An Illinois man with a long history of mental illness has been charged with plotting to blow up dozens of churches after a hotel maintenance worker in Oklahoma spotted the makings of Molotov cocktails in a trash bin and alerted police. 
 
 This undatedphoto provided by the Ottawa County (Okla.) Sheriff Department shows Gregory Arthur Weiler II. Prosecutors have filed charges against the Illinois man accused of plotting to bomb nearly 50... (Associated Press) 
 
 Gregory Arthur Weiler II, 23, of Elk Grove Village, Ill., has been charged under a strict Oklahoma anti-terrorism law put in place after the federal building bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995. The law makes terrorism hoaxes a crime as well as any effort to plan or help plan an act of terrorism. 
 
 Weiler was arrested Thursday after a worker at a motel in Miami, Okla., spotted bottles and other suspicious items in a garbage bin, according to a police affidavit. 
 
 Officers found bomb-making materials in Weiler's room along with torn bits of paper that, when assembled, contained directions for making Molotov cocktails, a list of 48 local churches, a hand-drawn map of the churches, and an outline of a plan to plant bombs. 
 
 Weiler has been held without bond on charges of threatening to use an explosive or incendiary device and violating the Oklahoma Antiterrorism Act. Online court records indicate he has applied for a court-appointed attorney and is due in court on Oct. 22. 
 
 According to an affidavit filed by Det. Jeff Frazier, a maintenance worker alerted Miami police after noticing a pile of brown bottles with cloth wicks attached by duct tape in a trash bin at the Legacy Inn and Suites, which sits just off a major interstate. A funnel and 5-gallon red gasoline can also had been dumped in the bin. 
 
 While background checks were being done on the hotel's 18 guests, the maintenance worker accidentally walked into Weiler's room and saw Weiler with similar items and a Walmart receipt showing the purchase of other items, the affidavit said. 
 
 Police found pieces of paper in the trash with details of the plot, plans to videotape the bombings and the words: "Try to get away with it ... maybe a plan out of town?" 
 
 Weiler's family said he has a long history of mental illness, and Miami Police Chief George Haralson said his answers during questioning ranged from rambling to coherent. 
 
 Haralson said it wasn't clear whether Weiler posed a real threat to churches and the community. 
 
 "He had the means and the ability to carry this out," he said. "How does one assess the threat?" 
 
 Weiler's parents both committed suicide, and Weiler has battled drug addiction and "a lot of mental illnesses" that led to a suicide attempt in the eighth grade, said his cousin Johnny Meyers. 
 
 Weiler has been admitted to mental hospitals multiple times, but "with his medication, he was perfectly fine and functional," Meyers said. He said family members in suburban Chicago believe Weiler must have stopped taking his medication and planned to go to Oklahoma to see him. 
 
 Meyers, whose parents cared for Weiler and his siblings, said his cousin had been out of touch for several years after leaving Illinois. 
 
 A pastor at a homeless shelter operated by a church in suburban Kansas City, Mo., said Weiler lived there for about six months within the past year. 
 
 Doug Perry said Weiler showed no violent tendencies and was active in the group's food pantry and various ministries, but he was clearly troubled. Among other things, he blamed himself for his parents' deaths, Perry said. 
 
 "I knew he was in a bad place," the minister said. He said he last saw Weiler about three months ago, when he left to take a roofing job in Houston. 
 
 "We really, really tried hard to love Greg and put up with his sort of sullen detachment," said Perry, pastor of The Church of Liberty in Liberty, Mo. "We poured a whole lot of love, a whole lot of time, a whole lot of prayer into trying to help him. I grieve because I really do love the kid." 
 
 Perry's church opposes denominational divisions and advocates for one Christian church in each community. 
 
 "We're supposed to be ONE Body and we're supposed to be about JESUS," its website says. "We're not supposed to split off and let theologies and philosophies of Man and personal grudges divide us into little pieces." 
 
 Perry said his beliefs are based on Christian teachings and his church does not advocate physical violence or the destruction of buildings. He said it would not support any plan Weiler had to harm churches. 
 
 "We've never advocated any kind of violence at all," he said. "This has nothing to do with physical violence." 
 
 Back in Oklahoma, youth pastor Chris Carlisle of First Baptist Church of Miami, said the community in the northeast corner of the state is usually very safe and Weiler's arrest hadn't caused great alarm. 
 
