2-Year Investigation Leads to Arrest of P-Section Bomber Who’d Left Trail of Violent and Disturbing Letters

Early the morning of Jan. 27, 2022, an explosion shook the neighborhood around Poppy Lane in Palm Coast. The explosion was strong enough that school buses were redirected, roads closed, the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office’s bomb squad called in, and a slew of Flagler County Sheriff’s investigative resources assigned. By the time the investigation was over, the FBI and ATF–the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives–were also involved.




Late Thursday, Flagler County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Jason Robert Burns, a 49-year-old resident of 9 Bronson Lane, on a first-degree arson charge and a charge of possessing explosives, both first-degree felonies, each with a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison. Burns had previously lived at 27 Poppy Lane with his wife and two children, across the street from the house in whose front yard he is alleged to have set off the pipe bomb, ostensibly because he was accusing the resident there of having an affair with his wife.

The blast from what Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly described today as an improvised explosive device was only a few feet from residents homes–and bedrooms. “The explosion left a one-inch deep crater, 12 inches wide and only several feet from between two homes where residents were inside sleeping,” he said. “Debris and shrapnel from the explosion were spread across several residential yards up to 30 meters away or about 95 feet. The blast damage nearby homes cars and air conditioning unit with enough force that it been its metal frame.”

No one was injured. “However the explosion was strong enough that it could have resulted in injury or death to anyone standing nearby from receiving or being struck by one of the pieces of shrapnel,” Staly said.

“My whole baby’s room lit up,” one caller to 911 said. “It’s really loud and it was right here,” another caller said.

Burns was immediately a person of interest “due to his hostility toward the victims of these homes,” Staly said. “Burns was also known to the Sheriff’s Office, the FBI and local businesses for being a prolific writer, writing, distributing and mailing rambling rants about various claims against government, elected officials, and businesses. All of these letters were analyzed by the FBI and our Homeland Security section. None of these writings contained any threats. We now know that they were rambling rants from an escalating madman in the making.”




During a press conference this afternoon Staly held up a stack of the letters, all handwritten. Some of them were directed against the sheriff himself. “They’re really made up issues,” Staly said, whether about himself or a car dealership or other targets.

While deputies had responded to some 60 calls at a trio of homes neighboring Burns’s, they’d also responded to eight calls for domestic or verbal disturbances at Burns’s family home, and 11 additional times to calls involving Burns at other locations, including businesses, and once at the public library, where he was leaving handwritten notes.

Burns and his wife divorced in February 2023. His wife requested and was granted a permanent injunction for her protection. She argued to the court that “shared parental responsibility would be detrimental” to her children because Burns “suffers from severe and untreated mental illness,” that he is “Bipolar and suffers from Paranoid Schizophrenia, Level 1,” that he had “recently been Baker Acted multiple times and has extreme paranoia that recently resulted in him brandishing a sword in the presence of the minor child. [Burns] has also recently driven his vehicle into a tree at an excessive rate of speed.” In the petition for an injunction she described severe beatings she’d suffered, including a time when he’d struck her in the face with a shoe, another time when he threatened to put a gun in her mouth, and yet other times when he took bat against her car and threw bricks through her bedroom window.

Court papers indicate he began suffering from mental illness in 2016. After the couple’s separation and before the divorce Burns had moved to the Bronson Lane address, but according to his former spouse, continued to harass her, call her friends, “slandering her and greatly damaging her relationships with these individuals.” He would leave vile, slandering letters about her at a local car dealership, churches and businesses, and to her would write her that he wanted to dismember her or shoot her in the head. It is remarkable that he had not until now faced more severe consequences.




As the investigation unfolded, authorities secured search warrants and analyzed the explosive, determining that it had been made with household supplies, plastic tubing, and what appeared to be fireworks explosives. They linked the pipe bomb to items found in Burns’s garage. But they also had DNA and handwriting lifted from the debris that linked back to Burns, making it unassailable evidence. Burns claimed he was sleeping in a truck with a friend at the time of the explosion. GPS data of his phone placed him in the area of the explosion instead. He then claimed that a friend had his phone.

Staly said that the investigation took this long “because all the forensic evidence that had to be done.” But investigators did not stop. Staly described Burns as a “unabomber in the making,” a somewhat hyperbolic reference to Theodore John Kaczynski, the recluse terrorist who killed three people and injured two dozen over 17 years of mailing sophisticated bombs before sending a 35,000-word manifesto to the FBI, detailing his grievances. The FBI decided to have the manifesto published in hopes of luring new clues about the man everyone called the Unabomber. The Washington Post did so–and the strategy worked. Kaczynski was arrested on April 3, 1996 in a shack in the Montana woods, which contained bomb components and 40,000 pages of a handwritten journal. He pleaded guilty and died in prison last June at age 81. Psychiatrists have disagreed about his mental state, some diagnosing him as a schizophrenic, others ridiculing the claim.

There were no indications that Burns had either carried out other bombing attacks or planned any, though his court divorce file points to some indications of violent behavior toward his own family members–violence the court recognized when it granted the permanent injunction, which also prohibited Burns from any access to firearms. He was granted no parental rights until further notice by the court, a drastic step. (The couple have an 18-year-old and a 14 year old in common.)

And there was some disturbing evidence that led to a stalking charge and conviction against him, as when he left a letter for his ex-wife, with a white powdery substance clearly intended to evoke the anthrax attacks that followed the terrorist attacks of September 2001, with warnings: ““I would never threaten to harm you or use the children as leverage. But heart attacks happen,” he wrote his ex. In another, he wrote: “The truth will come out. I will get my revenge.” He’d placed secret cameras inside and outside the home his ex had kept after the divorce–in a smoke detector, in a phone charger, in an air freshener, in an alarm clock. His ex eventually turned over to authorities 100 letters she’d received from him.

“We were aware of him, our Homeland Security section, my criminal Intel unit was all aware of him,” Staly said. “So I would not say that we were just letting him walk around freely. He might be a little close thinking that he was being watched–not the way he claims it was done. But but we were aware of him and we weren’t just going to let him go about his day not knowing what he was up to as best as we could.”

There were no additional devices found in his home, and no firearms. If he does post his $75,000 bond, Staly said, “I’m not going to tell the public or him what our plan is, but we’re going to do our best to make sure he can’t hurt anyone in this community, whether it’s his ex-wife, members of the sheriff’s office, including myself, members of the team that that investigated him, whether it’s state county or federal.”