Bomb suspect laid trail of evidence for investigators

Fingerprint, DNA lead to Florida man’s arrest

Short of turning himself in, suspected mail bomber Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr. could not have done more to get caught.

The clues that investigators followed to his gaudy white van in Plantation reveal that he either ignored or failed to consider all of the ways he was laying a trail for them.

He left a fingerprint on one of the packages he is accused of sending. His DNA was found on two of the bombs. By itself, that was enough to put feds on his trail, and everything else fell together quickly from there.

Investigators were able to find their man — one person in a population of 327 million — in a scant five days after the pipe bombs began showing up.

The first suspected package turned up Monday, addressed to George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist who has supported Democrats. It was intercepted, but the number of packages grew on Tuesday. One to Barack Obama. One to Hillary Clinton. Another to former CIA Director John Brennan.

All targeted prominent Democrats, and all bore a return address to South Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, former head of the Democratic National Committee and a frequent target of conservatives.

Immediately South Florida was at the center of the investigation.

Another package intended for

former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was misaddressed and was shipped to Wasserman Schultz’s office as the return address. By the end of the day Wednesday, the number of pipe bombs came to five, and the number ultimately climbed to at least 14.

All of the bombs were nearly identical. Each “consisted of approximately six inches of PVC pipe, a small clock, a battery, wiring, and energetic material," FBI Agent David Brown wrote in court records.

Some of the mailings “included photographs of the target-recipients marked with a red 'X,'”the agent wrote – the same way some were depicted on stick’s on Sayoc’s van.

Each of the devices was packaged in a tan-colored manila envelope lined with bubble wrap, with approximately six self-adhesive American flag postage stamps.

The packages were taken to the FBI’s crime lab in Quantico, Viriginia, for analysis.

FBI analysis

“The forensics are going to lead you to the perpetrator,” said John Osa, a retired FBI agent who worked extensively on the investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

“You’ve got letters, you’ve got bombs, there’s going to be something the lab can do to narrow it down and lead you to a suspect,” Osa said.

Lab experts found a latent fingerprint on one of the envelopes. Two DNA samples were taken from components of two of the pipe bombs.

Investigators easily linked that evidence to Sayoc, whose fingerprints were included in a national database because of prior arrests for relatively minor crimes in Florida. His DNA had been uploaded to a Florida Department of Law Enforcement database.

“This was obviously a high-priority case, and that’s an amazing forensic machine that they have in Quantico,” said Jeff Sloman, a criminal defense attorney who previously served as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. “This guy was in the system so they had his DNA and his fingerprints.”

A big break

With a prime suspect in their sights, agents also examined Sayoc’s public postings on Twitter for other clues. They noticed similarities that bolstered their case: Sayoc’s social media posts misspelled words that also were mangled on the package labels. Hillary Clinton was spelled as “Hilary.” Debbie Wasserman Schultz was printed on return labels as “Shultz.”

Once investigators have “a shred of probable cause” they can seek warrants from a judge to track a cellphone, search and track mail and conduct wiretaps, if needed, said Osa, who now works in South Florida for The Freeh Group, a private risk management and security firm headed by former FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Hundreds of agents from all of the FBI’s 56 field offices were available to track down clues.

“When something of this magnitude is under investigation, it’s all hands on deck. Everyone stops what they’re doing – in every FBI field office – and it’s priority number one until they solve the case,” he said.

The big break came Thursday. According to court records, that’s when investigators traced five of the packages to the Postal Service’s mail distribution center in Opa-locka, which handles thousands of package mailed to and from South Florida.

Postal officials won’t talk about how they screen or track packages, but a relatively new program that photographs mail could have played a part.

Asked about screening, Andrea Avery, a postal inspector and spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, emailed a description of a program called Informed Delivery that can send people pictures of mail headed their way in coming days.

Law enforcement sources also told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that they used cellphone “pinging” technology to track Sayoc’s whereabouts and tie him to locations where the packages had been mailed.

The arrest

Although Sayoc had been living in his van, plastered with Trump stickers and anti-Democrat barbs, agents eventually visited his mother’s home in Aventura before discovering that the two had been estranged for years.

Instead, they followed Sayoc’s cellphone to the parking lot of an AutoZone store in Plantation, where they put him under surveillance Friday morning.

After what witnesses described as an explosion – possibly a flash bomb detonated by the FBI -- he was arrested just after 10:30 a.m. as he approached his van.

Taking the suspected bomber into custody there assured he would not a pose a danger to the public or federal agents if he resisted, authorities said.

“We were concerned there was a chance that he might have explosives or that he could have rigged the van so we took measures to ensure that the arrest went down in as controlled a manner as possible,” said one source with knowledge of the operation.

The van

Police partially covered Sayoc’s van with a blue tarpaulin and loaded it onto a truck so it could be moved and thoroughly searched. Osa and other law enforcement sources said the tarp was used to preserve evidence and limit people’s ability to photograph the inside of the van.

“They don’t want anyone to photograph the contents of the van, especially with the way people can Photoshop things in today’s digital age and make it look like stuff was there or not there, if they could have put it in a semi tractor-trailer to move it, they’d have done it,” Osa said.

Sayoc is locked up in the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami. He is due in court Monday for an initial hearing and likely proceedings to move him to New York, where he will be prosecuted.

He is being represented by Assistant Federal Public Defender Sarah Baumgartel in the Southern District of New York. Baumgartel did not respond to requests for comment. South Florida’s federal public defender, Michael Caruso, declined to comment

Cesar Sayoc