 "We haven't changed anything," Carlisle said. "We just pray for him that God would do a work in his life. We know that God has a different plan for his life." 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writer Don Babwin contributed to this story from Chicago. ||||| Story highlights Gregory Arthur Weiler II was arrested at a motel last week 
 
 Authorities found bomb-making materials and a handwritten journal 
 
 He is charged with threatening to use an explosive or incediary device 
 
 He also is charged with violating the Oklahoma Anti-Terrorism Act 
 
 Authorities in Oklahoma have arrested and charged a 23-year-old man who they say planned to blow up 48 area churches. 
 
 Gregory Arthur Weiler II was arrested last week at a motel in Miami, Oklahoma, according to Ben Loring, first assistant district attorney for Ottawa County. 
 
 Authorities were tipped off to the plot by workers at the motel about 90 miles northeast of Tulsa. One discovered a duffel bag full of Molotov cocktails near the outside trash, while a room service employee reported suspicious items in Weiler's room, said Loring. 
 
 Police searched the room and allegedly found various documents outlining his plan to set off bombs at 48 churches in and around Miami. 
 
 Among the documents were a list of churches, a hand-drawn map with the churches grouped and circled, instructions for making Molotov cocktails and a handwritten journal, said Loring. Some of the documents had been torn up and needed to be assembled. 
 
 Loring said one of the journal entries read as follows: "Self-Promote for the next 4 years while beginning list of goals written out in Oklahoma having to do with destroying and removing church buildings from U.S., a tiny bit at a time -- setting foundation for the years to follow." 
 
 Authorities also recovered 50 brown glass bottles with cloth wicks attached by duct tape, a funnel and a 5-gallon gasoline can, Loring said. 
 
 Weiler was charged Friday with threatening to use an explosive or incendiary device and violating the Oklahoma Anti-Terrorism Act. He is being held without bond. 
 
 Weiler appeared in court Monday and was appointed representation -- attorneys Andrew Meloy and Daniel Giraldi, said Loring. Both work at the Hartley Law Firm. A woman answering the phone there said that the office would have no comment. 
 
 The suspect, who is from Illinois, is expected to appear in court next on October 22. 
 
 FBI using social media in hunt for 'wanted terrorist' 
 
 French police kill terror suspect, arrest 10 ||||| When I saw 23-year-old Jerry Drake Varnell’s mugshot on my Facebook newsfeed, I didn't know there'd be a single degree of separation between us. 
 
 Federal authorities arrested Varnell early Saturday, Aug. 12. He's charged with plotting an attack on one of the largest banks in downtown Oklahoma City. He also wanted to blow up a Bank of America data center in Dallas and the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, D.C. His method: detonate what FBI officials say he thought was a vehicle bomb similar to the one Timothy McVeigh used in 1995 to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. McVeigh's attack killed 168 people. 
 
 FBI officials claim Varnell had been planning his bombing since December 2016. He met with an undercover FBI agent in June and said he wanted to start the next revolution. Officials say he identified as a “3 percenter,” an ideology based on historical myth that only 3 percent of colonists fought in the Revolutionary War. 
 
 “I’m out for blood,” he wrote in a text message to a confidential informant. “When militias start getting formed, I’m going after government officials when I have a team.” 
 
 “I thought he was the most beautiful thing in the whole world.” – Phelecia, the ex-girlfriend of accused attempted car bomber Jerry Drake Varnell Facebook 
 
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 On Saturday, Varnell parked a van loaded with what he thought were explosives in an alley next to the bank. He then took out his cellphone and dialed a number that he thought would ignite the blast. But it didn’t work because the FBI joint terrorism task force had provided the materials. 
 
 “There was never any concern that our community’s safety or security was at risk during this investigation,” FBI special agent Kathryn Peterson said in a statement. “I can assure the public, without hesitation, that we had Varnell’s actions monitored every step of the way.” 
 
 I wish I could say I was surprised when I discovered that my 23-year-old cousin Phelecia had been dating and living with this wannabe bomber until a month before federal officials claim he hatched his plan. But nothing truly surprises me when it comes to my family. 
 
 “I thought he was the most beautiful thing in the whole world,” she says in a thick Oklahoma drawl. 
 
 They met in high school in Shawnee. He was a “super intelligent” skater kid with gauged ears and a pierced septum, she says. He was known to wear skinny jeans and listen to rap, metal and country. Phelicia had similar tastes and fell hard for him, but she says she hid her feelings and simply remained friends with him in high school. 
 
 They connected several years later on Facebook. They started messaging each other after one of their friends killed himself in the dorms at boot camp for the Air Force. A graduate of Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford, Varnell was separated from his wife and heading back to school to get a welding certification. He'd originally wanted to work in science, but his family was concerned he wouldn't be able to do it because of his mental illness, Phelecia says. 
 
