A Washington State man who had been charged with helping to plan and carry out a bombing of a fertility clinic in California last month that killed one person and damaged several buildings was found dead on Tuesday in a federal detention center in Los Angeles, the authorities said.
The man, Daniel Park, 32, was found unresponsive on Tuesday morning at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, according to a statement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Employees tried “lifesaving measures” and emergency workers took Mr. Park to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The bureau did not specify a cause of death in its statement and a spokesman for the bureau declined to elaborate on Tuesday. No employees or other people in the detention center were injured, the bureau said.
Mr. Park arrived at the detention center on June 13 after he was charged in a federal criminal complaint with providing material support to terrorists. He was accused of helping to plot and carry out the bombing of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, Calif., on May 17 with Guy Edward Bartkus, a 25-year-old man from California who officials say executed the bombing.
Mr. Bartkus died in the blast, which injured four other people and damaged several blocks in downtown Los Angeles, the authorities said.
Federal prosecutors say the two men’s shared belief in “anti-natalism,” a fringe ideology whose adherents consider human procreation unethical, motivated them to target the clinic, which offers treatments like in vitro fertilization and egg freezing.
The two planned the attack for more than a year, prosecutors said. Investigators found that part of their plotting involved asking an A.I. chatbot on the best ways to make ammonium nitrate fuel oil, a commonly used explosive.
Mr. Park started buying large amounts of ammonium nitrate in October 2022, the authorities said. Beginning in late January, he stayed with Mr. Bartkus in Southern California for two weeks to run “experiments,” according to the complaint charging him. In a search of Mr. Bartkus’s home after the attack, investigators recovered chemicals that are often used to make homemade bombs, as well as multiple recipes for explosives.
A few 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 this month.
Mr. Park tried to harm himself when the Polish authorities made contact to detain him, according to the complaint. He was then deported to the United States, officials said.
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