District attorney’s office staffer tried to make a bomb to blow up migrant shelter, police say

NEW YORK (AP) — A paralegal at a New York City district attorney’s office has been arrested after he attempted to make an explosive to bomb a migrant shelter located across from his apartment, according to a criminal complaint filed Thursday.

Police said Derek Klever, a 27-year-old who worked as a trial preparation assistant at the Queens District Attorney’s office, had grown frustrated with partying at the Kamway Lodge in Elmhurst, a small hostel that the city has been using to temporarily house migrants arriving from the U.S. southern border with Mexico.

“I know I shouldn’t be doing this, but it’s for Queens County,” he said, according to the court filing. “This is a war. I wish I had a big enough one to blow them back to Venezuela.”

Klever confided to an unnamed acquaintance that he had purchased fireworks and was going to combine their contents with nails, gasoline and other materials to create rudimentary explosives.

“I’m not trying to kill but injure,” he said. “I need to teach them a lesson.”

Klever claimed he had tested a version of the homemade explosive and was considering using a drone to drop multiple bombs on the unsuspecting residents in the shelter.

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Police said Klever’s fiancé consented to a search of the apartment earlier this week, where they recovered a BB gun in a child’s bedroom and various fireworks inside a closet in a larger bedroom.

Subsequent searches turned up other bomb-making materials, including explosive substances from disassembled fireworks that had been wrapped in tin foil, long nail cartridges that were also wrapped in foil, BB pellets and green wire, according to the complaint.

Klever was arrested and charged with making a terroristic threat, criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child, among other counts.

He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Thursday, and his next court date is Oct. 4.

Klever, though his lawyer, declined to comment Friday.

Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz’s office also declined to comment other than to say Klever has been fired and the investigation is ongoing.

Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, which advocates for migrants, said the case underscores the how anti-immigrant rhetoric promoted by some city leaders can lead to violence.

The city shelter system currently houses more than 60,000 migrants and has taken in more than 200,000 total since the spring of 2022.

“Every New Yorker, regardless of when they arrived here, deserves to live a life free of violence and threats to their safety,” Awawdeh said in a statement. “Our leaders must do better, and stop scapegoating asylum seekers for any perceived problem in New York City.”