Dipsh*ts Charged In Christmas Attacks On Four Washington Substations

Two men from Puyallup, Washington (it’s pronounced “pew-AL-up,” you’re welcome), were arrested Saturday night for alleged attacks on four electrical substations in Washington’s Pierce County, knocking out electricity to more than 17,000 people on Christmas and causing more than $3 million in damage. Two of the substations may take as long as three years to repair, requiring the utility company to use mobile transformers until the work is finished.

Matthew Greenwood, 32, and Jeremy Crahan, 40, were charged in federal court Tuesday with conspiracy to damage energy facilities, and Greenwood also caught charges of possessing unregistered firearms. When Greenwood was arrested, he was found with an illegally modified short-barreled rifle with a homemade silencer, as well as a short-barreled shotgun, neither registered as required by law.

In the Justice Department press release announcing the charges, US Attorney Nick Brown noted,

We have seen attacks such as these increase in Western Washington and throughout the country and must treat each incident seriously. The outages on Christmas left thousands in the dark and cold and put some who need power for medical devices at extreme risk.

In North Carolina, you’ll recall, three power substations were shot up on December 2, leaving some 40,000 homes without power. There’s been speculation those attacks may have been related to protests against a drag show, but while bigots were delighted the show was cancelled, no conclusive proof of a connection. (There have been many more recent substation attacks, but that’s the one we’ve covered so far.) Nobody’s been arrested in that case, because apparently the attackers were at least marginally smarter than Greenwood and Crahan, who were identified by cell phone data. Don’t take your cell phone along while committing federal crimes, kids. Or rather, please do.

We’re at least fairly certain that no drag queen story hours were planned in Pierce County for Christmas morning, so there’s that.

An FBI agent’s affidavit in the criminal complaint notes that cell data identified two phones, belonging to the suspects, that were in the vicinity of all four substations at the time of the attacks early in the morning of December 25. No, that does not vindicate Dinesh D’Souza’s fake voter fraud movie; the FBI affidavit notes that since the substations are “spread out over dozens of miles,” and the phones were near them at the times of the attacks, it’s “unlikely that an individual would simply happen to be at or near all four locations at around the times they were each vandalized.”

Video surveillance cameras at the substations also provided images of the attackers and a pickup truck; when search warrants were served on New Year’s Eve, clothing matching the clothes seen in the video was found at each idiot’s residence, and the Dodge pickup seen in the video looks like one owned by Crahan.

According to the complaint, after his arrest, Greenwood told law enforcement that he and Crahan had committed the substation attacks to cover up a burglary they had planned, which sounds all kinds of logical to us. Greenwood said he had used bolt cutters to cut through the chain-link fences at all four substations and then mucked around with switches and breakers to knock out the power. He said Crahan was the driver; after the power was out, the men went to a local business, drilled out a lock, and stole money from the cash register.

The federal conspiracy to attack energy facilities charges can result in up to 20 years in prison, and the illegal firearms charges are worth another 10, so that seems like some really smart planning for a burglary. We haven’t seen any media reports on whether the burglary has yet resulted in any state charges, but we’d imagine those will be on the way. First-degree burglary in Washington can be punished by up to life in prison and a fine of up to $50,000, so maybe these dipshits figured they liked the odds of committing a federal crime instead, or maybe they’re just A) not that smart, (2) wannabe terrorists lying about their motives (III) some combination of all the above.

Also too, we’ll close with the charming thought we saw on Twitter: Wouldn’t it be hilarious to find out these guys avoided the COVID vaccine because they didn’t want to be injected with Bill Gates’s tracking chips by the New World Order?

[Department of Justice / NYT / ABC News / DOJ criminal complaint / KING-TV / Image: Screenshot, NBC News on YouTube]

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