Gloria Timmers, front, with daughter Aleata and granddaughter, attended her husband’s hearing yesterday in the District. Lowell Timmers had threatened to blow up the White House.
Angry that his daughter’s fiance was being held by immigration authorities and likely to be deported, Timmers left his home in Cedar Springs and came to Washington to seek the man’s release, charging papers said.
But after setting out to talk to his representatives in Congress, Timmers took a very different turn – taking his protest to the edge of the White House compound, according to family and police accounts.
“I want my son, and I’m not leaving until my son-in-law is out of jail,” he told a Secret Service officer, according to the charging papers. “I have 10 gallons of gas in here, and I will blow up the van and the White House.”
No one was hurt in the 4 1/2-hour standoff, which ended with Timmers giving up peacefully.
Talking to reporters last week in Cedar Springs, Timmers’s daughter, Aleata, said her fiance, Manuel Regalado, was being held by authorities in Detroit, according to an account in the Grand Rapids Press. The newspaper quoted her as saying that Regalado was an illegal immigrant from Guatemala facing deportation because he missed an appointment with immigration authorities.
Along with assorted elements of a makeshift bomb, Timmers had marijuana in his van and told police that he had smoked the drug that day, Assistant U.S. Attorney Heidi S. Pasichow told the judge at yesterday’s hearing.
Looking weary after driving from Michigan, Timmers’s wife, son, daughter and granddaughter came to the courthouse for the hearing. Gloria Timmers appeared especially upset by the sight of her husband in an orange jail jumpsuit and by the strange turn in the family’s fortunes. As her husband sat next to his attorney, her eyes were at times red and watery.
