The University of Central Florida student accused of threatening to kill his classmates by blowing up a campus building claims a misunderstanding about his anger over President Barack Obama’s planned troop surge in Afghanistan led to the major bomb scare.
New documents obtained by KnightNews.com show Cory Carr, a former marine studying thermodynamics and engineering at UCF, muttered comments that shutdown UCF’s Classroom 1 building and two parking garages in November, after reading how Obama was considering sending 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
“I became very frustrated over the thought of sending even more of my brothers overseas and how I wished the service men and women could be home for the holidays,” Carr, 32, wrote in an sworn affidavit explaining his side of the story.
READ: Carr’s full affidavit in PDF format | Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6
SEE VIDEO: UCF Police Chief Press Conference During Search For Explosives In Garage
SEE VIDEO: KnightNews.com Report From Classroom 1 Scene After Carr’s Arrest
LISTEN: KnightNews.com Reportring from Garage Scene During Explosives Search
SEE VIDEO: How Students Reacted When It Was Over
“I remember thinking out loud to myself, ‘I wish we would just bomb those people over there’ — referring to bombing Afghanistan instead of sending over another 40,000 American troops,” Carr’s affidavit states he said.
But two students swore to UCF police they heard Carr say something that would cause carnage much closer to home. They claimed Carr said, “There’s a bomb, it’s going to kill half the people in here,” according to the police report.
Carr insists, however, that he’s innocent — and that UCF administrators even now agree, finding him “not in violation” of making the threat during a student conduct hearing which could have resulted in his expulsion from school.
UCF officials could not confirm or deny that finding. In a statement, UCF spokesman Chad Binette said, “Privacy laws prevent us from commenting on any specific student conduct case.”
In an e-mail to KnightNews.com, Carr said he wanted to tell fellow students that he is not a threat.
“I would like the UCF community to know that UCF did see that I was NOT in violation of this false bomb threat,” he wrote. “If you would like to write a story I would like to interview with you so that UCF community can really know what happened that night.”
KnightNews.com staff then contacted Carr by phone, but he declined to do an on camera interview, citing concerns from his attorney, Richard Hornsby, that publicity might prompt prosecutors to more aggressively pursue all charges instead of perhaps dropping them.
Tensions about threats were high when Carr was arrested on November, 10, as it unfolded just about one week after the Ft. Hood massacre and Orlando’s mass shooting in downtown.
After KnightNews.com broke word of UCF’s bomb scare that day, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office bomb squad, FBI agents and TV news trucks swarmed onto campus, as officials used a water cannon to blast open Carr’s vehicle in a parking garage and search it for explosives. None were found, although a bomb sniffing dog did alert on his vehicle, police said.
Carr wrote that he did “sarcastically” tell police, “Yeah, I have a crack pipe and a bomb in my back pocket,” after they “pinned me against against the car and asked me if I ‘had any guns, drugs or paraphernalia, or bombs in my pockets that they needed to know about before they searched me.'”
His affidavit went on to suggest even more strongly that he was not happy with his treatment by police after his take down.
“I then sat, embarrassed and handcuffed, in a police car for approximately thirty (30) minutes while my fellow UCF students and classmates looked on and took pictures of me with their cell phone,” he wrote.
During a phone conversation with KnightNews.com staff, Carr blamed the professor for blowing what the two students claimed they heard Carr say out of proportion, however, the statement UCF released about the incident indicates those reporting the comments did the right thing.
“The safety of our campus community is our top priority,” Binette said. “We are pleased that students acted quickly to call 911 and that law enforcement responded immediately and effectively. The university also sent more than 700,000 combined e-mails and text messages to keep the campus community informed during the incident.”
As we did from the time we first broke this story, KnightNews.com will continue to lead the way with every new development on the bomb scare as Carr’s case now plays out in court.
