Mom: MIT grad facing explosives charges in Vegas needs treatment

The mother of the 40-year-old MIT business grad who was arrested in Las Vegas with what police are calling a stockpile of explosives says her troubled son “needs treatment in the worst possible way” and likely had the arsenal to battle Scientologists he thought were out to get him.

Nicolai Mork, a 2004 graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management who later worked as a consultant for Bain and Co., was arrested Wednesday and now faces eight counts, including terrorism, possession of explosive devices, gun charges and unlawful acts relating to weapons of mass destruction stemming from a cache of chemicals police discovered in his Las Vegas home.

“A life such as our son’s, which was filled with the highest possibilities … they are all snuffed out, if the only way people think about someone like Nic when he has all this arsenal to fight the Scientologists, when all they can see is the danger from them,” Joan Mork told the Herald from her Minnesota home.

“He needs treatment in the worst possible way, and he wouldn’t take it because he thought he was saving people from Scientologists,” she said.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police searched Nicolai Mork’s home in December — after a string of Molotov cocktails were placed around the city — and found potassium chlorate, potassium perchlorate, ammonium perchlorate, red iron oxide, aluminum powder, magnesium ribbon, flasks of nitric acid, ammonium nitrate and sulfuric acid according to a police report.

The chemicals, police said, “can lead to both incendiary and explosive results.”