In the early hours of April 14th, a fire was ignited inside the governor’s home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Josh Shapiro and his family were able to evacuate and no one was injured from the attack. The suspect, Cody Balmer, was arrested only hours after throwing a homemade Molotov Cocktail into the governor’s home. As luck would have it, the fire erupted in a different part of the house from where Shapiro and his family were, which explains why they had a good amount of time to escape from the burning domicile.
Balmer faces charges of attempted homicide, aggravated arson, terrorism and aggravated assault without bail. Authorities claim the suspect climbed over a fence and was able to break into Shapiro’s mansion.
He admitted to having ”harboring hatred” for Shapiro, and going further, saying he would have ”beaten the governor with a hammer if they had encountered one another”.
Balmer’s full motives are unknown, authorities are working on identifying the cause of the felony. They are looking into whether the suspect was motivated by antisemitism, potential mental illness, or something else.
“This type of violence is not OK,” Shapiro declared at a news conference on Sunday, further saying, “We have to be better than this.”
Before the attack, the governor, his wife Lori and his four children were celebrating the first night of Passover, a famous Jewish holiday, and soon went to sleep, when they were woken up by banging on their door from authorities trying to get them out of the burning three-story home, having time to get out quickly.
The Democratic governor told reporters, “I refuse to be trapped by the bondage that someone attempted to put on me by attacking us as they did last night,”.
The fire was extinguished before it could spread any further, but most of the house was heavily damaged by the fire. Overlooking the Susquehanna River, the home was about 29,000 square feet and was completed in 1968. Its style was Neo-Georgian, a style of home meant to be a revival of 18th-century Georgian architecture.
