Bolivia Bomb Suspect ‘Own Worst Enemy’

As a defiant youngster in rural California, he spat at a judge, spent years in juvenile lockups and psychiatric institutions and was suspected of blowing up a telephone booth.

As an adult, he decamped to South America, where he posted Internet messages seeking female companionship, became infatuated with a Uruguayan hairdresser 21 years his senior and was jailed for six months for bombing a bank in Argentina.

He described himself as a pagan high priest, a lawyer, a philosopher. He adopted the name of a literary vampire.

Finally, he ended up in the rough-and-tumble dynamite trade in Bolivia, distributing a racy promotional calendar that featured his girlfriend posing in the buff amid a cache of explosives.

But none of Triston Jay Amero’s previous misadventures compare to his current predicament: Amero, 24, and his Uruguayan companion are in custody in Bolivia facing murder charges in connection with bombings at two hotels that killed two people and wounded seven others last week in the capital, La Paz.

As grave as the blasts were, the matter escalated into an international incident when Bolivia’s outspoken president, Evo Morales, cited the possible involvement of a U.S. government eager to undermine his new socialist administration, which at times has been openly hostile to Washington.

“This American was putting bombs in hotels,” Morales told reporters. “The U.S. government fights terrorism, and they send us terrorists.”

U.S. officials dismissed any link to the bombings, and Bolivian investigators said the bomber may well have been mentally deranged or had vague “religious” motives.

At the center of this unlikely imbroglio is Amero, a paunchy, ponytailed, Internet-blabbing native of Northern California with sociopathic tendencies and a fierce rage against a system he views as victimizing him. He also has a thing for explosives.

“He was a troubled, probably fairly bright individual,” said Joseph Warchol, chief probation officer of El Dorado County in Northern California, where the teenage Amero first went astray of the law.

While Amero was in juvenile hall, Warchol recalled, he cut himself and scribbled threats on the wall in his own blood.

Amero’s rebel-without-a-cause fury aggravated the significance of relatively minor juvenile offenses. He peppered the California Youth Authority with nearly 20 lawsuits, assailing the “dread Court” and claiming his civil rights had been violated. He made constant threats to those in power, addressing menacing missives to his overseers and at one point spitting in the face of a juvenile judge -- an act he later ascribed to “political reasons.”

Said Warchol: “He was his own worst enemy.... He just had an uncontrollable mouth.”

Amero is a native of Butte County, a rural pastiche of farmland, forested hills and suburban settlements north of Sacramento.

In comments to authorities, Amero said he never advanced beyond second grade and was kicked out of elementary school. “I absolutely despise formal academic curriculum,” Amero declared in one statement. “I am a lone wolf, when it comes to studying.”

He said he was committed to a psychiatric institution as a youth and diagnosed with a sociopathic personality disorder, among other maladies.

By age 14, he was questioned as a suspect in the bombing of a phone booth outside a market in the small town of Magalia. Much of his teenage years were spent in and out of juvenile detention sites, where he declared a “war of wills” between himself and authorities.

“They wanted to change me in their image,” Amero said. “I knew that the only way ... I could get out of that kind of a program is to raise hell.”

Once freed, Amero launched his expansive Internet life, casting his online persona as a “Wiccan High Priest” fed up with “Bible-mongering Christians” and adept at discerning the metaphysical forces of good and evil.

Reviewing a treatise titled “Satanic Rituals,” Amero cautioned against emulating such rites, but agreed with the author’s assessment “on the state of society: In short, that most people tend to be scum.”

Despite such misanthropic tendencies, Amero apparently aspired to be a democratic representative of the people, seeking seats on both a school board and a fire protection panel in the November 2002 elections in El Dorado County. He finished last in both races, but received 4,360 votes in the hotly contested school board contest -- not a bad showing for someone who went by his “Lord Cactus” moniker on the ballot and described his occupation as “Clergyman/Process Server.”

Evidently soured on politics, Amero made good on his longtime vow to flee the United States. For reasons that remain opaque, he chose South America as his destination, despite his lack of Spanish-language skills. In this case, though, part of his motivation seemed wholly conventional: women.

In May 2004, he posted his particulars on a website frequented by visitors to Colombia, describing himself as “a political refugee from the United States” and explaining that he was seeking an “affectionate woman aged 18-25 for a possible long-term relationship.” He only encouraged replies from “those who speak good English.”

A month later on the site, he bemoaned his checkered love life, describing himself as “SUPER LOOSER OF THE SUPER LOOSERS” (sic). “The last time I was rejected by a woman (in Uruguay), I tried to kill Myself like six times in one Week,” he wrote.

By now, Amero had adopted his signature alternate identity, concluding his Web postings with the grandiose signoff Lestat Claudius de Orleans y Montevideo, declaring, “yes, that is my Real Name.”

Lestat is the name of the vampire in the dark novels of Anne Rice, a role played on screen by Tom Cruise in “Interview With the Vampire.”

At some point, Amero met Alba Ribeiro Acosta, the hairdresser who seems to have become his soul mate. In an entry presumably written by Amero on Wikipedia, a user-contributed online encyclopedia, Ribeiro is described as a “sacred woman” pregnant with the child of “Political Philosopher” Lestat.

The couple lived for a while in the tranquil Uruguayan river town of Fray Bentos, where, according to media accounts, Amero gained the nickname tira-bomba, or bomb-thrower, because of his propensity to toss small explosives at pigeons in a plaza.

Bolivian authorities say the two touched down in their country in May 2005 in the grim mining town of Potosi, where sticks of dynamite are sold openly in the markets.

Both were arrested when a bomb went off shortly after midnight on June 2, 2005, at a branch of Banco Macro in the Argentine town of La Quiaca, on the border with Bolivia. Police called it a botched attempt to get money from an ATM. Amero spent six months in jail; Ribeiro was judged not guilty.

Both returned to Bolivia in December 2005, authorities say, and apparently dedicated themselves to their dynamite business, selling liquor and fireworks as a sideline.

The motive for last week’s dynamite bombing at the pair of hotels remains unclear, authorities say. Police say Amero was also scouting other potential targets here in Bolivia, including the Chilean Consulate in La Paz.

The couple faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted in the hotel attacks. Police say Amero confessed to the crime, and his alleged accomplice screamed to reporters that her “husband” was to blame -- though it was unclear if the two were ever married.

“From what I know about the kid, he’s capable of doing it,” said Todd Riebe, district attorney in Amador County in Northern California. “He was a very disturbed kid.”

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McDonnell reported from Buenos Aires and Romney from San Francisco. Times staff writer Robert Salladay in Sacramento and Times researchers Andres D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires and John L. Jackson in Los Angeles, and special correspondents Oscar Ordonez in La Paz and Diego Elgart in Fray Bentos, Uruguay, contributed to this report.