Details slowly started to emerge Monday about the two young men charged over the weekend with trying to detonate homemade bombs outside Gracie Mansion, apparently aimed at a protest billed as “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City, Stop New York City Public Muslim Prayer.” According to Police Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch, after their arrest both expressed support for the Islamic State, the extremist group also known as ISIS that remains widely influential even as it has lost power in the Middle East.
The Police Department has not yet released information about the contents of the two men’s cellphones or computers, or about how they might have come to identify with an extremist group or ideology.
A lawyer for Emir Balat, the high school student who was caught on video lighting a homemade bomb and tossing it toward the demonstrators, said he thought the two men did not know each other before last weekend. “They’re strangers, as far as I know,” the lawyer, Mehdi Essmidi, said.
Mr. Balat, 18, is a senior at Neshaminy High School in Langhorne, Pa., the lawyer confirmed. Ibrahim Kayumi, 19, the other man arrested, graduated from Council Rock North High School in Newtown, Pa., in 2024.
Outside the family homes of the two men on Monday, neighbors expressed surprise that the teenagers they knew could have been involved in violence 100 miles away. Both live in well-maintained, ethnically diverse suburbs of Philadelphia in Bucks County, in new middle- or upper-middle-class developments carved out of what was once rural farmland.
At Mr. Balat’s family home in Langhorne, a woman wearing a hijab answered the door but politely declined to speak to a reporter. A half-dozen pairs of shoes sat outside the door, a sign of a gathering inside.
A neighbor who declined to give her name described the Balats as a very kind family, adding that she was shocked at the news of the Gracie Mansion incident.
Mr. Balat’s father, Selahattin Balat, a Turkish native who was granted asylum by the United States in 1998, became a legal permanent resident in 2010 and a citizen in 2017.
Mehmet Isak, a former president of the Turkish American Muslim Cultural Association of Bucks County, said he knew the elder Mr. Balat from the Turkish mosque in nearby Levittown, and believed him to be a “good man, a good businessman.”
The mosque and the local Turkish American community, he said, had no connection to violent extremism.
“In our community, we would never, ever support these kinds of things,” Mr. Isak said of the events in New York. “We wouldn’t want that in our congregation.”
The congregation itself has been subject to some bigotry: News reports of a planned expansion of its mosque last year drew a rash of anti-Muslim sentiment on social media, including one comment that suggested it be torn down and a church built instead.
At Mr. Kayumi’s family home, in a subdivision of multimillion-dollar houses in Newtown Township, 20 minutes away in a more affluent part of Bucks County, a Mercedes S.U.V. sat parked in front of the three-car garage.
Mr. Kayumi’s parents emigrated from Afghanistan and became United States citizens more than a decade ago, according to published reports. Over the weekend, Mr. Kayumi’s father, Khayer Kayumi, told The New York Times that they became worried about their son on Saturday when he did not come home.
“If he’s going to be five minutes late, he calls,” Mr. Kayumi said. He said the family had been scouring parking lots, looking for him and fearing the worst.
“Maybe he had killed himself,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going on.”
In police custody, the younger Mr. Kayumi said he was affiliated with ISIS and had watched ISIS propaganda on his phone, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court. He said his actions on Saturday were “partly inspired by ISIS,” according to the complaint.
Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
John Leland is a reporter covering life in New York City for The Times.
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