US Massive explosion reported at Arlington home after suspect fires flare gun during police search

Massive explosion reported at Arlington home after suspect fires flare gun during police search
FOX 5 DC (archive.ph)
By FOX 5 DC Digital Team
2023-12-04 04:24:28GMT

ARLINGTON, Va. - Community members in an Arlington neighborhood were told to shelter in place Monday night after police say a flare gun was fired inside a home, causing a massive explosion.

Arlington County police put out the alert just after 8:15 p.m., saying the incident occurred in the 800 block of N. Burlington Street in the Bluemont neighborhood.

Police say as officers were attempting to execute a search warrant at the residence, a suspect fired several rounds inside the home, which led to the explosion.

Neighbor Alex Wilson told FOX 5 this came after an hours-long standoff with the suspect. He said he took notice of what was happening around 4 p.m. when police rolled up to his neighbor's home. Wilson said as time went on, it was clear the situation was only getting worse.

"Three hours later, at least, we saw the SWAT truck arrive and when the SWAT truck arrived you know, you’re like, ‘oh things are escalating at that point,'" Wilson said.

Neighbors were immediately told to avoid the area as a large response came from Arlington Fire and police.

The flames took hours to put out. Arlington Fire and EMS said the fire was controlled around 10:30 p.m. and crews were only battling small spot fires by that time.

Officials say only minor injuries were reported but it's not yet clear how many people may have been involved. The explosion knocked the power out for several homes in the neighborhood.

Spoiler: Previous Version

ARLINGTON, Va. - Community members in an Arlington neighborhood are being told to shelter in place after police say a flare gun was fired inside a home, causing a massive explosion.

Arlington County police put out the alert just after 8:15 p.m., saying the incident occurred in the 800 block of N. Burlington Street in the Bluemont neighborhood.

Police say as officers were attempting to execute a search warrant at the residence, a suspect fired several rounds inside the home, which led to the explosion.
Arlington Fire and EMS said units are at the scene working to put out the fire.

They tell neighbors to expect a large fire department and police response and ask everyone to avoid the area as officials continue to investigate the circumstances of the explosion.

This is a developing story. Check back with FOX 5 for updates.

https://twitter.com/connormaj/status/1731853442056929425 (archive.ph)
catbox if the site is acting up: https://files.catbox.moe/y3px8m.mp4

 

[WelperHelper99]

Apparently they found as yet unidentified human remains. So the crazy Chinaman is presumed barbequed.

The chink went out like a motherfucker straight our of a 80s blockbuster. Best words I can give him

 

[RodgerDodger]

And because someone earlier mentioned it being effective to shoot someone with one because it's magnesium... Yeah, maybe, if you got lucky and it stuck in their clothes. In practice they tend to bounce off targets. They'll go through very thin stuff, but anything with much mass or resistance and they just tend to bounce off. And that's if you can even hit them. Beyond about 5 feet that's a crapshoot. Flare guns aren't actually guns. There's effectively no barrel. It's sort of like trying to shoot a roman candle, it just sort of gets flung outward away from the gun, but not with any accuracy. As someone I watched once put it, you're just trying to hit the sky, and that's a hard target hard to miss.

That's what has me looking at this and staring dumbfounded at the media. "Oh he fired a flare gun". Yeah... unless he somehow got his hands on an artillery Star Shell, it's not going to go through the roof like that. And the whole house isn't going to explode. If you shoot your standard marine flare in an enclosed space it will start ricocheting off walls and give you a very bad day, in that confined space. I keep watching that house go up, and that's a strange explosion. Lots of fire. Not a huge amount of kinnetic energy. I mean the cops at the front door were pretty much unharmed. If this was something like fertilizer they would be finding the cops teeth in the next county. It's just a huge blossom of fire as the walls and roof sail skyward. Maybe he filled the house with gas before pulling the trigger?

But the lack of any curiosity about those sorts of details by the media is really astounding.

 

[clipartfan92]

I am probably late to this, but it says "Archive not found", the videos however are still viewable by link.

I'll have to email the admins there and see if there's a workaround they can incorporate to fix that. Thanks for mentioning it.

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

Or he filled the house with natural gas, either accidentally or intentionally. Natural gas explosions can rip a house apart.

Just judging by how much open, visible flame was produced that's my guess. If that is the case, as well, the schizo probably did a flip onto the end of a barallel after leaving the stove on and a lit flame. The flames suggests there was an imperfect ratio of fuel and oxidizer suggesting deflaguration rather than detonation.

