The Copycat?

By Rachele Kanigel/San Jose and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

Hey bastards, reads the salutation in the June 1998 posting by Flame88610 on an anarchy message board. "First off, I have lost all hope that anyone belonging to the human race, including myself, is worthy of life, liberty or anything worth mentioning, other than extermination." Flame88610 then goes through a checklist of how to destroy the "United $tates of Amerikkka," including forming a terrorist band, acquiring "various weapons of mass destruction," the poisoning of the water supply, assassinations, bombings and, in an epilogue to apocalypse, turning the terrorists on themselves. Earlier, Flame88610 had asked about bombing "aquaducts [sic]...supplying water" to California's farmers. Would that bring the economy to its knees?

Last week the man allegedly behind the alias was arrested for plotting a smaller conflagration: bombing De Anza College in Cupertino, Calif. De Anza sophomore Al Joseph DeGuzman, 19, had apparently posed with his arms cache (guns as well as 60 explosive devices) and then sent the film off to be developed at a local drugstore. A clerk alerted the cops, who promptly entered the house where DeGuzman lived with his parents. They found an audiotape and time line describing how he would plant the bombs at 4:30 a.m. on Jan. 30 and then attack the cafeteria at 12:30 p.m. His parents said they had respected DeGuzman's privacy and never checked his room.

DeGuzman apparently idolized Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, calling the Columbine gunmen "the only thing that's real." But unlike them, DeGuzman was no outcast. "He worked so well with everybody," says his yearbook adviser Paul Ender. The weapons, friends say, are simply part of DeGuzman's fantasy. Attorney Craig T. Wormley says his client "has merely an innocent fascination with some of the items that were seized." But the charges of weapons possession and intent to injure may send him to prison for 106 years. He has pleaded not guilty.

--Reported by Rachele Kanigel/San Jose and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles