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SOPHIE LISTENED to Tony Patera whine about the media underplaying Swamp Man and his ominous load of thirteen handguns and $320,000. But there was little time to contemplate that bust before it was steamrolled by an unrelated Seattle Times story that became international fodder by noon.
The “Space Needle Bomber” who triggered a multimillion-dollar increase in northern border security and strained U.S.-Canadian relations this summer is not the Algerian terrorist federal agents originally suspected, but rather the troubled son of a wealthy couple from a posh Seattle suburb.
While U.S. authorities initially thought they had Shareef Hasan Omar in custody, they actually had Michael T. Rosellini, twenty-six, who grew up in Broadmoor, one of Seattle’s most affluent neighborhoods. His father is a vice president at CellularOne, his mother a programmer for Microsoft.
The mistaken identity was complicated by the twenty-three-day coma Rosellini endured after crashing his chased vehicle near Lyn-den on April 8. A subsequent search found a trunk full of explosives and three pounds of marijuana in the door panels.
Rosellini’s former friends and coworkers described a troubled rebel who loved pot and couldn’t hold a job. “He reinvented himself five times by the age of twenty-two,” said one old friend. He was a punk rocker, a Nietzsche reader who liked to detonate homemade bombs in abandoned quarries. More recently, he frequented a Seattle mosque to show his support for oppressed Muslims and to agitate his Presbyterian parents. Three photos showed his progression from a clear-eyed senior to a shaggy Alaska deckhand to a bearded Costco worker who, with his mother’s East Indian coloring, arguably resembled Shareef Hasan Omar, also pictured.
With the help of federal sources, the newspaper pieced together Rosellini’s recent exploits. A letter from a Seattle imam introduced him to leaders of a radical London mosque, but he was not embraced. He showed up next at Toronto mosques, exaggerating his ties to a London imam. Again he wasn’t trusted, though somehow he acquired fake identities—one of them was Hassan Mahjoub, a reputed alias for Omar—as well as explosives.
It was unclear what, if anything, he had targeted. The Space Needle map found in his vehicle turned out to be a tourist pamphlet. Rosellini’s unconscious fingerprint didn’t help much, because neither he nor Omar had ever been arrested and printed. The mystery, however, was over once he awakened. The FBI’s only public comment was that he was being held on drug, explosives and other potential charges, including conspiracy to levy war against the United States.
Friends were split on whether Rosellini was a con man, a believer or a wannabe, though none of them believed he was capable of harming anybody but himself.
Sophie watched the news sink in, nobody knowing quite how to react. A collective attention-deficit disorder took hold. People half-listened to one another, and even the prime minister couldn’t contain his smirk when asked if he found it ironic that Canada had caught so much hell from Washington, D.C., over someone who turned out to be a U.S. citizen.
Sophie received multiple copies of a Maclean’s cover story called “America’s Clumsy Wars on Drugs and Terror” in which former UBC professor Wayne Rousseau was quoted as saying, “The U.S. is the paranoid bully of the world. From where I’m sitting, it looks like Americans are being terrorized by themselves. It’s a new wrinkle on FDR’s famous apothegm: All we have to fear is … ourselves.”