POLICING THE POLICE
the Internet and read sites like
Infowars. He’d start to question
things like how 9/11 happened.
I would get on him about it, because it always put him in a bad
mood,” Erna Stewart says. “But
he never expressed any desire to
hurt anyone.”
The photo of Stewart dressed as
a terrorist was actually him posing in an Osama bin Laden Halloween costume, his family says.
Regarding the bomb that police
allegedly found in a closet, an
agent from the federal Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms
later told the Salt Lake Tribune,
“to characterize it as a bomb or
device is not accurate.”
“He and his brother were trying to build smoke flares once. Remember, they were in the Army,”
Erna Stewart says. “So he probably
had some chemicals to make smoke
flares. That’s probably what it was.”
“Matt was really shy. He was introverted. A little nerdy. You could
tell he was a child of the 80s,” she
says. “He wore his jeans up high,
he liked video games and fantasy
novels. We’d give him a hard time
about it. Socially, he didn’t have a
lot of friends. But once he felt comfortable, he was the sweetest guy.”
Stewart didn’t do well in jail.
HUFFINGTON
11.17.13
“I remember he was really
upset about what Obama was
doing with indefinite detention.
But he was never volatile about
it. I think he just internalized
it. It made him sad.”
Judging by the letters he wrote to
his family, his mood clearly darkened as the months wore on. The
jail conditions, the way the public
perceived him, and the isolation
began to break him down. At one
point, the extremely fit former
paratrooper told one of his sisters
that he had quit exercising.
“Everyone says I’m looking great
in the newspaper pictures of me.
I see a man that was betrayed by
someone he thought he loved,
who’s [sic] world was destroyed,
where everything he once cared
about was stolen from him, everything he found holy was defiled,”
he wrote. “Now he is locked in a
box away from those he loves, with
the worst weight on his shoulders.”
In May, a judge ruled that the
search warrant for Stewart’s home
and the raid were both legal — a
huge setback for Stewart’s argument that he was acting in self
defense. A little over a week later,
at 12:50 a.m. on a Friday morning,