An Ohio man, who played the Dagorhir RPG, delivered a bomb to seriously injure a woman’s boyfriend who rejected his romantic interest, officials said on Thursday.
Chesterton resident Clayton Alexander McCoy, 30, was arrested and charged with carrying an explosive device intended to injure and use a destructive device in a violent crime, according to a federal criminal complaint.
The victim was seriously injured after opening a package bomb inside his home in Manchester, Maryland, on October 30, officials said.
Shards hit his “chest, legs and front of (his) body” and the victim was not released from the hospital until November 17, although he is still in rehabilitation, said Dawn Machon, special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, in the complaint.
The victim’s girlfriend “has known McCoy for nearly seven years, since McCoy became a member of the Dagorhir community,” according to Machon.
Dagorhir is a live battle RPG with full contact hand-to-hand combat between players wearing medieval-style costumes and wielding weapons made of foam or other lightweight, harmless material.
Carroll County, Maryland, Sheriff Jim DeWees compared Dagorhir to Civil War reenactments.
McCoy and the victim’s girlfriend were close and even planned to camp together, according to the complaint. But around October 12, McCoy told her “he had feelings for her”, but she “didn’t feel the same way and was in a relationship” with the victim, wrote Machon.
After the explosion, the girlfriend told investigators that McCoy, “like most Dagorhir members, is proficient in wood and metal and may have the ability to create the device that exploded,” according to the complaint.
The victim also knew the suspect through Dagorhir, but “did not think McCoy would be responsible for this incident,” wrote Machon.
Data from Google and Verizon linked McCoy’s mobile devices to a nearly seven-hour journey that began in Chesterland at 1:24 am and ended in Manchester on October 30, federal investigators said.
McCoy’s devices entered the victim’s neighborhood at about 8:18 am that morning, just before the victim’s grandfather located the package addressed to his grandson outside his home at 8:30 am, federal officials said.
The records also showed that accounts linked to McCoy used Google Maps to request information from his Ohio home to the victim’s address in Maryland, about 360 miles away, the complaint said.
“We felt from the beginning, we believed that the device was not delivered by UPS, FedEx or the traditional party,” Sheriff DeWees told reporters on Thursday. “But, based on what we learned from the package, it probably had to be left by a third party, delicately, or by the individual who was trying to do harm.”
The timing of the bombing, just before the holiday, was particularly unnerving, officials said.
“We were arriving at Christmas and the fear of packages appearing on the balconies and exploding” made the neighbors nervous, said DeWees. “The family and the community there are extremely relieved that we reached that conclusion and the prison.”
During a brief virtual hearing before a federal judge in Youngstown, Ohio, on Thursday, McCoy did not contest his identity as the man named in the criminal complaint, paving the way for his transportation to Maryland, according to court records.
McCoy’s federal public defender refused to discuss the case on Friday and members of the suspect’s family did not immediately return messages asking for his comments.
McCoy was convicted in 2013 of sharing child pornography online with an undercover investigator, according to federal authorities and prosecutors in Geauga County, Ohio.
He was sentenced to four years in prison and forced to register with the state register of sex offenders. He is not currently on probation, so this federal prison has no impact on his previous Ohio case, the local prosecutor said.
