Left: Explosive devices found in possession of Christopher Arthur. Right: Photo of Arthur and family. (Images via U.S. Justice Department.)
An Army and National Guard veteran from North Carolina who served two tours in Iraq has been sentenced to spend 25 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of teaching a person how to make and use bombs to murder federal law enforcement officials while also posting videos online on how to overthrow the government.
Christopher “Kit” Arthur, 40, was sentenced on May 24 in Raleigh, almost a year after a jury found him guilty on nine counts including teaching and demonstrating destructive device making to someone who intended to use that information for the furtherance of a crime; as well as a number of charges involving possession of an unregistered weapon or firearm.
Prosecutors said Arthur had unregistered altered short-barrelled rifles, firearm silencers, devices “rigged with and wired to detonate the use of a 9-volt battery and switch” and other improvised explosives like grenades that could be triggered merely by striking match heads on a striker plate, according to his indictment. He was also charged with possession of “military grade ammunition and a 1-lb container of exploding target material.”
According to the Justice Department, Arthur did not come under formal investigation until 2022 but had first drawn scrutiny from the FBI in March 2020 — as the COVID-19 pandemic had started to spread in earnest in the U.S. — when a truck driver, Joshua Blessed, was killed in a shootout with police in New York after leading them on a two-hour high speed chase.
Investigators conducted a warranted search of Blessed’s car as well as a property he owned in Virginia. All told, authorities found stacks of cash, two AK-47s, a .50-caliber rifle and a .223-caliber sniper rifle. They also found bomb-making and tactical manuals that featured the business name, “Tackleberry Solutions.”
As it turned out, the owner of that entity was Arthur, and a search of Blessed’s cellphone revealed that Blessed had been trained by Arthur in North Carolina for several days in March 2020.
A confidential source, or CS, known as “Buckshot,” according to court records, later assisted an operation for the FBI, meeting with Arthur to receive weapons and explosives training much like Blessed had done. Buckshot went to Arthur’s home in the spring of 2021 and after receiving introductory training, told Arthur that he was worried the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, would be knocking on his door any day. They had already come once before, he told Arthur.
“Arthur introduced the CS to a concept [he] called ‘the spiderweb,’ which he described as a ‘freaking deathbox,” the Justice Department said in an announcement of the sentencing last week.
For two-and-a-half-hours, Arthur continued to explain how to create IEDs and, further, how to arrange them to create “fatal funnels” where anyone who entered the home would be obliterated.
“During that instruction, Arthur also showed the CS how to create an electric initiator for homemade grenades and bombs and how to make a homemade trip wire. Once he was finished demonstrating how to make the components, Arthur provided them to the CS and explained how to use an old shotgun to create a ‘thumper’ that could launch homemade grenades,” the Justice Department said.
The Associated Press reported in 2023 that when Arthur went to trial, his public defender asked the jury to believe that Arthur only showed Buckshot what he did because Arthur was in a heightened state of paranoia about America’s future. Arthur, his attorney argued, thought the government was on the cusp of collapsing in March 2020.
“What you have is someone dealing with fear. He’s talking about preparing for the future war … he’s not talking about today,” Arthur’s public defender Ed Gray said.
Arthur did testify at trial but left jurors unconvinced in 2023 that he wasn’t referring to the current government in his videos where he called law enforcement and the federal government tyrannical. He also said it wasn’t “uncommon” for people in North Carolina to receive a visit from an FBI agent after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Prosecutors also showed the jury videos of Arthur doling out instructions on how to form militias and encouraging viewers to arm themselves for a fight ahead.
A federal prosecutor repeated Arthur’s own words back to the jury: “The individual gets to decide who the innocent are … including the federal government and local law enforcement.”
Jurors convicted Arthur within a matter of hours.
In a sentencing memorandum seeking leniency from the court, a mitigation specialist for the Office of the Federal Public Defender compiled a report on Arthur by interviewing him, his mother, father, wife, sister and brother and reviewed his military and university records.
Arthur admitted he had an “awesome” childhood growing up on a North Carolina farm with a “close-knit family that provided him with love and nurturing.”
“His childhood was free from abuse and neglect and all his basic needs were met,” the report states, adding that he comes from a long line of veterans, including members of his family who served in the Revolutionary War. He was “steeped” in military tradition and “religion was central to the Arthur’s family life” with his family eventually moving from a Methodist church to a Mormon one.
It was this faith tradition, his public defender said, that held out the imminent “Second Coming” of Jesus Christ and when the pandemic hit in March 2020, Arthur took these as “signs of the times.”
“The Lord told me ‘the purge’ was coming,” Arthur said. “I thought I was going crazy, so I started looking for things to disprove what God was telling me, but I kept finding proof.”
Arthur “never intended to harm anyone, but only provide information and skills to use in their own defense against what he perceived as very real threats,” the sentencing report states.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
