Investigators have charged a 19-year-old loner with the Jan. 11 firebombing of a Rutherford rabbi's home and a Jan. 3 arson at a Paramus synagogue. Bail for Anthony Marco Graziano of Lodi is $5 million.
The arrest early this morning follows an intense manhunt that, in the end, produced a lone teenager with a backpack, a bicycle and rudimentary materials to make bombs out of Orange Crush soda bottles.
CLIFFVIEW PILOT on Thursday obtained still images of a man later identified as Graziano walking out of the Wal-Mart on Route 46 in Saddle Brook with a bag of items that sources with direct knowledge of the investigation said included Suave hair spray, duct tape and Orange Crush.
"Just about everything recovered from the scene was bought" at the store where the images were taken, one of them told CLIFFVIEW PILOT on Thursday. Various sources in different areas of law enforcement confirmed that report.
The Orange Crush bottles are believed connected to "Left 4 Dead," an X-Box game that two Florida honor students cited as their inspiration for throwing more than a dozen Molotov cocktails at cars and a house in Florida two years ago.
In another incident, authorities in Salt Lake City last year arrested a man who they said threw Orange Crush soda bottles filled with an accelerant into a target's home.
The soda bottles were bought at a Wal-Mart, same as in the Rutherford firebombing.
Molinelli officially released the images to the public on Friday, in the hopes that someone would recognize the man in the red skull cap and black track suit.
The first wave of calls didn't pan out, he said. But on Monday detectives "received a number of tips" that pointed directly to Graziano, Molinelli said.
Detectives went to his grandfather's house, where Graziano and his mother live. They interviewed Graziano, as well as his friends and relatives, then obtained a search warrant and conducted a "massive" search of the home, Molinelli said.
The 5-foot-11, 170-pound Graziano -- who turns 20 on Valentine's Day -- was also caught in the images wearing a military-styled camouflage sack on his back in which the prosecutor said he carried the bomb-making materials. His brother is currently on assignment with the U.S. Army.
The brother "was very well-known and well-liked," a Lodi source told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. Anthony Graziano, on the other hand, "hung out with the punks. He never seemed to do much of anything."
And while his brother is into motorcycles and car shows, Graziano usually pedaled his bicycle around, those who often spotted him said. READ MORE....
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