Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes:

Around two in the morning on April 13th, an out-of-work car mechanic named Cody Balmer climbed over a metal perimeter fence outside the Pennsylvania governor’s residence. In a backpack, he’d brought a sledgehammer and several Molotov cocktails, which he’d made by pouring gasoline siphoned from a lawnmower into Heineken bottles. It took just a few seconds for Balmer to cross a small, well-kept courtyard and reach the south side of the building, a twenty-nine-thousand-square-foot Georgian mansion overlooking the Susquehanna River. He used the sledgehammer to shatter a first-floor window of the state dining room, which housed a Steinway piano, then lit a Molotov cocktail and threw it inside.

It was the first night of Passover. Hours earlier, the governor, Josh Shapiro, had led a seder, sitting in the middle of a long rectangular table in the dining room, surrounded by his wife, three of their children, his three siblings, and several nieces and nephews. Many of the guests were spending the night; as Balmer broke another window in the dining room and climbed inside, about twenty people were asleep upstairs. He lit a second Molotov cocktail and smashed it on the floor. Almost immediately, the tablecloths in the room, which was still set up for the seder, caught fire.

On one side of the room, Balmer encountered a locked double door, the only barrier between him and the rest of the house. He would later tell police that, if he had encountered Shapiro, he would have attacked him with the sledgehammer. But, when he tried kicking the doors open, the lock held. The fire, meanwhile, was spreading rapidly. Balmer broke a third window and fled. He’d been inside for a little more than a minute.

“I woke up to a bang on the door,” Shapiro later said. “It was a state trooper, telling us that there was a fire, and we needed to evacuate immediately.” Shapiro and his wife, Lori, roused the rest of the household. “We ran out of the home just as the first responders ran in,” Shapiro said.

That week, details about Balmer, who had turned himself in the day after the fire, began to accumulate. He had previously been charged with assault, after his wife told police that he had attacked her and two of his sons, and a bank had threatened to foreclose on his house. His mother told reporters that Balmer had gone “off his meds” and checked into a hotel. She had called multiple police departments in an effort to get him help. Balmer, shortly after leaving the governor’s residence, had called 911 himself. “Governor Josh Shapiro needs to know that Cody Balmer will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,” he told the operator. Balmer had no known history of pro-Palestinian activism, nor any obvious association with the Palestinian cause. Still, he told the operator, “Our people have been put through too much by that monster. All he has is a banquet hall to clean up.” [Continue reading…]