DNA, fingerprint match: How FBI uncovered bomb suspect’s ID

As Cesar Sayoc spun records at a Florida nightclub federal authorities zeroed in and secretly accumulated evidence.

Cesar Sayoc at a Trump rally in Melbourne, Florida, last year. Picture: Getty Images

In the hours before his arrest, as authorities zeroed in and secretly accumulated evidence, Cesar Sayoc was in his element: spinning classic and Top 40 hits in a West Palm Beach nightclub where he’d found work as a DJ in the past two months.

As he entertained patrons from a dimly lit booth overlooking a stage of dancers at the Ultra Gentlemen’s Club, where Halloween decorations hung in anticipation of a costume party, he could not have known that investigators that very evening were capitalising on his own mistakes to build a case against him.

Lab technicians had linked DNA on two pipe-bomb packages he was accused of sending prominent Democrats to a sample of on file with Florida state authorities. Or that a fingerprint match had turned up on a separate mailing the authorities say he sent.

Investigators scouring his social media accounts had found the same spelling mistakes on his online posts — “Hilary” Clinton, Deborah Wasserman “Shultz” — as on the mailings he’d soon be charged with sending.

In the end, prosecutors who charged Sayoc with five federal crimes on Saturday say the fervent Donald Trump supporter unwittingly left behind a wealth of clues, affording them a break in a coast-to-coast investigation into pipe-bomb mailings that spread fear of election-season violence. The bubble-wrapped manila envelopes, addressed to Democrats such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and intercepted from Delaware to California, held forensic evidence that investigators say they leveraged to arrest Sayoc four days after the investigation started.

“Criminals make mistakes so the more opportunities that law enforcement has to detect them, the greater chance they’re going to be able to act on that, and that appears to be what happened here,” said Aloke Chakravarty, who prosecuted the Boston Marathon bombing case.

Cesar Sayoc’s booking shot. Picture: AFP

It wasn’t always clear that such a break would come, at least not on Monday when the first package arrived: a pipe bomb delivered via mail to an estate in Bedford, New York, belonging to billionaire liberal activist George Soros.

That same day, Sayoc, still under the radar of law enforcement, retweeted a post saying, “The world is waking up to the horrors of ­George Soros”.

Additional packages followed, delivered the next day for Clinton and Obama and after that to the cable network CNN, Obama attorney-general Eric Holder, former vice-president Joe Biden and other Democratic targets of conservative ire. Each delivery created more unease. But together they also provided more leads for the FBI, which mined each pipe bomb for clues at a specialised laboratory in Quantico, Virginia.

As the packages rolled in, technicians hit a breakthrough: a fingerprint and DNA left on a package sent to representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat and one of the intended pipe bomb recipients, and DNA on a piece of pipe bomb intended for Obama. In addition, his social media posts that traffic in online conspiracy theories, parody accounts and name-calling include some of the same misspellings as were noticed on the 13 packages he was charged with sending.

The clues, authorities say, led them to a 56-year-old amateur body builder and former stripper with a long criminal history who’d previously filed for bankruptcy and appeared to be living in his van, showering on the beach or at a local fitness centre. He drove a van plastered with stickers supporting Trump, criticising media outlets and showing rifle crosshairs over Clinton and filmmaker Michael Moore. He was pictured at a Trump rally in Melbourne, Florida, in February last year.

Sayoc is scheduled to make his first court appearance tomorrow.

AP