Sarah Beth Clendaniel, a 36-year-old resident of Catonsville, “plotted to disable the power grid around the entire Baltimore region and cause harm to thousands of people in pursuit of a racially motivated violent extremist agenda,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said.
The sentence includes a concurrent 15-year term for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
The plot, which involved Clendaniel planning to be the shooter in a series of gun attacks and enlisting the help of a confidential informant to acquire firearms, was thwarted when law enforcement arrested her in early February.
Clendaniel pleaded guilty to planning the attacks in May.
U.S. District Judge James Bredar said he wanted to believe that Clendaniel wouldn’t have actually carried out the plot, which he called “extreme in every respect.”
“I think that’s a huge question, but who can take that risk?” he said before sentencing her.
The case alleged a conspiracy between Clendaniel and Brandon C. Russell, a Florida resident who allegedly shares Clendaniel’s views and is awaiting trial for related charges. The pair allegedly embraced a belief known as “accelerationism,” which advocates violent action to precipitate societal collapse.
According to court documents, from December 2022 through February 2023, Clendaniel and Russell allegedly planned a series of gun attacks on electrical substations with the intended damage estimated to exceed $75 million.
Their communications, conducted through encrypted messaging applications, outlined detailed plans to attack five specific substations, including ones in Norrisville, Reisterstown, and Perry Hall. Clendaniel had described how striking multiple substations in a coordinated attack would “completely destroy this whole city.”
She said that they needed to “destroy those cores, not just leak the oil” and that a “good four or five shots through the center of them ... should make that happen,” according to the DOJ.
She also said attacks “would probably permanently completely lay [the] city to waste” if done successfully.
A search of her residence uncovered multiple firearms and ammunition, which she was prohibited from possessing due to prior felony convictions.
In a letter to the court before sentencing, Clendaniel apologized for her actions and said she had been struggling with mental and physical health problems.
“I felt like I needed to do something to make up for my shameful life of drugs, crime, addiction, and neglect of my children by going to prison,” she wrote. “My primary motivation for my plans ... was because I wanted to help people to understand how fragile this modern world is.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland said Clendaniel “sought to ‘completely destroy’ the city of Baltimore ... as a means of furthering her violent white supremacist ideology.”
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kathleen O. Gavin and Michael Aubin for the District of Maryland prosecuted the case with assistance from the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section.
