Click here to subscribe today or Login.
By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH
MISSION, Kan. (AP) — A Missouri man who was planning to bomb a Kansas City-area hospital killed himself in March as FBI agents served a probable cause arrest warrant, the FBI said Friday.
An autopsy determined that FBI agents shot Timothy Wilson, 36, of Raymore, Missouri, in the upper and lower extremities on March 24 on a street in Belton, Missouri, but that his cause of death was a self-inflicted wound to the head, the agency said. The FBI didn’t say if Wilson shot himself before or after the agents shot him.
Investigators said Wilson was distressed by the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis and motivated by racial, religious and anti-government animus, according to court documents. The plot was reminiscent of the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. Wilson first talked of plans for an attack in April or June, but FBI agents say he moved up that timeline as the coronavirus made its way to Missouri.
The followed a long-running domestic terrorism investigation that began in 2019 with Wilson’s encrypted communications about bomb-building with Jarrett William Smith, a 24-year-old Army infantry soldier who faces prison for distributing bomb-making information through social media.
Wilson considered attacking the University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City, Kansas, before settling on a plan to park a vehicle loaded with explosives and detonate it in the parking lot of Belton Regional Medical Center in Cass County, investigators state in court documents.
Just two days before his death, Wilson and an undercover FBI agent visited Belton Regional to inspect the hospital property and conduct a dry run of their plot, court records say.
The records show that for months, Wilson had discussed ideas for a terrorist attack, telling an undercover FBI agent that he was considering sites including a nuclear plant and Islamic centers in Missouri and the Walmart headquarters or a synagogue in Arkansas. He also discussed last year shooting up a predominantly black elementary school, the FBI said in the affidavits.