Sheriff thinks Conn. tragedy was a factor in Ala. bomb plot

PHENIX CITY, Ala. — An Alabama teenager teen who described himself as a white supremacist made journal entries three days after the Newtown school massacre about a plot to bomb classmates and began building small homemade explosives, a sheriff said Monday.

Russell County Sheriff Heath Taylor told The Associated Press that he believed the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a factor because the first date in the boy's journal describing the plan was Dec. 17, just days after the Connecticut killings.

Seventeen-year-old Derek Shrout is charged with attempted assault after authorities say he planned to use homemade explosives to attack fellow students at Russell County High School in Seale, Ala.

Taylor said the boy told investigators that he's a white supremacist and five of the six students he named in his journal are black. The journal was found by a teacher, who turned it over to authorities.

A search of Shrout's home found several small tobacco cans and two large cans, all with holes drilled in them and containing pellets. Taylor said all they needed were black powder and fuses to become explosives. The journal also allegedly mentioned using firearms. The sheriff said Shrout's father owned a few household weapons, like a hunting rifle, a shotgun and a handgun.

"He just talks about some students, he specifically named six students and one faculty member and he talked about weapons and the amounts of ammunition for each weapon that he would use if he attacked the school," Taylor said.

The sheriff said he didn't believe the teen's initial claim that the journal was a work of fiction.

"When you go to his house and you start finding the actual devices that he talked about being made, no, it's not fiction anymore," Taylor said. "Those devices were — all they needed was the black powder and the fuse — he had put a lot of time and thought into that."

The teen, who is thin and wears glasses, said little during an initial court appearance Monday. District Judge David Johnson set bond at $75,000 and the teen's attorney said the family expected to post it by the end of the day for his release.

The judge ordered the teen not to contact anyone at his school, and not to use the Internet without parental supervision.

His attorney, Jeremy Armstrong, declined to discuss specifics of the case, but he did say that the talk of the case he has heard so far was "blown a little out of proportion."

"Our position is that our client had no intention to harm anybody," he said.

Seale is located about 80 miles east of Montgomery.

(Associated Press writer Jeff Martin in Atlanta contributed to this report.)

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