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The
U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland said it
charged 28-year-old Rondell Henry of Germantown, Maryland, with
interstate commerce transportation of a stolen vehicle. It said
the government has since petitioned a federal court to detain
Henry pending trial after learning more about his motives.
“I was just going to keep driving and driving and driving. I
wasn’t going to stop," the government quotes Henry as saying in
its motion seeking detention pending trial.
A detention hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in U.S. District
Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, before U.S. Magistrate Judge
Thomas M. DiGirolamo.
Henry's public defender, Michael Citaramanis, declined to
comment.
In its criminal complaint, the government said that on March 26,
the Alexandria Police Department in Virginia received a report
about a leased U-Haul truck that was stolen from a nearby mall.
The driver who rented the truck initially reported seeing a man
in a blue BMW follow the U-Haul off Interstate 395 and park in a
space near the U-Haul at the mall. When police arrived at the
mall, they found the BMW still parked there and discovered it
was registered to Henry.
A day later, the stolen U-Haul was found in National Harbor, a
bustling development along the Potomac in Maryland across from
Alexandria, Virginia, that features bars and restaurants, shops,
a Ferris wheel, a luxury hotel and residential apartments.
Video surveillance showed Henry parking and getting out of the
truck. He was arrested the next day.
Prosecutors say that Henry has harbored “hatred” for those who
do not practice the Muslim faith and was allegedly inspired by
videos he watched of foreign terrorists.
Specifically, they said he was inspired by the 2016 terrorist
attack in Nice, France, in which a man drove a truck at high
speed into crowds, killing 86 people, and for which Islamic
State claimed responsibility.
Henry "walked off his job in Germantown, Maryland, in the middle
of the day, determined to walk down the extremist path," the
government alleged in court papers.
"Recognizing that his older four-door sedan would not cause the
catastrophic damage that he desired, the defendant drove around
the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area looking for a larger
vehicle to steal."
According to a posting http://www.mymcpnews.com/2019/03/27/concern-for-missing-germantown-man-19
on the Montgomery County Police Department, Henry was reported
missing and was last seen by his co-workers on March 26.
The Justice Department said that before setting his sights on
National Harbor, Henry wanted to try driving the truck into
pedestrians at Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
He arrived at the airport around 5 a.m. on March 27, but the
airport "lacked the large number of unloading pedestrians the
defendant hoped to find," the court filing says. He also tried
to find a way through security at the airport, but struck out
multiple times.
Henry then made his way to National Harbor, arriving around 10
a.m. that same day. He later told police he wanted to create
“panic and chaos,” just like "what happened in France,”
prosecutors said.
Henry still did not find a large crowd, however, so he decided
to wait. He broke into a boat and hid there overnight, the
government said.
The next day, police had tracked down the stolen truck and were
there waiting. After Henry jumped over a security fence, the
government said, he was arrested.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Marguerita Choy and
Leslie Adler)
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