The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Man jailed after online hunt for Islamic State
Humdrum life jolted by quest to save hostages.
A car salesman who sparred online with FBI agents and others over Islamic State ends up in prison for almost 14 months.
WYOMING, DEL. — By his own account, Toby Lopez was a supremely ordinary guy. He sold Toyotas and lived with his mother in a tidy ranch home with a cherry tree out front. What passed for excitement was the time his young niece won a beauty contest and he chauffeured her in a Corvette in a local parade.
Then a high school friend was killed in Afghanistan, and the Islamic State began beheading U.S. journalists. Horrified, Lopez heard on CNN one day in the fall of 2014 that the Islamic State was active on Twitter.
“I was intrigued,” said Lopez, 42. “What could they possibly be saying on Twitter?”
What followed was a radical break from his humdrum life. He was pulled into the murky world of Internet jihadis, sparring with them online from his office at the car dealership and late into the night at home. Before long, he was talking for hours on Skype with a man who claimed — falsely, as it would turn out — to be a top Islamic State military commander, trying to negotiate the release of hostages.
Lopez contacted the FBI and began a testy relationship with counterterrorism agents, who came to believe he might pose a danger. In the end, he landed in federal prison, where he was held for nearly 14 months without trial.
The hundreds of emails, text messages and recorded Skype calls that Lopez saved show him growing more and more frantic when FBI agents did not see things his way. Believing U.S. hostages’ lives were at stake, he sent an agent 80 increasingly overheated messages in 10 days. In one, he declared, “Just remember whatever ends up happening to you ... You deserved it,” and added an expletive.
On Feb. 11, 2015, a dozen police and FBI cars surrounded the house with the cherry tree, arrested Lopez and charged him with transmitting a threat.
By his own admission, Lopez knew almost nothing about the Islamic State before 2014. Athletic and fun-loving, he had managed an Italian restaurant for years before becoming a car salesman.
On Google, Lopez discovered that one man who had engaged him on Twitter, calling himself @shishaniomar, seemed to be Omar al-Shishani, the military commander of the Islamic State. Soon, the two were regularly chatting on Skype. (By early November 2014, Lopez had left his job, agreeing with his boss that his online life had become a distraction.)
The man who claimed to be the Islamic State commander asked Lopez to raise ransom to free hundreds of members of the Yazidi religious minority held hostage by the Islamic State. Lopez contacted the FBI, and two agents interviewed him at his home, he said.
Lopez also contacted The New York Times. Two reporters visited him in January 2015. After checking with experts, however, the reporters concluded that Lopez was talking not to the real, redbearded Shishani, but to an impostor. The man’s motive appeared to be money.
When the reporters told Lopez of their conclusion, he grew angry. He was hearing similar skepticism from the FBI, according to email exchanges with Jeffrey A. Reising, a senior counterterrorism agent based in Wilmington, Delaware.
From the emails, it appears Reising tried to persuade Lopez to disengage from the online jihadi world. Convinced he could save lives, however, Lopez brushed off Reising’s warnings. He focused on the case of Kayla Mueller, a 26-year-old U.S. aid worker being held by the Islamic State.
When Mueller was reported killed in February 2015 in an airstrike, Lopez was furious and blamed the FBI for not cooperating with him. His messages to the agency grew more defiant. By Feb. 11, the FBI had had enough.
The authorities had interpreted Lopez’s heated emails as a “threat to injure” Reising, a crime with a sentence of up to five years. Lopez said later he had threatened only to expose to the news media what he considered government bungling. He was locked up, and prosecutors soon sought a court order for a mental health assessment.
At an initial court hearing in Wilmington, family members urged Lopez’s public defender, Daniel I. Siegel, to collect the records of his online contacts, which they thought showed his intentions were good. By their account, Siegel ignored their pleas.
“He just said, ‘Your brother is very sick and he needs help,’” Roloff recalled.
In the year that followed, Lopez cycled through the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, a medical prison in Butner, North Carolina, and three other facilities.
A year into Lopez’s imprisonment, after complaints from his family and reporters’ inquiries, Edson A. Bostic, the chief federal public defender in Delaware, took over the case. He quickly obtained from the family the files documenting Lopez’s online history and arranged for a third psychological assessment.
Kirk Heilbrun, a Drexel University psychologist, declared in his March 2 evaluation that if Lopez had not been talking with the real Shishani (who was killed last month), then someone posing as the Islamic State commander had pulled off “a clever, detailed, and well-constructed hoax.” The evaluation found Lopez competent, and he was released on bail late last month.
On Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware said it had taken the “exceedingly rare” step of dropping the charges.