Two Massachusetts men who were visiting Boston-area colleges on Halloween night, when several parties were taking place, were arrested and charged with causing an explosion over the weekend on the Harvard Medical School campus, authorities said Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors alleged that 18-year-old Logan Patterson and 20-year-old Dominick Cardoza broke into a building that houses Harvard’s research labs on Saturday morning and caused an explosion with fireworks.
Police and the FBI announced Saturday that they were investigating what the Harvard University Police Department said appeared to be an “intentional” explosion.
“Anxiety levels naturally rise when the public learns that an explosion was intentionally caused,” prosecutor Leah Foley told reporters during a news conference.
Ted Docks, chief of the FBI’s Boston division, said no one was injured and property damage was limited, but noted that “detonating an explosive device in a closet at a higher education institution is not harmless pranks.”
Attorneys for Patterson, of Plymouth, Mass., and Cardoza, of Bourne, Mass., could not immediately be identified.
According to charging documents, surveillance cameras captured two men later identified as Patterson and Cardoza shortly after 2 a.m. Saturday walking toward the Harvard Medical School campus, covering their faces.
Surveillance video showed the two with the fireworks, jumping over a chain-link fence, entering a construction area around Harvard’s Goldenson Building and then climbing scaffolding to access the roof, charging documents state.
Minutes later, Harvard police received a fire alarm call due to an explosion on the fourth floor of the building, which houses a laboratory for the school’s Department of Neurobiology. The two then fled.
According to authorities, the explosive was detonated inside a closet.
Surveillance video captured Patterson after the explosion at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston and recorded him later meeting with Cardoza.
The Wentworth students told investigators that the two had gone there earlier in the evening for Halloween social activities and told some of them about their involvement in the explosion, according to court documents.
