Andrew Dubois

Staff Writer

   Douglas L. Wright, 26, Brandon L. Baxter, 20, and Anthony Hayne, 35, were arrested in Cleveland by the FBI on April 30 for charges of conspiracy to damage physical property affecting interstate commerce. Basically, they attempted to blow up a bridge.

    Two others were also apprehended on April 30, Connor C. Stevens, 20, and Joshua S. Stafford, 23. The self proclaimed Anarchists had been under extensive surveillance for a long period of time. According to the FBI, the explosives that the group planned to use on the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge were never any danger to the bridge or general public. The explosives were sold to the group as part of a sting operation and were totally inoperable. A sting operation is a operation in which a informant earns the trust of a suspect in order to catch the suspect committing a crime.

    Key members of the Occupy Cleveland protests said they knew most of the Anarchists personally. Johnny Peskar, a organizer of the Occupy Cleveland protests, said about the suspects, “They didn’t show any signs of being violent. They weren’t bad people. I have nothing bad to say about them, but what they did, what they were going to do, it’s been denounced all around.”

    The FBI informant who supplied the information that made the arrests possible said that the group privately confided in him their displeasure at the Occupy crowd’s unwillingness to act violently. Baxter told the informant that the goal of blowing up the bridge was to cost corporate America a lot of money and stop people from going to work.

    As is typical in high-profile sting operations, some question whether the suspects would have acted on their own without the FBI’s intervention. U.S Attorney Steven Dettelbach assured people saying, “The suspects stand charged based not upon any words or beliefs they might espouse, but based upon their own plans and actions.”