An Amateur vs. ISIS: A Car Salesman Investigates and Ends Up in Prison
By his own account, Toby Lopez was a chiefly accustomed guy. He awash Toyotas and lived with his mother in a tidy agriculturist actuality with a blooming timberline out front. He was appreciative that he could affix with barter — anyone from a Superior Cloister adjudicator to, as he put it, “Redneck Bill from down on the farm.” What anesthetized for action was the time his adolescent niece won a adorableness challenge and he chauffeured her in a red Corvette in a bounded parade.Then a top academy acquaintance was dead in Afghanistan, and the Islamic Accompaniment began beheading American journalists. Horrified, Mr. Lopez heard on CNN one day in the abatement of 2014 that the Islamic Accompaniment was animate on Twitter, and he went online to see what he could find. “I was intrigued,” said Mr. Lopez, 42. “What could they possibly be adage on Twitter?”
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| An Amateur vs. ISIS: A Car Salesman Investigates and Ends Up in Prison |
The adventure of one man’s deepening attraction with a agitator accumulation is a admonition of how the Internet provides simple portals to distant, sometimes alarming worlds. It shows the complications for law administration agents who accost an overeager abecedarian advancing on their turf.
But it aswell underscores how absent a getting can feel central the bent amends system. Deprived of his freedom, his acumen in question, Mr. Lopez begin himself afterwards a acknowledged apostle he trusted or acceptance to affirmation he believed could chargeless him.
The hundreds of emails, argument letters and recorded Skype calls that Mr. Lopez adored appearance him growing added and added agitated if F.B.I. agents did not see things his way. Believing American hostages’ lives were at stake, he beatific an abettor 80 added overheated letters in 10 days. In one, he declared, “Just bethink whatever ends up accident to you … You adapted it,” and added an expletive. On Feb. 11, 2015, a dozen badge and F.B.I. cars amidst the abode with the blooming tree, arrested Mr. Lopez and answerable him with transmitting a threat.
He was shuttled a part of federal accessories in Pennsylvania, New York, Oklahoma and North Carolina. Afterwards acceptance to his records, bastille psychologists affected his tales of talking to Islamic Accompaniment associates were fiction, affection of a brainy affliction that fabricated him amateur to angle trial. Prosecutors approved a audition to adjudge whether he should be forcibly medicated.
The aegis assuredly acquired a third brainy bloom appraisal — the aboriginal one by a analyst who had in fact advised Mr. Lopez’s abundant files. It begin him competent, and he was appear on bond backward endure month.
“Without accepting the documents,” Kirk Heilbrun, a Drexel University psychologist, wrote in his March 2 evaluation, “I would accept assured that his annual of this absolute alternation of challenge articulate both affected and delusional. Accepting advised these documents, however, I would not call his annual as delusional.”
On Friday, the United States attorney’s appointment in Delaware said it had taken the “exceedingly rare” footfall of bottomward the charges. “We accept not hesitated to do so if the facts and law abutment such a decision,” a annual said.
In an annual endure week, Mr. Lopez’s articulation bankrupt as he declared his bastille ordeal. “Nobody deserves to get abject through what I got abject through, forth with my family,” he said. “It’s sad that if anyone does something with angelic intentions and gets advised by the government this way.”
Finding Internet Adversaries
By his own admission, Mr. Lopez knew about annihilation about the Islamic Accompaniment afore 2014. Athletic and fun-loving, he had managed an Italian restaurant for years afore acceptable a car salesman. He became absorbed to painkillers for a while, but he kicked the addiction and has been off drugs for several years, he said. “Toby is your approved guy,” said Mary Roloff, who is affiliated to Mr. Lopez’s bisected brother, Edward.
At first, Mr. Lopez said, he started calumniating humans who accepted the Islamic Accompaniment on Twitter. Again he absitively to apprentice added about his amusing media adversaries. He best up a few Islamic agreement online and began to appoint the agitator group’s supporters, even commendation the Quran to adverse them. He begin the anonymity of the Internet intoxicating. As he put it, cipher knew he was “little Toby, the car salesman from Delaware.”
On Google, Mr. Lopez apparent that one man who had affianced him on Twitter, calling himself @shishaniomar, seemed to be Omar al-Shishani, or Omar the Chechen, the nom de guerre of the aggressive administrator of the Islamic State. Anon the two were consistently chatting on Skype. By aboriginal November 2014, he had larboard his job, accordant with his bang-up that his online activity had become a distraction.
The man who claimed to be the Islamic Accompaniment administrator regaled him with tales of battle, grumbled about arrogant Arab administration and alleged Mr. Lopez “brother.” The man confided that he did not accept that Islam condoned the demography of women and accouchement as slaves. Anon he asked Mr. Lopez to accession bribe to chargeless hundreds of associates of the Yazidi religious boyhood captivated earnest by the Islamic State.
When ancestors aggregate for Thanksgiving in 2014 at the Roloffs’ home abreast Baltimore, Mr. Lopez showed them jihadist videos and argument bulletin exchanges with Islamic Accompaniment fans.
“We adulation ‘CSI,’” Ms. Roloff said. “We thought, ‘This is absolutely cool.’ But some of what he aggregate with us — like videos of kids blind from a timberline — started to alarm me. It was above our comprehension.”
Mr. Lopez contacted the F.B.I., and two agents visited his home and interviewed him, he said. Through Allan Ripp, a New York accessible relations specialist he begin online, Mr. Lopez aswell contacted The New York Times. Two reporters visited him in January 2015 and spent several hours reviewing his emails, texts and audio recordings.
But afterwards blockage with experts, the reporters assured that Mr. Lopez was talking not to the real, red-bearded Mr. Shishani, but to an impostor. The absolute administrator did not allege chatty English, and the accent overheard in the accomplishments of Skype calls was not Chechen, as the actor claimed, but Kurdish. His assorted Twitter accounts had an caper tone; he already acquaint a “Simpsons” animation about the Islamic State.
