A Washington State man was accused on Wednesday of helping to plot and carry out the bombing of a California fertility clinic that killed one person and damaged buildings on several city blocks last month.
The man, Daniel Park, 32, was charged in a federal criminal complaint with providing material support to terrorists. He was arrested late Tuesday at Kennedy Airport after arriving from Poland, said Bill Essayli, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California.
Mr. Park is accused of scheming to blow up the Palm Springs clinic, American Reproductive Centers, with Guy Edward Bartkus, a 25-year-old California man who officials say executed the bombing.
The two men, federal prosecutors say, targeted the clinic because of their shared belief in “anti-natalism,” a fringe ideology whose adherents consider human procreation unethical. They plotted for more than a year to carry out the attack, consulting an A.I. chatbot that helped them devise recipes for explosives, according to prosecutors.
Mr. Park made an initial appearance in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Wednesday before Magistrate Judge Cheryl L. Pollak. She ordered that he be detained and sent to California for the remainder of his case.
Facing up to 15 years in prison if convicted, he wore a green T-shirt with the words “fight like Ukrainians” on it as well as a logo with the Ukrainian flag’s yellow and blue colors. What appeared to be a white bandage was wrapped around one of his hands.
Mr. Bartkus, of Twentynine Palms, Calif., bombed the Palm Springs clinic on May 17, according to officials. The clinic offers treatments like in vitro fertilization and egg freezing.
He died in the blast, which also injured four people, officials said. Described as having “nihilistic ideations,” he caused the explosion by detonating his Ford Fusion, which was parked near the clinic, according to federal law enforcement authorities.
“I would be considered a pro-mortalist,” Mr. Bartkus said in an audio clip, before detonating his car. “Let’s make the death thing happen sooner rather than later in life.”
Mr. Bartkus said that I.V.F. was “kinda the epitome of pro-life ideology” and that by bombing the clinic he would be “causing destruction” and “possibly death,” according to the complaint charging Mr. Park.
Mr. Park started buying large quantities of ammonium nitrate in October 2022, the complaint says. In May, days before the attack, he paid to ship 90 pounds of the material to Mr. Bartkus, the complaint said.
For two weeks starting in late January, Mr. Park stayed with Mr. Bartkus and his family in Southern California, where the two men ran “experiments” in an adjacent garage. After the attack, investigators searched Mr. Bartkus’s home and recovered chemicals that are often used to create homemade bombs, as well as “multiple recipes for explosives.”
Investigators also determined that Mr. Park and Mr. Bartkus had quizzed an A.I. chatbot on the best ways to concoct ammonium nitrate fuel oil, a commonly used explosive.
“I agree that exploring fractions of diesel for optimization could theoretically yield meaningful insights into ANFO performance,” the bot responded in one exchange, referring to the explosive.
Four days after the attack, Mr. Park bought a plane ticket in cash and flew to Poland, Vincent Chiappini, a federal prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office for New York’s Eastern District, said in court on Wednesday.
When the Polish authorities made contact with Mr. Park in order to detain him, he tried to harm himself, according to the complaint. He was then deported to the United States, officials said.
Anti-natalism gained popularity after David Benatar, a South African philosopher, wrote a book in 2006 arguing that existence is a form of harm.
“You’re stuck between having been born, which was a harm, but also not being able to end the harm by taking your own life, because that is another kind of harm,” Mr. Benatar said in an interview with The New York Times.
Mr. Park, like Mr. Bartkus, apparently took that ideology a step further. According to a family member who was interviewed by the F.B.I., he held not just anti-natalist beliefs, but “pro-mortalist” beliefs dating back to high school, the complaint says.
In 2016, according to the complaint, Mr. Park posted a message on social media in which he spoke positively about anti-natalism and tried to recruit followers to the ideology. “When people are lost and distraught, death is always an option,” he wrote.
In April, a month before the attack, Mr. Park responded to a question he was asked on social media about whether he would press a button that would wipe out a tribe of people and “speed up the process of extinction of life on Earth.”
“Yes,” he wrote.
Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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