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Three months after orchestrating a bomb threat that forced a
seven-hour evacuation of the School
of Medicine complex, a former UCSD
employee awaits sentencing for the hoax after pleading guilty earlier this
week.
Richard Sills Jr., who worked in the Leichtag
Biomedical Research
Building for seven months prior to
the Dec. 5 bomb scare, could face up to five years in prison when he is
sentenced by a federal court judge.
Sills, 54, pleaded guilty to one count of making threats
involving animal enterprises, and will appear before U.S. District Judge Larry
Burns on June 16.
According to an indictment issued by the San Diego U.S.
Attorney’s office, Sills was initially charged with three counts of providing
false information and hoaxes as well as two counts of making telephoned bomb
threats.
He was arrested on Jan. 4 by members of the FBI’s Joint
Terrorism Task Force, though a brief treatment at Alvarado
Hospital in East
County delayed his arraignment
until Jan. 14.
The indictment alleges that Sills threatened to detonate
multiple remote-controlled explosives in six campus buildings if all animals
housed in campus research facilities were not released.
A letter sent to the UCSD Police Department claimed that the
Animal Liberation Front, an animal-rights activist group that has accepted
responsibility for other threats against University
of California laboratories,
coordinated the attack.
“This will be a 9/11 event for the raising of awareness of
what you and institutions like you are doing to these defensles [sic] sentiant
[sic] beings,” the letter read.
A device later found to be a dummy bomb was discovered in
Leichtag at 10:26 a.m. on Dec. 5,
and the entire School of Medicine
complex was cleared out by members of the Metro-Arson Strike Team.
Members of the North American Animal Liberation Press
Office, a group that advocates animal-rights reform and handles media requests
for ALF, could not confirm whether Sills was a member of the organization.
“I never heard a word from this guy, or from anybody that
knew anything about it,” ALPO spokesman Jerry Vlasak said. “We don’t have any
independent confirmation that he really was with the ALF.”
ALPO, which Vlasak called an “above-ground” organization,
does not know the identities of ALF members.
The FBI arrested former UCSD employee Timothy Kalka three
days after the hoax, but dismissed all charges against him on Jan. 4.
The UC Board of Regents is currently seeking an injunction
against ALF, along with two other animal-rights organizations, due to the
groups’ alleged harassment of professors and researchers working with animal
subjects.
Last month, the husband of a UC Santa Cruz biology professor
was attacked in the couple’s home just weeks after the words “murderer” and
“torturer” were chalked on the sidewalk in front of their residence.
Readers can contact Matthew L'Heureux at
mlheureu@ucsd.eduThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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