“It’s absolutely a fake,” Joanna Paraszczuk, a British announcer and researcher who advance the Chechens affronted in Syria, said by email. She said the aforementioned man had bamboozled an Australian radio base into interviewing him but afterwards accepted that he was not the ISIS commander, but a Kurdish immigrant to Scandinavia.
The man’s motive appeared to be money: He asked Mr. Lopez to accompany the bribe to Sweden, allegedly to be forwarded to Syria.
When the Times reporters told Mr. Lopez they did not accept he was ambidextrous with the absolute Islamic Accompaniment commander, he grew angry. He was audition agnate skepticism from the F.B.I., according to email exchanges with Jeffrey A. Reising, a arch counterterrorism abettor based in Wilmington, Del.
From the emails, it appears that Mr. Reising was exploring Mr. Lopez’s contacts even as he approved to actuate him to abstract from the online jihadist world. But Mr. Lopez affiliated with a additional Twitter user claiming to be an Islamic Accompaniment amount who could get American hostages released, and Mr. Lopez approved to acquaintance several hostages’ families. At atomic one of them complained to the F.B.I.
Convinced that he could save lives, Mr. Lopez brushed off Mr. Reising’s warnings. He wrote dozens of emails to the F.B.I., some proposing that he allocution to the bureau’s administrator or even to President Obama. He focused on the case of Kayla Mueller, a 26-year-old American aid artisan getting captivated by the Islamic State. His online contacts had appropriate that she ability be freed.
Despite his doubts about Mr. Lopez’s exploits, Mr. Reising appeared to accept he ability accept stumbled beyond advantageous information. “Can you accommodate all acquaintance advice for the getting on that chat?” he wrote to Mr. Lopez on Feb. 4, 2015, apropos to an barter with a declared Islamic Accompaniment representative.
Near midnight, Mr. Lopez absurdly emailed the F.B.I. agent. “I wish to accompany her home alive,” he wrote. “I apperceive I can do it and I will attending the PRESIDENT in his eyes and acquaint him absolutely that … Anything abroad your bluffing yourself and your in denial!! Acceptable night!”
The weary F.B.I. abettor replied: “Toby….Seriously. Get some sleep.”
When Ms. Mueller was appear dead two canicule afterwards in an airstrike, Mr. Lopez was bent and abhorrent the F.B.I. for not allied with him. His letters to the agency grew added defiant.
“Any attack to arrest me will be advised as a adverse act,” he wrote to Mr. Reising. By then, agents had been abreast by the Delaware Accompaniment Badge that Mr. Lopez’s mother, Joyce Lopez, had told them that her son had a shotgun and was in a “poor brainy state.” Mrs. Lopez, 78, said afresh that she had artlessly asked whether the gun had to be registered.
By Feb. 11, the F.B.I. had had enough. Mrs. Lopez accustomed home to acquisition her abode surrounded. “Cars all over the place,” she recalled. “Toby was continuing there with his easily up. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’”
The authorities had interpreted Mr. Lopez’s acrimonious emails as a “threat to injure” Mr. Reising, a abomination with a book of up to 5 years. Mr. Lopez said afterwards that he had threatened alone to betrayal what he advised government bungling to the annual media. He was bound up, and federal prosecutors anon approved a cloister adjustment for a brainy bloom assessment.
‘Your Brother Is Actual Sick’
At an antecedent cloister audition in Wilmington, ancestors associates apprenticed Mr. Lopez’s accessible defender, Daniel I. Siegel, to aggregate the annal of his online contacts, which they anticipation showed his intentions were good. By their account, Mr. Siegel abandoned their pleas. “He just said, ‘Your brother is actual ailing and he needs help,’” Ms. Roloff recalled.
Mr. Lopez said Mr. Siegel never came to see him in the year that followed, as he cycled through the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan (where he afraid a few agitation defendants with Arabic phrases); a medical bastille in Butner, N.C., (where he played on the softball team); and three added facilities.
The aboriginal two cerebral evaluations begin that Mr. Lopez was adversity from “delusional disorder, affected type.” To Mr. Lopez’s distress, Mr. Siegel did not challenge the findings.
A year into Mr. Lopez’s imprisonment, afterwards complaints from his ancestors and reporters’ inquiries, Edson A. Bostic, the arch federal accessible apostle in Delaware, took over the case. He bound acquired from the ancestors the files documenting Mr. Lopez’s online history and abiding for the third cerebral assessment.
Dr. Heilbrun, the Drexel psychologist, declared in his address that if Mr. Lopez had not been talking with the absolute Mr. Shishani (who was dead endure month), again anyone assuming as the Islamic Accompaniment administrator had pulled off “a clever, detailed, and complete hoax.”
In a annual on Friday, Mr. Bostic alleged the case “a circuitous matter” and accepted Mr. Siegel’s almanac of apery busted clients. But he said the complaints from Mr. Lopez and his ancestors would be investigated. Mr. Siegel did not acknowledge to emails gluttonous comment.
Now that the accuse accept been dropped, Mr. Lopez, who absent two ancestors weddings while in prison, is reconnecting with accompany and relatives.
“All over you see those billboards that say, ‘See Something; Say Something,’” said Tana Stevens, Mr. Lopez’s sister. “He approved to do that. And they basically kidnapped him for 14 months.”
Mr. Lopez said he had consulted attorneys and was because a accusation adjoin the government admiral amenable for his incarceration. “If I hadn’t gotten addition evaluation, I ability still be sitting down at Butner, with a aggravate in my arm,” he said. “This was the United States of America, coil its anatomy on me.”
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