[Strategerist]

Remember Joel Hinrichs? The OU undergrad who unaccountably started sprouting a scraggly jihadi beard, shopped for ANFO, frequented the local mosque, and ultimately offed himself, perhaps prematurely, outside a packed stadium with a nail-studded bomb-vest?

1) It wasn't a bomb vest. It was a backpack in his lap.

2) There were no nails.

3) Have you ever set foot on a college campus in the last 40 years? Do you have any concept of how many college students have a scraggly beard that just have scraggly beards?

4) There's no evidence he frequented mosques or was a Muslim. He had a Pakistani roommate.

[SauronOfMordor]

ping

[Rocky Mountain High]

“There’s no evidence”...

classic denial

[El Gato]

4) There's no evidence he frequented mosques or was a Muslim. He had a Pakistani roommate.

Who somehow never noticed that his roommate was making explosives. Apparently quite a large amount of explosives based on how long it took to get them out of the apartment.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"1) It wasn't a bomb vest. It was a backpack in his lap."

You are correct on this one.

"2) There were no nails."

Nails were reported, FWIW. It was one of those "trickled-out" details. As with anything else one reads, its provenance is unknown. Sorry, it was two years ago and I've lost the citation; googling on [Hinrichs, backpack, nails] yields several hits, most leading back to the Northeastern Intelligence Network's posting of this allegation.

"3) Have you ever set foot on a college campus in the last 40 years? Do you have any concept of how many college students have a scraggly beard that just have scraggly beards?"

Sure, but most of those guys don't go shopping for bomb materials or setting off explosive backpacks near crowded venues.

"4) There's no evidence he frequented mosques or was a Muslim. He had a Pakistani roommate."

Again, there were reports--some quite detailed, FWIW--that he had visited the mosque (right around the corner from his apartment) on several occasions.

Unfortunately a complete investigative picture was never released, to my knowledge. And I've had a googlebot set up to snare any mention of Hinrichs for more than two years-- that's how I snared this article.