A man charged with trying to firebomb a Jewish-sponsored assisted living facility in Longmeadow in April now also faces a charge of lying to federal investigators probing the attempted arson, according to US Attorney Andrew E. Lelling’s office.
In a statement Friday, Lelling’s office said 36-year-old John Rathbun - an East Longmeadow resident who pleaded not guilty in June to a pair of federal charges alleging he tried to obtain and transport explosives and destroy property with them - had been charged in a second, superseding indictment with a third count of making false statements to a federal agent.
It wasn’t immediately clear if an arraignment date for the new charge had been set.
Prosecutors also allege an aggravating “special finding” that Rathbun allegedly targeted the Jewish Geriatric Services Lifecare complex, or JGS Lifecare, in Longmeadow based on the occupants' perceived religion, records show. Rathbun disputes the finding and denies leaving the explosive device at the complex.
On the morning of April 2, Longmeadow police discovered a five-gallon Scepter fuel canister on the “landscaped grounds” of JGS, according to court papers. The canister was located next to the JGS primary driveway entrance, within feet of a busy pedestrian walkway along Converse Street and about 50 yards from the JGS-operated Genesis House, a senior living facility with more than 100 units, legal filings show. No one was injured.
A DNA profile was taken from each blood sample, and investigators later determined the profiles were “linked to the DNA profile of Rathbun,” authorities have said, and a month before the crime, an online white supremacist platform had identified April 3 as “jew killing day,” and someone mentioned “that jew nursing home in longmeadow massachusetts” as a possible target.
In Friday’s statement, Lelling’s office said Rathbun allegedly lied to the FBI when he told agents on April 15 that he “was not familiar with the location on Converse Street where the device was placed; he had not left his house in the past two weeks because of the COVID-19 pandemic; and he only used the Internet to search for work, to use a dating application called Bumble and to view pornography.”
Rathbun’s federal public defenders on Tuesday filed a motion to exclude statements he made to the agents during the April 15 interview at his home.
The defense noted the FBI didn’t record the interview and said the “report of Mr. Rathbun’s statement makes it almost impossible to ascertain exactly what questions the agents posed, or what statements Mr. Rathbun actually gave, as their report has reconfigured Mr. Rathbun’s statements into one unbroken ‘summary’ narrative that fails to document Mr. Rathbun’s verbatim statements and was not first drafted until the day after Mr. Rathbun was interrogated.”
Rathbun’s lawyers have previously asserted in court filings that he was in various other locations when someone left the makeshift incendiary device on the JGS grounds on April 2.
But authorities maintain they matched the DNA taken from the canister and partially charred Christian religious pamphlet found in the nozzle to Rathbun through the FBI national CODIS database, which stores convicted offender and arrestee DNA profiles.
Rathbun, records show, has three prior arrests in 2011 on his record for breaking and entering and receiving stolen property offenses. All three cases were continued without a finding; he was fined for each of them and placed on probation for one, according to legal filings.
Rathbun’s mother attends a Baptist church and has distributed Christian “proselytizing pamphlets,” but she told investigators she printed her own pamphlets and didn’t recognize the one that police found in the incendiary device, records show.
“RATHBUN believed it was possible that someone tried to frame him by placing his blood on the device,” said an FBI report summarizing the April 15 interview. “RATHBUN told Agents about an incident he had with an individual ... [he] had known since high school.”
Rathbun indicated that the associate had recently come to his home with another person, and that Rathbun “ran out of his house with a baseball bat and smashed” the associate’s car, the FBI report said. And, Rathbun told authorities, the associate had since been calling him seeking payment for damages to the vehicle.
But Rathbun, the report said, “refused to get into the details of why” the associate “was coming over to his house, nor why he reacted the way he did” with the bat.
Rathbun also said he’d been involved in a March incident at a Quality Inn in Chicopee in which he “hired a prostitute and suggested that he had damaged the room, as his room was only supposed to cost $50, but ended up costing him $350,” according to the report.
The document said Rathbun, who’s prescribed methadone for substance issues, “stated, that even in light of his two violent/erratic incidents in the past two months, that he did not believe it was possible that he could have used drugs to the point where he blacked out, placed the explosive device, and forgot that he did it.”
His trial is tentatively scheduled for Nov. 9, though legal filings indicate that “due to the court’s trial docket, the case may be actually called to trial on any day during the two weeks following.”
Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.