 Phelecia was a single mother who lived with her aunt in the small town of Dustin. She says she didn't really know what she was doing with her life. She says she thought about nursing, but then she reconnected with Varnell and moved in with him in two houses that had been made into one on his parents' property in Sayre, a small town in western Oklahoma, in April 2016. 
 
 Varnell didn't work, but Phelecia found a job at Flying J and, six months later, landed one as a prison guard. "It was the highest-paying job around here that I could get," she says. 
 
 Phelecia says she didn’t have much experience with paranoid schizophrenia before she dated Varnell. She had heard stories of what he was like when he didn’t take his medications. She knew he had been arrested in 2013 for trying to strangle his ex-wife, and she says part of the reason was that he hadn’t been taking his medications. He pleaded no contest and received five years probation. 
 
 “He thought he was Jesus, his mother was Mary and his now ex-wife was the Devil,” Phelecia says. “He told his mom that they needed to kill her.” 
 
 Phelecia’s father wasn’t fond of Varnell. 
 
 “He was weird,” he says. “He would also go out and look for gold and leprechauns… . I’m not kidding. If he did not take his meds, he was twisted. I told Phelecia that I would kill him if my grandson got hurt.” 
 
 “He would also go out and look for gold and leprechauns. I’m not kidding." – father of Jerry Drake Varnell's ex-girlfriend Facebook 
 
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 Phelecia called Varnell’s leprechaun excursions “a scavenger’s hunt for gold,” but she says she made sure that he took his medications every day until they separated in November 2016. 
 
 During their year together, Phelecia says, he never mentioned blowing up any buildings, but he was political and didn’t trust the government. He discussed revolution and what he would do if the world fell into chaos. 
 
 He also told her that he knew how to make pipe bombs. “I didn’t think he would go as far as making 1,000 pounds" of the explosive, she says. 
 
 Their love fell apart, she says, mostly because he was lazy. “He didn’t want to work,” she says. “He would just lay around. I was paying all the bills. Then I met Redman, and I cheated on him and his mom kicked me out.” 
 
 A month later, Varnell began planning to blow up the BancFirst headquarters in downtown Oklahoma City, federal officials say. 
 
 Phelecia learned of her ex-boyfriend's arrest on Facebook. Then her family started calling her. She says she couldn’t believe it and that it was something she would have never expected from him. “I was speechless,” she says. 
 
 Varnell’s parents, Clifford and Melonie, said in a statement to HuffPost that the FBI should have known about their son’s mental illness and that he “is extremely susceptible to different types of ideology that normal people would deem immoral. 
 
 “What the public should be looking at is the fact that the FBI gave our son the means to make this happen,” they added. “He has no job, no money, no vehicle and no driver’s license due to the fact that he is schizophrenic." 
 
 The Varnells say a court had found their son mentally incompetent and given them legal guardianship. "The mental health system has consistently failed us due to the lack of establishments and health coverage for a person like him,” they said. 
 
 They also pointed out that the FBI fed into his paranoia by sending an agent to pick him up from their home and giving him a vehicle and a fake bomb. The FBI never comments on ongoing criminal cases. 
 
 Phelecia agrees with Varnell’s parents and says that some of the information appearing in news stories isn’t exactly as it appears in print. 
 
 For example, she says Varnell’s hideout was simply an extra room built in the master closet in a house that his parents built. They used money that Varnell received when his a finger was cut off in accident when he was 3 or 4 years old. Based on her recollections, there is no bunker on the property. It’s simply a trashed-out semitrailer. 
 
 Phelecia says that when Varnell is having a schizophrenic episode, "he will go far with whatever it is. If the FBI hadn’t went along with it, it probably wouldn’t have gone as far as it did. ... He can’t reason.”
– A 23-year-old from Illinois has been charged in connection with an alleged plot to blow up 48 churches in northeast Oklahoma. Gregory Weiler, who has a long history of mental illness, was arrested after motel workers in the town of Miami spotted suspicious items in a garbage bin, CNN reports. Police found 50 Molotov cocktails in the trash and bomb-making materials in Weiler's room, along with documents outlining his plans to set off bombs at dozens of churches. He has been charged under state anti-terrorism laws. Miami's police chief says Weiler's answers in custody ranged from rambling to coherent and it's not clear whether he was going to actually carry out the plot. "He had the means and the ability to carry this out," the chief tells the AP. "How does one assess the threat?" Weiler's parents both committed suicide and he has battled drug addiction and "a lot of mental illnesses," his cousin says. "With his medication, he was perfectly fine and functional," but family members believe he must have stopped taking the medication, the cousin says.