While I believe this was never quite legally confirmed, the arsonist was presumably the then- Chair of the public policy department at American University who was planning a heist of prescription drugs to sell to students— when he was arrested, they found 5000 pills in his apartment— and...
I remembered it was the AU prof, but I didn't know the prescription drugs part of the story! My goodness.
Wow. My Dad ( Tracy B. Strong) I remember assumed at the time it was some sort of political protest or an echo of apparently the 1973 APSA shenanigans, so I ‘m glad the truth finally came out.
…the what now
I'm hung up on the selling drugs to students part. Was he doing that routinely?
I had totally forgotten this. Gotta love AU.
why is this not a Coen Brothers movie yet
the heist plan involved setting small fires to distract emergency response. He apparently used APSA as (so to speak) an experiment to test the response times of the firefighters. (He was arrested and convicted for a subsequent round of experimental arsons, but IIRC not for the APSA round.)