bomber). But cell-phones? Not so much, if they found an intact cell-phone, even one that the bomber bought in cash from some small store, they would have had a much easier time tracking who they were.