The Six Words That Snared Bronx Twins in Alleged Bomb Plot

On the day a Florida gunman with an AR-15 murdered 17 at a Broward County high school, New York cops and federal agents were interviewing a student at an Upper Manhattan high school who said a teacher had paid her and a classmate $50 an hour to empty black powder from fireworks.

The horror in Florida was all too familiar. A troubled teen had arrived at a school with an assault rifle and proceeded to shoot everybody he could.

The case in New York was something new: a teacher allegedly enlisting students to help him and his twin brother amass the makings of a bomb, complete with deadly shrapnel.

Yet both cases seem just variations on a dark nihilism that is at the core of all terrorism in its many forms. Foreign and domestic. Individual and group. Fiery or icy. Purportedly religious or political. Or just nakedly sociopathic. 

The Florida gunman is said to have been a member of a white supremacist group, but when it came down to it he killed whoever he could. The Bronx teacher and his twin do not seem to be bent on jihad, yet they were allegedly enlisting school kids in preparing a bomb such as was detonated in the name of Allah at the Boston Marathon.

We seem surrounded by evil at every turn. And the only real protection from it is a six-word saying that might have prevented the Florida school shooting and apparently did head off whatever the New York teacher and his twin intended.

The New York investigation began back on Dec. 4 of last year, when someone called a bomb threat into the Upper Manhattan high school, which investigators presently prefer not to name.

The NYPD’s Intelligence Division investigated and identified a 15-year-old female student as the prime suspect. She told the investigators that she had done it at the suggestion of a 27-year-old teacher named Christian Toro after she had complained that she was bored.

“If you’re bored with school, call in a bomb scare,” the teacher had allegedly told her in essence.

Shortly after the student was arrested for making the threat. the teacher abruptly resigned. He had been issued a laptop, and his twin brother, Tyler Toro, delivered it back to the school two days later.

The See Something came when a school technician came upon a downloaded book in the computer that detailed how to make explosives.

The technician then Said Something.

On Feb. 8, New York cops and federal agents interviewed Christian Toro at the Bronx apartment he shares with his twin. He told the investigators that he had unintentionally downloaded the explosives book after coming across it while researching the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.

“Christian Toro stated that he had never built a bomb and had only looked at the explosives book’s table of contents,” the subsequent federal complaint reads.

In the meantime, the student charged with calling in the bomb threat also told investigators that she had been having sex with Christian Toro in the apartment beginning in October. He was arrested on Jan. 31 and charged with statutory rape.

Investigators were at the Upper Manhattan school on Feb. 14, Valentine's Day—the day of the school shooting in Florida—interviewing students in connection with the statutory rape case. A friend of the accuser told the investigators that she had also been at the teacher’s apartment. She added that the teacher had paid her and her friend to empty the black powder from fireworks.

The investigators returned to the first girl, who allegedly said she ”forgot” to tell them about emptying fireworks. The next step was for the investigators to secure a search warrant.

Source: Thedailybeast News