Woman who torched Wyoming abortion clinic sentenced to five years in prison
A woman who says anxiety and nightmares led her to set fire to Wyoming’s only full-service abortion clinic, setting back the facility’s opening by almost a year, was sentenced to five years in prison and three years of probation on Thursday.
Lorna Roxanne Green could have been sentenced to up to 20 years for burning the Wellspring Health Access facility in Casper. She pleaded guilty to a federal arson charge in July.
Green said at that hearing she regretted what she did and took full responsibility.
“I knew right after” setting fire to the clinic that it was wrong, she told the US district judge Alan Johnson, who also sentenced her.
The May 2022 fire happened weeks before the clinic, Wellspring Health Access,was to open. Extensive damage to the building cost the clinic hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair and kept it from opening for almost a year.
Green admitted to breaking in, pouring gasoline around the inside of the building and lighting it on fire, according to court documents.
The Casper College mechanical engineering student showed no sign of anti-abortion views on social media but told investigators she opposed abortion.
She told a US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent she bought gas cans and aluminum pans the day before the fire, drove to Casper, and carried the cans and pans to the clinic in a bag, matching security video and a witness account, according to a court filing.
She admitted using a rock to break glass in a door to enter and pouring gasoline into the pans in several rooms and on the floor before lighting it, according to the document.
The abortion clinic is located nextdoor to a gas station.
Investigators said they made little progress finding who started the fire until a reward was increased to $15,000 in March, leading several tipsters to identify Green.
The clinic, which opened in April, provides surgical and pill abortions, making it the first of its kind in the state in at least a decade. Only one other clinic in Wyoming – in Jackson, some 250 miles (400km) away – provides abortions, and only by pill.
Laws passed in Wyoming in 2022 and 2023 sought to make abortion in the state illegal but a judge has kept the procedure legal while a lawsuit challenging the new laws proceeds. One of the new Wyoming laws to ban any drug used to cause an abortion would be the nation’s first explicit ban on abortion pills.
Teton county district judge Melissa Owens has expressed sympathy with arguments that a 2012 state constitutional amendment guaranteeing Wyoming residents’ right to make their own healthcare decisions conflicted with the bans.
Though abortion in Wyoming has remained legal, women in the rural state often go to nearby states, including Colorado, for the procedure.
The arson in Wyoming was just one of four perpetrated against abortion providers and clinics in 2022, according to the National Abortion Federation, which tracks violence and harassment against abortion providers. There were two arsons in 2021, and five in 2020.