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May 22, 2008 10:56 am US/Central
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Vandal's Actions Cause 2 Power Outages
ST. PAUL (AP) ―
A 21-year-old has pleaded guilty in Ramsey County District Court to damaging two Qwest utility boxes in St. Paul.
Levi Glennie was sentenced Wednesday to 90 days in jail. But at the time of his arrest, he told authorities he had valuable information about how the "system" was vulnerable.
Now, officials say, an investigation before Glennie's sentencing revealed 27 incidents between July and November in which someone caused power failures across the Twin Cities. The outages affected a major hospital, a children's hospital, businesses and homes where the failure of electrical medical devices could've killed someone.
"Mr. Glennie is very fortunate that we're not here under a manslaughter charge or something like that," said Ramsey County prosecutor Dan Vlieger.
The incidents were not tied to Glennie and his two co-defendants. The three were charged only in two outages last November.
But Glennie's attorney, Robert Owens, said the three men may face federal charges.
Ian-David McCombs, 22, of White Bear Lake, and Christopher Dee Walter, 26, of Andover, pleaded guilty and were sentenced previously. Both had criminal records, including burglary.
But Glennie, a smart University of Minnesota student, had a clean record and a promising future, Ramsey County District Judge Margaret Marrinan said.
"You chose to turn that to evil," she told Glennie. "What you did was malevolent, malicious and with malice aforethought."
She also called him the "mastermind" of the operation.
Glennie apologized in court to his parents, his girlfriend, the University of Minnesota, Qwest and "the St. Paul community for being yet another crime statistic."
Owens said Glennie's criminal activity began when he became friends with his co-defendants.
A pre-sentence investigation report showed that police tripped several alarms in Glennie's Minneapolis apartment during a search, and they also found a surveillance camera in his bedroom at his parents' Hastings home. Authorities seized key-making equipment, utility uniforms, badges, lock-picking tools, keys for U locks, an Xcel Energy credit card, Northern States Power padlocks, Xcel Energy hard hats, and much more.
The report also said police, the FBI and Xcel Energy staff worked together to investigate a series of thefts, vandalism and disruptions of power grids across the Twin Cities.
Glennie said he met McCombs through online "urban exploring" Web sites. Urban exploring involves going into underground or off-limits areas. He said he met Walter through McCombs.
Their criminal activity "accelerated a great deal" from early 2007 and "became almost like an addiction," Glennie said. All three worked to defeat locks belonging to Xcel Energy, Qwest and Comcast, cutting service to customers.
Glennie told a probation official he "always had an obsession to having access to things."
(© 2008 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)