Hope I'm correct, I'm 100% so far on big booms such as the boston bombers being pressure/pipe bombs based on the white smoke, and the beirut explosion being a nitrate based detonation based on the noxious cloud.

 

[HarveyMCR]

Apparently they found as yet unidentified human remains. So the crazy Chinaman is presumed barbequed.

That dude is 100% vaporized

 

[Drain Todger]

Exploding your house so the Feds can't search it: extreme, crazy, but undeniably based.

Based schizo actually pulled a Jerry Fletcher IRL, my god.

 

[WonderWino]

Flare guns aren't legally considered firearms in any state, they are really only capable of shooting flares, which look a lot like modified shotgun slugs.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe they think he fired the flare out of a shotgun, which might work, but I don't know.

Perhaps he used a flare to go full waterworld:

That said, chris chan should be grateful his house didn't run on gas or this could easily have been the fate he and barb had during the fire

The only thing that really surprises me about the whole thing is this guy didn't wait until the feds were in the house to blow it. Its not like he had anything else to lose at that point. Can you imagine the utter shitshow that would have led to? The feds and the media would have had a field day with screeching about terrorists, probably would have tried to claim he was a trump supporter or planning another capitol riot

 

[vomitusdeux]

That said, chris chan should be grateful his house didn't run on gas or this could easily have been the fate he and barb had during the fire

The irony being that would have been the good ending for both of them.

 

[Snekposter]

Did he fill the house with propane or natural gas first?

That's the assumption. Easy enough to disconnect a line or turn on a gas stove and then extinguish the flame but keep the gas going...

Wait a minute, this is all just a false flag to further demonize everyone's gas stoves. "See how dangerous natural gas in houses is! Ban gas now!"

 

[clipartfan92]

Easy enough to disconnect a line

Just remember if you're working on your gas lines, it's the same as plumbing, the threads are reversed so it's actually righty loosey instead of the standard lefty loosey. Please don't use this knowledge to blow up any feds raiding your house.

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

Just remember if you're working on your gas lines, it's the same as plumbing, the threads are reversed so it's actually righty loosey instead of the standard lefty loosey. Please don't use this knowledge to blow up any feds raiding your house.

Too much work, just turn on the burners and blow out the oven pilot. I just read, somewhere in here, that this is a duplex. Glad to know civilians were not harmed in it. Considering my brush with landlords I'd wager all of the appliances in there are running on tech from the 70's. One of the apartments I had to live in up North East had the water heater's control box catch fire after a repairman "fixed" it. Lesson learned, choose your apartments wisely and trust the negative reviews; in my experience, they've proven to be the most honest.

 

[TowinKarz]

Just judging by how much open, visible flame was produced that's my guess. If that is the case, as well, the schizo probably did a flip onto the end of a barallel after leaving the stove on and a lit flame. The flames suggests there was an imperfect ratio of fuel and oxidizer suggesting deflaguration rather than detonation.

Good eye, was thinking the same thing, especially because the person filming from what can't be more than 1,500 feet away isn't knocked off their feet as you'd expect from a nice, crisp, overpressure wave from a stack of actual explosives going off.

If that had been ANFO, you'd get one or two frames of a flash, then a roaring kaboom and the camera either is now filming a carpet full of shattered window glass, or the black darkness of it's own smashed lenses.

That was more like a fast (but as far as explosives go, slow) burn of flammable gas indeed, with the entire house being more peeled-apart than exploded. In fact, it only looks like 1/2 of the house went up in the initial blast, the rest collapsed as a consequence of not having anything structurally supporting it anymore.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

Only a fireball spell can level a house like that.

Explodio Demolitious!

 

[Drain Todger]

Based on what I'm seeing, it sounds to me like the schizo may have been onto something, or at least that he stirred up some glowie hornet's nest somehow with his ravings.



His YouTube account disappeared. Hell, even Archive.org went down and his archive on there disappeared, too. This shit is being memoryholed very, very quickly, as it always is when a suspect is involved in a shooting or bombing or something along those lines.

The videos on his YouTube account were archived by anons who were quick on the uptake, though. It's 1.2 gigs in a 7-part archive. I recommend grabbing them while you can. A quick perusal of the 16 vids in the archive shows that they are sequences of screencaps of some wild schizo court documents and social media postings, as well as him sending harassing emails to then-US Attorney in the Western District of New York, James P. Kennedy, claiming that the FBI agents who showed up at his door were actually MSNBC reporters, et cetera. They're chock-full of wild Francis E. Dec-level paranoia. Legal briefs with like a million John Does with hilarious codenames for them, stuff like that.

