Investigators are combing through the writings of the 25-year-old man believed responsible for an explosion that ripped through a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, over the weekend.
The blast on Saturday gutted the American Reproductive Center, a fertility clinic in the desert city, and was powerful enough to leave the windows of nearby buildings along a palm tree-lined street shattered. None of the facility’s embryos were damaged.
Akil Davis, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, called it possibly the “largest bombing scene that we’ve had in southern California”.
“This was a targeted attack against the IVF facility,” Davis said Sunday. “Make no mistake: We are treating this, as I said yesterday, as an intentional act of terrorism.”
The FBI has identified Guy Edward Bartkus of nearby Twentynine Palms as a suspect in the attack. Bartkus died in the explosion.
They haven’t said if he intended to kill himself in the attack or why he chose the specific facility.
Authorities are working to learn more about Bartkus’ motives, but have said Bartkus has left behind nihilistic writings that indicated views against procreation, an idea known as anti-natalism.
Bartkus’ writings communicated “nihilistic ideations” that were still being examined to determine his state of mind, said Bill Essayli, a US attorney and top federal prosecutor in the area. In general, nihilism suggests that life is meaningless.
Bartkus appeared to hold anti-natalist views, which include a belief that it is morally wrong for people to bring children into the world. The clinic he attacked provides services to help people get pregnant, including in vitro fertilization and fertility evaluations.
Investigators are reportedly analyzing a website with an audio recording of a man saying he was going to bomb an IVF clinic. Bartkus’s estranged father, Richard Bartkus, told media he believed the audio was his son’s. He also told the New York Times that Bartkus, who was interested in toy rockets as a young boy, had burned down the family home while “playing with matches” when he was nine.
Some people with extreme anti-procreation views have a lack of purpose and a bleak feeling about their own lives “and they diagnose society as suffering in a similar way that they are”, said Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama. “Essentially, they feel like we’re all doomed, that it’s all hopeless.”
Bartkus tried to livestream the explosion, but the attempt failed, the FBI said.
Authorities haven’t shared specifics about the explosives used to make the bomb and where Bartkus may have obtained them.
Scott Sweetow, a retired ATF explosives expert, said the amount of damage caused indicated that the suspect used a “high explosive” similar to dynamite and TNT rather than a “low explosive” like gun powder.
Those types of explosives are normally difficult for civilians to access, but increasingly people are finding ways to concoct explosives at home, he said.
“Once you know the chemistry involved, it’s pretty easy to get stuff,” Sweetow said. “The ingredients you could get at a grocery store.”
The images of the aftermath also showed that the explosion appeared to blow from the street straight through the building and to the parking lot on the other side, something that could have been intentional or pure luck, Sweetow said. A part of the car was also blown through the building and landed in the back by a dumpster.
