'They Don't Believe People Should Exist,' FBI Says of Palm Springs Bomb Suspects
A second man who helped a domestic terrorist plan what officials call a "suicide car bombing" outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic last month was hunted down in Warsaw, Poland, federal officials announced Wednesday.
Daniel Park, 32, of Kent, Washington left the country four days after his alleged co-conspirator, Guy Edward Bartkus, died in the blast outside American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic on May 17, officials say. Both men shared nihilistic and anti-life ideologies and practiced building the bomb in Bartkus's Twentynine Palms garage in late January and early February, federal officials said at a press conference Wednesday morning.
"They do not believe people should exist," FBI Assistant Director for Los Angeles Akil Davis told reporters Wednesday morning. Davis said that Park, like Bartkus, posted nihilistic ideologies on Internet forums dating back to 2016. Park, investigators learned after last month's blast - which left a 250-yard debris field in the bustling Palm Springs block - secured 270 pounds of ammonium nitrate for their planned attack.Park sent a total of six shipments of bomb making materials from Seattle to Twentynine Palms, officials said, before and after he spent two weeks in Southern California at Bartkus's home in Twentynine Palms. The duo practiced building the car bomb based on the ammonium nitrate–fuel oil bomb recipe that was used in the 1995 homegrown terror attack in Oklahoma City, the FBI says. Officials in Poland captured Park on May 30, said United States Attorney Bilal Essayli, and he was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport by U.S. federal officials Tuesday night. He is expected to appear in a Brooklyn federal courtroom Wednesday before his removal to California to face federal charges.
Davis said the FBI did not have either man on their radar until after the Palm Springs attack and were taken aback that the duo could put "such a destructive device" together without raising any red flags. That raises "fear of the unknown" for homeland security officials, he said. That fear, says the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, is well-founded. "Those who seek to carry out nihilistic violence often do not fit neatly into the ideologically-based classifications that have been adopted by counterterrorism agencies, creating the potential for them to 'slip through the cracks,"' the think tank wrote in a report released last month, which also noted that those "engaged with subcultures of nihilistic violence may also interact with ideologically-motivated communities online including neo-Nazis." The Palm Springs bomb gutted the facility and shattered the windows of nearby buildings along a palm tree-lined street. The suspect was recovered in a burnt-out 2010 Ford Fusion outside the bombing scene, authorities say, but all of the embryos inside were saved by law enforcement officials. Bartkus attempted to livestream the explosion and left behind writings that suggested he believed people should not procreate, the FBI says. The case is being charged as an act of terrorism. A study released last year by West Point raises alarms about nihilism on the rise in the U.S.
This story was originally reported by L.A. Mag on Jun 4, 2025, where it first appeared.
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