Man with 200 explosives arrested outside Catholic Church hours before justices were to attend mass

A man was charged on eight counts for bringing 200 homemade explosives to a Washington, D.C., Catholic Church where Supreme Court justices were to attend Mass on Sunday.

The man arrested and charged is Louis Geri, 41, of Vineland, N.J., who had a tent set up on the top of the stairs leading to St. Matthew’s Cathedral with more than 200 handmade destructive devices inside, including bottle rockets and molotov cocktails, the Washington Post reported.

Metropolitan Police approached Geri inside a green tent as they were clearing the block for Red Mass, an annual service marking the start of a new Supreme Court term and honoring the judiciary. Several justices normally attend the Mass, but the incident prevented them from doing so Sunday. 

“As the security situation unfolded, none of the justices attended this year’s Mass,” according to the Catholic Standard, the official newspaper of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington.

When police officers asked Geri to leave, he told them, “You might want to stay back and call the federales, I have explosives,” according to court records.

Geri's lawyer did not respond to the Post's request for comment.

A police officer called over a sergeant with the bomb squad who told Geri he had to move because there was an event, per court records. Geri allegedly said he knew about the event and said he had bombs.

“Do you want me to throw one out, I’ll test one out on the streets? I have a hundred-plus of them,” Geri told the sergeant, according to court records. “If you just step back, I’ll take out that tree. No one will get hurt, there will just be a hole where that tree used to be.”

When police said they were going to forcefully remove him if he did not leave, court documents show he responded by telling police, “several of your people are gonna die from one of these.”

The sergeant agreed to read what Geri had written down, in an attempt to de-escalate. Geri allegedly unzipped the flap of the tent and handed over nine pages of notebook paper titled, “Written Negotiations for the Avoidance of Destruction of Property via Detonation of Explosives.” 

Per court records, the pages expressed animosity toward the Catholic Church, Supreme Court justices, members of Judaism, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The sergeant noticed explosives in Geri's tent, according to court records, and after he told the sergeant to have the police "step away or there’s going to be deaths," the sergeant told surrounding officers to back up and notified command staff.

While officers formed a perimeter, court records show, Geri left his tent and walked over to trees near the corner of the church to urinate. The sergeant and another officer stopped and handcuffed him as he wrestled to get away. He allegedly told them he had an explosive device on his person, which they recovered.

Geri was arrested, and the explosive devices were taken to the FBI for processing. Authorities found that some of the vials contained nitromethane, an explosive compound often used in improvised explosive devices, such as those from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Other explosives were modified bottle rockets with aluminum foil heads and treated in a pyrotechnic solution, according to court records. Authorities said that the devices appeared “fully functional” in court documents.

Among the charges Geri faces is the manufacture or possession of a weapon of mass destruction in furtherance of a hate crime. On Monday, he was arraigned in court on two charges connected to an incident at the church last month, after which he was barred from the property: possession of a destructive device and false report of a weapon of mass destruction. A court ordered Geri to be held without bond.