PENNSBURG — According to neighbors of 427 Main St., Pennsburg, where Colleen LaRose reportedly lived for some time in 2009, there was nothing suspicious or out-of-the-ordinary about LaRose’s appearance.
Renee Herbert, who resides in the Main Street building where LaRose lived, said she used to see LaRose sometimes when the two did laundry.
“Colleen looked like an everyday housewife,” Herbert said of LaRose. Herbert described LaRose as a middle-aged white woman with blond hair.
Herbert said she didn’t talk with LaRose often, only when the two were doing laundry or when they passed one another coming or going.
“Just ‘hi’ and ‘bye,’ really,” Herbert said of their interactions.
Herbert, who has lived in the building for about a year, said that while LaRose’s physical appearance wasn’t out-of-the-ordinary, her disappearance was.
“I met her and then all of a sudden, I didn’t see her,” Herbert said. She explained the last time she saw LaRose was around the end of August or the beginning of September, about the time children started going back to school.
Herbert, who drives a school bus for the area school district, said it seemed her schedule was opposite of LaRose’s, because she didn’t see her very much. However, “I never noticed anyone coming or going” from LaRose’s apartment, she said. Herbert did believe LaRose lived with a man at the apartment, and mail lying on the doorstep of the apartment where LaRose once lived Tuesday was addressed to that man.
Court papers indicated LaRose was living with a person whose initials were “K.G.” in Montgomery County. The mail found on the doorstep of 427 Main St., Tuesday, was addressed to a person whose initials were K.G.
Herbert said she wasn’t sure whether LaRose and that man were married.
Herbert said the attention by the news media to Pennsburg Tuesday was a bit alarming.
“This is a very peaceful neighborhood,” she said. “Pennsburg is a very quiet community. Everybody pretty much knows everybody.”
She said she first heard about LaRose’s alleged terrorist activities Tuesday when reporters arrived.
“The news crews were knocking on my door,” she said. “When they (the media) first told me (of the indictment) I was shocked. I was totally surprised. You don’t expect this in your community.”
Patty Hartman, media contact for the U.S. Attorney’s office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, said Tuesday night that LaRose has been in custody since Oct. 15.
She confirmed LaRose was from Montgomery County, but would not confirm whether LaRose lived in Pennsburg.
Court papers indicated LaRose traveled to Europe in August 2009 prior to being taken into custody. LaRose allegedly was involved in “conspiracy to kill in a foreign country” from sometime in 2008 until Oct. 15, 2009. Court papers indicated LaRose and her co-conspirators were involved in recruiting people online to “wage violent jihad in South Asia and Europe.”
Court papers indicate LaRose utilized YouTube as a means of publicizing that she was “‘desperate to do something to somehow help’ the suffering Muslim people.”
Hartman said LaRose was taken into custody in October while she was in Philadelphia, and LaRose is currently being held in a federal detention center in Philadelphia. An arraignment for LaRose is scheduled for sometime in the next week, Hartman said.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s office, if LaRose is convicted of the charges against her, her maximum sentence will be life imprisonment and a $1 million fine.
Her federal public defender Mark T. Wilson declined comment Tuesday.
Department of Justice spokesman Dean Boyd said the case represents “one of only a few such cases nationwide in which females have been charged with terrorism violations.” He declined to comment further.
In recent years, the only other women charged in the U.S. with terror violations were lawyer Lynne Stewart, convicted of helping imprisoned blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman communicate with his followers, and Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist found guilty of shooting at U.S. personnel in Afghanistan while yelling, “Death to Americans!”
But neither of those cases involved the kind of plotting attributed to LaRose — a woman charged with trying to foment a terror conspiracy to kill someone overseas.
Stewart has insisted she is “not a traitor,” while Siddiqui has accused U.S. authorities of lying about her.
please free her. she was merely following quranic injunctions.