When the FBI identified Brad Spafford as the subject of a nearly two-year Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation, Marissa Odom recognized the name.

She’d spent years living across the street from the 36-year-old Isle of Wight County man and his wife, Jackie, when the couple resided in Suffolk.

“I was actually really, really confused when I heard about all this,” said Odom, who described her former neighbor as a “loving father and husband” who would occasionally babysit for her children and had two of his own.

She’d often see him in church or outside woodworking or playing with his daughters.

“I don’t have one bad thing to say about them,” Odom said.

Court filings paint a starkly different picture of Spafford, who’s been in custody at the Western Tidewater Regional Jail since his Dec. 17 arrest.

He was initially charged with a single felony count of possessing an unregistered short-barrel rifle. FBI agents who raided his Foursquare Road home on Dec. 18 said they found the illegal gun and more than 150 pipe bombs, some hand-labeled “lethal.” A federal prosecutor described the find as the largest cache of homemade explosives the FBI had ever seized.

In a Jan. 8 indictment, a federal grand jury found probable cause to support the original charge and an additional felony count of possessing an unregistered destructive device. Spafford, who’s scheduled for a May 28 trial, has pleaded not guilty to both charges.

The Smithfield Times, based on interviews and public records, has established a timeline for what is known to date about Spafford and how he came to be on the FBI’s radar.

 

Early life and education

Spafford attended Isle of Wight Academy, a private K-12 college preparatory school, beginning as early as 1995. According to the Times’ archives, he more than once made the school’s honor roll and frequently placed in 4-H competitions at the annual Isle of Wight County Fair. He graduated in 2006 and that year announced plans to attend WyoTech, a private for-profit two-year college based in Laramie, Wyoming.

At Spafford’s Dec. 30 bond hearing, his attorneys, Lawrence Woodward and Jeffrey Swartz, mentioned that Spafford held an associate’s degree, but didn’t specify from which institution or his field of study.

Staff at WyoTech, which was formerly known as Wyoming Technical Institute and offers training in the automotive, diesel and marine industries, told the Times they had no record of Spafford’s attendance at the Laramie campus but noted he could have attended one of the school’s former campuses in California, Florida or Pennsylvania, all of which have since closed. 

At the time Spafford would have attended, Wyotech was owned by Corinthian Colleges, a chain of for-profit post-secondary schools that the U.S. Department of Education slapped with a $30 million fine in 2015 for misrepresenting its job placement rates. Corinthian filed for bankruptcy that same year.

 

2010-present

By Aug. 4, 2010, Spafford had obtained a Federal Aviation Administration certificate as a private pilot for single-engine planes and last completed his medical fitness test in 2013, according to FAA records. He was living at an address just outside the Suffolk Executive Airport at that time.

He and Jackie married in December 2012. She’d graduated that same year from Regent University.

According to his lawyers, Spafford has been employed at Collins Machine Works, a Portsmouth-based defense and industrial fabricator, for the past nine years. 

The business has experience in the refurbishment and manufacture of shafting components for the marine industry, dealing with both military and commercial vessels, according to its Facebook page.

Collins Machine did not respond to the Times’ inquiries regarding Spafford’s duties or employment status.

By 2019 Spafford had sold his home near the airport and moved to Suffolk’s Holy Neck borough, according to city land transfer records. Isle of Wight County land transfer records show the family purchased the 20-acre Foursquare Road farm and residence in early October, two months before Spafford’s arrest.

According to Odom, Spafford and his wife homeschooled their children and had purchased a horse prior to relocating to Isle of Wight. Odom said Spafford, prior to moving, had rebuilt the porch on his Suffolk house using his own labor and tools.

The FBI investigation began in 2023 when Spafford allegedly told an informant, whom he’d known as a neighbor from before he moved to Isle of Wight, that he’d lost several fingers to a homemade explosive device on July 4, 2021.

Detective Rachelanne Cardwell, a Suffolk police officer and member of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, testified at Spafford’s Dec. 30 hearing that Spafford, in conversations with the informant, expressed a desire to “bring back political assassination” and had used a photograph of former President Joe Biden for target practice at a shooting range where he was pursuing a 300- to 400-yard sniper qualification. He also allegedly admitted in conversations with the informant to owning the unregistered short-barrel rifle and said that he “did not believe in registering firearms.”

Following the July assassination attempt on then-candidate and now President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Spafford allegedly remarked to the informant something along the lines of “Bro, I hope they don’t miss Kamala,” referring to former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

Spafford’s lawyers, in court filings, characterized his alleged remarks as “ill-advised comments about the government and political leaders that are not illegal and are protected by the 1st Amendment.” 

The Times’ search of national and state databases for records of political campaign contributions showed none under Spafford’s or his wife’s names during the past several election cycles. Whether he was a member of any political party is also unknown, as Virginia does not register voters by party and holds open primary elections where any voter can cast a ballot in either the Democratic or Republican race, but not both, regardless of party affiliation.

The Times’ search of General District and Circuit Court records for Isle of Wight County and Suffolk showed no past criminal or civil cases against Spafford. While his attorneys have asserted that Spafford never made any explicit threats, prosecutors allege Spafford to have been “planning something” he “could not do alone.”

 

Alleged ties to extremism

Most of the bombs, according to court documents, were found in Spafford’s detached garage stored alongside frozen food in a freezer, but some were found unsecured in the home’s bedroom in a backpack with a patch depicting a hand grenade and the hashtag “#nolivesmatter,” which the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness describes as connected to an “accelerationist extremist ideology” that “promotes targeted attacks, mass killings and criminal activity, and has historically encouraged members to engage in self-harm and animal abuse.”

Court filings allege Brad and Jackie Spafford, while in the presence of the informant, to have discussed a canister of hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, or HMTD, stored in the freezer and labeled “do not touch.” The U.S. director of national intelligence describes HMTD as a “highly sensitive explosive compound that is of interest to terrorists.”

Jackie Spafford has not been charged with a crime.

Court filings further allege Brad Spafford, in conversations with the informant, to have espoused “his belief that the government was taking children away and turning them into school shooters,” an unfounded conspiracy theory not dissimilar to one pushed by Infowars host Alex Jones in the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, which Jones had falsely called a “false flag” operation by the government. Jones was found liable in two separate defamation lawsuits in 2022 and declared bankruptcy after he was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion to the surviving family members of the 20 children and six teachers killed in the massacre.