Kan. Inmate Charged With Mailing Bomb To Va. Court

A prisoner at the famed high-security Leavenworth prison was charged yesterday with fashioning a letter bomb and mailing it to the federal courthouse in Richmond, authorities said.

Rodney Curtis Hamrick, who has a long history of threatening public officials, sent "an operable explosive device that had the capability to cause death," prosecutors said as they announced the charges. It was sent to the offices of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit and addressed to the clerk but was diverted to a basement mailroom and later detonated by police, authorities said. No one was injured.

Hamrick was an inmate at the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., when he mailed the bomb in October 2005, along with a letter several days later that contained a powdery substance labeled "anthrax," federal law enforcement officials said. Tests indicated that the substance was not anthrax.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Prisons, said she could not comment on how Hamrick allegedly managed to construct and mail a bomb from prison.

An attorney had not been appointed yesterday for Hamrick, 41, who was charged in a seven-count indictment and faces up to life in prison if convicted. He has since been moved to Colorado's notorious "supermax" federal facility that houses terrorists and other violent felons.

Chuck Rosenberg, the U.S. attorney in Alexandria, said Hamrick's actions had presented "a grave threat to the United States courthouse and to the people who work inside, and we will prosecute it accordingly."

Hamrick has made threats to public officials and mailed dangerous devices from jail before, court records show. In 1987, from a state prison, he mailed letters threatening to kill President Ronald Reagan. While serving a prison term for that offense, he threatened to blow up a West Virginia courthouse, a United Airlines flight and NAACP headquarters, court records show.

Hamrick then constructed a bomb while an inmate at a county prison in West Virginia, according to a 1995 4th Circuit Court decision. The bomb "comprised a nine-volt battery as a power source, steel wires, three butane cigarette lighters as the explosive, and an unidentified pink substance speculated to be lip balm, which was to serve as the detonator," the appellate court wrote.

Hamrick was later convicted of mailing an envelope containing the bomb to William A. Kolibash, the U.S. attorney in West Virginia. Kolibash opened the envelope in his office, realized it contained a homemade bomb and fled. The bomb, which had scorched the packaging in which it was mailed, was disarmed, the court said.

A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit initially reversed Hamrick's conviction for the attempt to kill Kolibash, but the full court overturned that ruling and reinstated the conviction in a 1995 decision.

Pat Connor, the 4th Circuit Court clerk, praised the quick action security officials took when the bomb Hamrick is now accused of sending was received. "The response was one that would make those receiving the package feel safe," she said.