 

[Richard Freeman]

His second channel is also gone, as far as I can tell he only had these 2 shorts on that channel.

 

[Lichen Bark]

Pictured Below:
James Yoo waiting for the glowies to enter his living room, holding his detonator after a valiant attempt at stopping the creation of Skynet.

Police bodycam of the incident:

I need AI to rotoscope his face into this video...

 

[Super-Chevy454]

The chink went out like a motherfucker straight our of a 80s blockbuster. Best words I can give him

Indeed, he know how to go out with a bang.

 

[clipartfan92]

Arlington man whose house exploded had history of rambling lawsuits
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Salvador Rizzo, Omari Daniels, and Jasmine Hilton
2023-12-06 02:15:34GMT

Before an explosion leveled James W. Yoo’s two-story duplex in Arlington County, Va., during a police standoff Monday night — before the dwelling erupted in a gargantuan fireball, apparently with Yoo inside — the 56-year-old homeowner had gone through a contentious divorce, had a history of alcohol abuse and filing rambling lawsuits, and had repeatedly complained to the FBI, to no avail, that he was a fraud victim, according to authorities and court records.

Yoo, who described himself in some of his many court cases as a former security specialist for telecommunications companies, was rarely seen around his neighborhood in the county’s Bluemont area, residents said. Then, late Monday afternoon, someone began firing projectiles from “a flare-type gun” in the 800 block of North Burlington Street, police said. When officers arrived at Yoo’s home about 5 p.m., they were met with gunfire, and a barricade situation ensued.

Shortly before 8:30 p.m., an enormous blast from inside the home, heard for miles around, reduced the place to splinters and rained debris all over the block. Police said a person’s remains later found in the rubble are presumed to be Yoo’s. They said no one else was seriously hurt and that the cause of the explosion has not been determined.

Neighbors said Yoo recently seemed to be getting ready to move out. Bags were piled atop his garage roof, they said. They said Yoo almost never interacted with others on the block. In fact, they said, they rarely set eyes on him.

“If you saw a human in that house, it would be a miracle,” said Sharney Wiringi, 45, who walked his dog daily by the home at 844 N. Burlington St. Referring to Yoo, he said, “Nobody in the neighborhood really knew him.”

Yoo, who inherited the house from his parents, stated in unsuccessful legal filings over the years that he had long suffered from alcoholism. Arlington County Police Chief Andy Penn said at a news briefing Tuesday that the investigation of the explosion was ongoing and that the Virginia medical examiner’s office had yet to positively identify the person whose remains were found.

The incident began before 5 p.m. Monday, when police received a call about possible shots fired on Yoo’s block. It was “a flare-type gun,” Penn said, and more than 30 projectiles had been fired. As Yoo barricaded himself inside the home, authorities obtained a search warrant to enter the property and look for weapons, Penn said. Firefighters evacuated neighbors as a precaution.

The natural gas line to Yoo’s home was shut off before the explosion, Assistant Fire Chief Jason R. Jenkins told reporters.

When a tactical unit of police officers breached the front door, attempting to execute the search warrant, a person inside opened fire with a gun, Penn said. In an effort to flush him out, “officers began to deploy nonflammable, less-lethal chemical munitions to multiple areas within the residence where the suspect was believed to be hiding,” Penn said. But this was unsuccessful, and the officers retreated.

Ryan Gill, 41, who lives on a nearby street, was reading a bedtime story to his 6-year-old son around 8 p.m. when he heard what sounded like fireworks, he said. Eventually he recognized the noise as gunshots. Then, about 8:25 p.m., Gill said, his home shook and his family “could feel the shock waves.” When he walked outside to his neighbor’s yard, he could see flames and what was left of a house on an adjacent block.

Wiringi said debris landed on nearby roofs and that electrical power went out along the block. Emergency management officials said 10 to 12 surrounding homes were damaged by the blast.

“It just rocked our house,” said Suzanne Sundburg, 62, who lives a few blocks away and was working at home with her husband Monday afternoon when she started hearing “a strange thumping” that preceded the blaze.

