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| Photo Credit: AP. |
An Army private who was planning an internet fantasy defense has shelved his initial plans and pleaded guilty for plotting to murder members of his unit overseas with help from a secretive violent anarchist group, court papers show, The Associated Press reports.
Courts
papers show Ethan Phelan Melzer defense plan in the months before he pleaded
guilty to charges Friday, eliminating the need for his July 5 trial in
Manhattan federal court, according to The Associated Press. The Kentucky man
will now be sentenced on January 6 2023 and could face up to 45 years in prison
instead of the life sentence that a jury conviction could have brought.
According to
The Associated Press, Melzer, 24, was in Italy in October 2019 with the 173rd
Airborne Brigade Combat Team when he communicated online with others prior to
planning an attack against his Army unit once it was redeployed in 2020 to
guard an isolated sensitive military installation, prosecutors said.
Court papers
reveal the individuals he was communicating with online weren’t members of the
Order of Nine Angles or 09A as he believed but rather government informants who
helped build the case against him, defense lawyers sad, according to The Associated
Press.
The Washington
Post quoted a European security official in a June 2020 article as saying that
the Nazi-Satanist group was established in Britain in the 1970s and has
promoted extreme violence for decades, according to The Associated Press.
Speaking on
condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, the official
told Washington Post that 09A membership ranges from a few dozen to about 2,000
targeting young people and sending supporters into groups to influence and
recruit, according to The Associated Press.
The white
supremacist group espouses neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic and Satanist beliefs and
encourages members to infiltrate the military to gain training, commit acts of
violence and identify like-minded individuals intent on subverting the military
from within, prosecutors said, according to The Associated Press.
On Friday
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams accused Melzer of seeking to “orchestrate a
murderous ambush on his own unit by unlawfully disclosing its location,
strength and armaments to 09A members online,” The Associated Press reported.
“The
defendant believed he could force the U.S. into prolonged armed conflict while
causing the deaths of as many soldiers as possible. Melzer’s traitorous conduct
was a betrayal of his storied unit and nothing short of an attack against the
most essential American values,” he said in a news release.
“The charges
in this case are sensational, the facts less so: No ‘jihadist ambush’ on
Melzer’s unit happened, none was close to happening, and Melzer had no
intention of seeing one happen, Melzer’s lawyers said. In post-arrest
interviews with law enforcement he made clear that he never intended to see an
attack occur and that he believed that his interlocutors were ‘jokers’ who
similarly had no intentions or capabilities of orchestrating one,” Melzer’s lawyers wrote, according to The
Associated Press.
They argued
that his online prose was “bluster — falsities designed to impress the people
he was communicating with online,” adding that while Melzer was curious about
09A, he thought it was “weird” and “pretty much a cult” and its beliefs were
“polar opposite” of his own, according to The Associated Press.
The
maintained that one government cooperator posing as an 09A sympathizer online
who claimed to be a former Canadian paratrooper injured in Iraq was actually a
mentally ill 15-year-old who had been hospitalized for psychiatric care months
before he began communicating with Melzer.
“The
government’s efforts to paint Melzer as an O9A-devotee committed to murdering
his fellow soldiers are overblown,” defense lawyers wrote, according to The
Associated Press. They said three post-arrest interviews in 2020 with law
enforcement “amounted to full-throated denials of the most serious charges
against him.”
Prosecutors
said they had built a case against Melzer that included evidence from his
electronic devices and barracks such as photographs and documents that could be
characterized as “jihadist” and “09A” materials.
Prosecutors
said a number of items such as books titled “The Sinister Tradition” and “the
Anarchist’s Cookbook,” where recovered from him and had detailed instructions
on how to manufacture and use explosives and weapons.
Prosecutors
also said they planned to show the jury proof Melzer sought to earn a
self-initiation into 09A through violence as a street level drug dealer after
shooting a marijuana dealer in the arm in January 2017 near his Louisville,
Kentucky apartment, according to The Associated Press. He later joined the Army
the following year. This singular evidence seeks to establish his long held
views about 09A and his adherence to such believes as he sought to impress them
through violence on the street.