'Love Triangle' Leads To Bombing
A 41-year-old Washington state man obsessed with a 15-year-old girl faces child rape and attempted murder charges after his homemade bomb blew the leg off her teenage boyfriend's father, police said Wednesday.
Timothy Michael Goff of Port Orchard, Wash., was arrested Monday in Washington on charges related to the girl, whom he met on the Internet, and will also be arraigned in nearby Portland, Ore., where her boyfriend's family lives, police said.
Police said Goff planted a bomb in the driveway of his 17-year-old rival's family Sept. 27 which exploded after the boy's father, Barry Hornstein, kicked it, tearing Hornstein's leg off below the knee.
"We are so relieved" by the arrest, Hornstein said Wednesday. "It has taken a lot of stress off me and my family."
Portland's Multnomah County has a warrant out for Goff on two counts of attempted aggravated murder and one count each of first-degree assault, first-degree arson, manufacturing and possessing a destructive device.
Goff met the then 14-year-old Kennewick, Wash., girl through an Internet chat room in October 1999. The two corresponded, met in person and had sex at Kennewick area motels, said Portland police officer Henry Groepper.
Hornstein's son Jack met the girl last summer during a beach vacation and the teenagers began dating. She "seemed like a lovely young lady," Barry Hornstein said.
Goff tracked the Hornsteins down using the Internet and began harassing them with letters and e-mails and even posted fliers at Jack Hornstein's high school alleging the boy had sexually abused another girl, police said.
Goff sent similar letters to the girl's family and left a phony bomb at her house during the weekend when she and Jack Hornstein attended a school prom together, police said.
Police in turn used Internet accounts to track down Goff, whom they described as an unemployed pipe fitter now held at Benton County Jail in Kennewick pending bail of $750,000.
Police called the girl a "typical" teenager who tried to keep the affair with Goff secret until confronted with motel receipts and other evidence.
"The Internet has given us a love triangle that has produced one of the strangest cases I have seen in my 30 years of police work," Groepper said.
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