Aimenn Penny grew angrier and angrier late on March 24, as he watched online videos about drag shows, prosecutors said. Committed to stopping one near his home in northeastern Ohio, he got in his vehicle and, starting just after 11 p.m., drove about an hour to the Community Church of Chesterland, where organizers were planning to host a two-part “Drag Brunch and Story Hour” on April 1. Once there, investigators said, he hurled two molotov cocktails, hoping to burn “the entire church to the ground.”
On Monday, Penny, 20, was sentenced to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to two felonies: committing a church arson hate crime and using fire and explosives to commit a felony. Penny’s attempted firebombing of the Community Church of Chesterland came as some right-wing media outlets intensified their rhetoric against drag shows and conservative lawmakers made banning them or limiting children’s exposure to them an increasingly high priority. Meanwhile, the number of attacks against drag events rose.
“We hope this significant sentence sends a clear and resounding message that this type of hate-fueled attack against a church will not be tolerated in our country,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a news release. “This defendant tried to burn down a church simply because its members created space for and provided support to the LGBTQ+ community.”
Penny’s attorney, John Greven, told The Washington Post that the firebombing and the events that led up to it were a classic example of a young man looking for acceptance, finding it on the internet and falling into a rabbit hole filled with hate and misinformation.
“He was almost brainwashed,” Greven said, adding that Penny plans to appeal his sentence in the hope of getting less time in prison.
On March 25, the Community Church of Chesterland reported to police that the church had been damaged by molotov cocktails overnight. Church representatives said they believed the attack was tied to the upcoming drag show events since they had been receiving hate mail and threatening messages about them.
No one was injured, and no one was inside the church at the time of the attack, WEWS reported.
FBI agents in Cleveland got a tip that Penny was responsible. They also learned he was a member of White Lives Matter, a pro-Nazi group with homophobic views, and had attended several of the organization’s events in the previous months, FBI agent Lane Thorum wrote in a sworn affidavit.
In October 2022, police in Alliance, Ohio, saw him putting fliers on their cruisers, Thorum wrote. Penny, who was armed with a large hunting knife and an expandable baton, allegedly told the officers that he welcomed the inevitable civil war that he expected would break out between Black and White people.
Then, on March 11, 2023, police in Wadsworth saw him wearing tactical gear when he showed up at a drag event to distribute more fliers with other White Lives Matter members, Thorum wrote. At the event, members of White Lives Matter, which is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, allegedly carried swastika flags and shouted racist and homophobic slurs.
Armed with a search warrant on March 31, FBI agents searched his home. They found a Nazi flag, other Nazi memorabilia, a White Lives Matter of Ohio T-shirt, a gas mask and gas cans, court records state.
Penny told agents that he was trying to protect children by stopping the drag event. He detailed the ingredients and steps he used to make the molotov cocktails and described how, after growing increasingly upset while watching online videos about drag shows in France, he decided to attack the church, prosecutors said.
Penny expressed no remorse, instead lamenting that his bombs had done little more than make a few black marks, the affidavit states.
“PENNY stated that he would have felt better if the molotov cocktails were more effective and burned the entire church to the ground,” Thorum wrote.
And in jail while waiting for his case to proceed, investigators said he wrote a letter in which he bragged about attacking the church and claimed that he was “respected for it” in jail. He allegedly urged other White Lives Matter members to do away with peaceful protests in favor of violence at an April 29 drag event in the Akron Civic Theatre.
The letter contained swastikas and directions for making molotov cocktails, according to court records.
Becky Lutzko, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, told The Post that, even though the physical damage to the church was limited, it instilled fear in the people who use it. Parishioners left the church, and a preschool moved out because of the attack, she said.