By JAMES MITCHELL
Sunday Times Newspapers
TRENTON — Nearly a year after a pair of explosive devices were planted in the city and a bomb threat was made to the high school, John Robert Kennedy will face federal weapons charges beginning April 3.
Kennedy was indicted in July by a grand jury which issued six charges following Kennedy’s arrest in Flat Rock by agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Michigan State and Trenton police departments.
Police and investigators believe Kennedy planted two explosive devices in Trenton in April 2011, one in the high school parking lot and another near ACO Hardware, 2080 Van Horn Road. Kennedy allegedly made a telephone bomb threat to Trenton High School on April 28.
Investigators said that Kennedy, an Indiana native living in his mother and stepfather’s Flat Rock mobile home, called the school using a cellular phone purchased three days earlier from Wal-Mart in Woodhaven. Store records and video surveillance confirmed the purchase and captured Kennedy in the store and in the parking lot, driving away in a Chevrolet Trailblazer. Investigators tracked down the location from which the call was placed and located a vehicle matching the description from Wal-Mart; a multi-divisional task force took Kennedy into custody, and he was arraigned in June on charges including being a felon in possession of explosives, possession of an unregistered firearm, felon in possession of a weapon and manufacture of a destructive device.
U.S. District Court Judge John Corbett O’Meara will preside over Kennedy’s jury trial.
(James Mitchell can be reached at [email protected].)