A U.S. Army veteran has been convicted for attempting to bomb a Long Beach rally as part of a conspiracy that targeted several locations in Southern California including Long Beach, the Santa Monica Pier, Huntington Beach and Los Angeles freeways.
Mark Steven Domingo, 28, of Reseda, was found guilty of providing material support to terrorism and attempting to use of a weapon of mass destruction this week according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He faces a statutory maximum sentence of life in prison.
Domingo was arrested in April of 2019 after authorities began monitoring his online activity due to posts about gathering materials to build a bomb and planning to carry out attacks on Christians, Jews and police officers as retribution for the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand. After considering several targets, including the Santa Monica Pier, he settled on a plan to detonate a bomb at a white nationalist rally.
Domingo, who returned from a deployment in Afghanistan in 2013, unknowingly worked with an FBI informant to recruit a bomb-maker into his scheme.
“Domingo then purchased and provided to the confederate and the bomb-maker – who in fact was an undercover law enforcement officer – several hundred 3½-inch nails to be used as shrapnel for the bombs. Domingo specifically chose those nails because they were long enough to penetrate organs in the human body,” said DOJ Spokesman Thom Mrozek.
In April of 2019, he drove his confederate and the undercover officer to Long Beach to scout the location he planned to attack. While there, Domingo discussed finding the most crowded areas so he could kill the most people. Later that month he received what he thought were two live bombs, but were actually inert explosive devices delivered by an undercover law enforcement officer. He was arrested that same day with one of the bombs in his hands.
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