These booking photos provided by the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office in Wichita shows three members of a Kansas terror group who were charged Friday with plotting to bomb an apartment building filled with Somali immigrants in Garden City. Pictured from left are Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright and Patrick Stein. (Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office via AP, File)
WICHITA — A man accused of planning to bomb a Kansas apartment complex that houses Somali refugees says he was unaware his co-defendants intended to carry out the attack.
Gavin Wright, formerly of Manhattan, made the argument in a court motion filed Wednesday that offers the first details at his defense strategy.
His attorney filed the 93-page document during a hearing where she asked that Wright be released pending trial. The judge hasn’t ruled on the request.
Wright and co-defendants Patrick Stein and Curtis Allen are charged with conspiring to detonate truck bombs at an apartment complex in Garden City. They’ve pleaded not guilty.
Wright’s motion is redacted, but it portrays Wright as a lonely man desperate to find friends after moving to rural western Kansas. It contends Wright believed the talk about surveillance of the Somali Muslim refugee community was only hyperbole.