At Tuesday’s briefing, Jenkins said investigators have not ruled out chemical munitions as a possible contributor to the explosion. David Sundberg, the No. 2 official in the FBI’s Washington Field Office, said Yoo had repeatedly contacted the bureau “via phone calls, online tips and letters over a number of years,” complaining of fraud. Sundberg declined to detail the complaints but said none of them prompted the FBI to open an investigation.

Court records show that Yoo and his ex-wife, Stephanie Yoo, had a contentious divorce that was finalized in 2018 and that James Yoo later tried to overturn. The couple had no children, according to a filing in the case. In 2020, Yoo was held in contempt of court for failing to distribute assets to his ex-wife by a court-ordered deadline.

A judge ordered Yoo to sell the Arlington property that exploded Monday by late October 2020 as part of the asset distribution in the divorce. No public record could be found indicating that a sale took place. Stephanie Yoo and a divorce attorney who represented her did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

Over the years, Yoo filed a battery of lawsuits in New York and Virginia, accusing lawyers, judges, doctors and relatives of conspiring to violate his rights. The defendants included his former wife, his sister, his former attorneys, the court officials who handled his divorce proceedings in Monroe County, N.Y., and a hospital in Rochester, N.Y., that treated him in 2015 for “acute alcohol withdrawal,” according to hospital notes quoted in Yoo’s lawsuit.

“Do not send anything to my private residential address again,” one of his former attorneys, Richard J. Bombardo of Syracuse, N.Y., warned Yoo in a 2019 email appended to one of his lawsuits. “If you do, I will immediately file a police report against you and seek an order of protection. Your behavior is extreme and outrageous and beyond all possible bounds of decency.”

Bombardo added: “If you come on my property, or you cause any third [party] to come on my private property, I will immediately file criminal trespassing charges against you. I cannot even believe that I am forced to give a criminal trespass warning to my own client. Former client that is.”

In an interview, Bombardo said Yoo’s divorce was stressful and “quite combative.” Bombardo declined to comment on Yoo’s mental health. “There are several court records that are public, and I’m sure you can draw inferences from them,” he said, adding, “My heart goes out to him and his family.”

In one lawsuit, Yoo said he had a history of “excessive overconsumption of alcohol throughout [his] life as early as the tenth grade.” When his then-wife took him to Rochester General Hospital in November 2015 while he was in withdrawal, she said she had found a suicide note that Yoo had written, according to hospital records quoted in Yoo’s lawsuit. He denied having written such a note or having suicidal thoughts and accused the hospital, his wife and sister of holding him there against his will.

Judges dismissed all of his claims and warned he would face sanctions if he continued to press “frivolous” lawsuits, which at times veered into conspiracy theories, tying his cases to former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Yoo claimed two men, including a New York Times reporter he had seen on MSNBC, showed up at his residence in March 2017 impersonating FBI agents and asked him to stop sending materials to federal prosecutors in New York.

On a YouTube channel, Yoo posted several videos that show screenshot after screenshot of legal documents related to his unsuccessful lawsuits and protracted divorce. In LinkedIn posts, Yoo accused the U.S. government of corruption and uploaded photos of a couple he said were his next-door neighbors in Arlington. He described them as “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” — after the film in which Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie played a spy couple — and claimed his neighbors were surveilling him.

“We are aware of concerning social media posts allegedly made by the suspect, and these will be reviewed as part of the ongoing criminal investigation,” Penn said.

Yoo stated that his mother’s death in 1992 after an extended stay in a hospital saddled him with more than $500,000 in debt, and that he was laid off from his job in 2003 as head of security for a telecommunications company, Global Crossing, that is no longer in business. Records show he sold a property in McLean, Va., for $1 million in 2021, after being ordered to do so by a judge in his divorce case.

In legal filings, Yoo stated that his father had been an adviser to a South Korean presidential candidate and that his mother had been a U.S.-based journalist reporting on Korean issues. In a 2016 email to his sister, included in one complaint, he indicated he was getting therapy but that it was “a long and slow process.”

Razzan Nakhlawi, Justin Jouvenal and Teo Armus contributed to this report.

 

[equinsu_ocha]

As the details, as vague as they are, start to emerge I'm quite convinced that this dude was taken out. Also I like revisiting to watch the house blow up tbh.

 

[George Lucas]

As the details, as vague as they are, start to emerge I'm quite convinced that this dude was taken out. Also I like revisiting to watch the house blow up tbh.

Why would they take someone out with a ridiculous Hollywood explosion that everyone will know about?