Teen’s Disability Could Play Major Role in Bomb Plot Case

The story sounds familiar: Two teenagers are accused of plotting fatal revenge against classmates who teased them. Authorities say it could have become another in a series of schoolyard killings by outcast students.

But the case of two young men jailed on charges of conspiring to detonate a bomb at Burbank High School comes with a twist: One of them suffers from cerebral palsy and a learning disability. That has some advocates for the disabled questioning the young man’s prosecution. It also figures to play a major role in his courtroom defense.

But Burbank Police Department Det. Carl Costanzo said Friday the suspects carried out enough of a detailed plan to justify their arrest, regardless of any disabilities.

“When it all comes out, you’ll see how serious this is,” Costanzo said.

Patrick Longmire, 18, of Burbank, has a mild form of cerebral palsy that causes him to walk with a limp and has kept him in special education classes all his life, his attorney and relatives say. The lawyer and Longmire’s grandparents contend he lacks the mental ability to plan and execute an attack on his school.

“To conspire to plant or attempt to plant a bomb, he’d have to want to do it, as opposed to just saying, ‘Oh, I think I’ll blow up a federal building,’ ” attorney Charles Lindner said. “Patrick strikes me as extremely gullible and unsophisticated, not someone who’d really want to blow up a school.”

Longmire is charged along with Christopher Mannino, 18, of Van Nuys. Neither youth obtained the device they allegedly planned to detonate at the school, police said. They were arrested April 21 and remain in Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles on $1 million bail each.

Procedure Questioned

Peter Leone, director of the National Center on Education, Disability and Juvenile Justice, said criminal court often is the wrong place to deal with the likes of Longmire and Mannino.

“This comes down to a policy question,” he said. “As a nation, does it make sense for us to lock up a sizable portion of the least competent among us? If so, we need to have our eyes wide open and say this is how we do business in America.”

Comments made during secretly recorded conversations between Longmire and a 15-year-old Sun Valley girl led to the arrests, Burbank police said. The men are charged with conspiracy to injure people and attempted possession of a destructive device. If convicted, they could face a possible seven years in prison. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for Thursday in Burbank Superior Court.

Little is publicly known about Mannino, who was not a student at Burbank High. His attorney and relatives declined to speak about the case.

Longmire allegedly planned to blow up a math classroom because fellow students repeatedly taunted him about his disability, police said. A desire to strike back at bullying and belittling classmates has been cited as a motive in several campus shootings, including those at high schools in Littleton, Colo., and Santee.

Since those incidents, the National Institutes of Health published a report saying bullied students are more likely to be depressed and commit crimes. Many schools throughout California, including Burbank High, have adopted zero-tolerance policies--which usually means immediate expulsion--for students who make threats of violence.

But Leone said police and school officials are sometimes too quick to punish students, especially those with learning disabilities, for idle threats.

“Under the guise of zero tolerance, a lot of very foolish decisions are made by administrators that should know better,” said Leone, who is a professor of special education at the University of Maryland. “The juvenile and criminal justice systems are full of people with disabling conditions with so-called bad behavior defined by their poor social skills and poor judgment. This sounds like a really bogus case.”

Expert Urges Counseling, Treatment

He compared the Burbank case to that of Michael Gayles in Detroit last fall. After a long interrogation, Gayles, who was 18 but had the mental capacity of an 8-year-old, confessed to raping and killing a young girl. He later recanted and was cleared by DNA evidence. Gayles’ attorney has filed a $20-million lawsuit against Detroit police.

Diane Lipton, an attorney with the Disability Rights and Defense Fund in Berkeley, said authorities should offer counseling and other treatment to learning disabled students who are not a clear threat, rather than throw them in jail. Federal protections afforded special education students on campus should be extended to criminal cases, she said.

“If whatever he said could be part of his disability, then his disability is relevant in the criminal setting,” Lipton said. “The ultimate question is what did he do, not what did he say he would do.

“Throwing kids in jail doesn’t fix things or make school safer if nothing is done to provide intensive mental health care for the student.”

Girl’s Father Taped Calls

The district attorney’s office is basing its case on conversations taped in April by the Sun Valley girl’s father, who was concerned about her relationship with the boys.

Police said Mannino had asked his neighbor, Bobby McMullens, to make a bomb. McMullens, just off probation in connection with a small explosion he set off at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys in 1997, said he is out of the bomb business and refused.

McMullens, 19, had detonated a homemade bomb while a student at Birmingham. No one was injured. The bomb was among several devices he had made from plans outlined in “The Anarchist Cookbook,” McMullens said.

Early morning searches at the homes of Longmire, Mannino and McMullens turned up nothing but a battery with a wire attached to it in McMullens’ bedroom, police said. McMullens said he uses it in his new hobby, creating electronic gadgets.

Lindner plans to make Longmire’s disability the centerpiece of his defense. “Because of his disability, the police can’t establish that this was a serious threat,” he said.