PA Governor’s Mansion Arsonist Was Ready To Beat Shapiro With Sledgehammer

Confessed Pennsylvania governor’s mansion arsonist Cody A. Balmer, who is now being hospitalized for an unspecified reason, told police he was prepared to beat Gov Josh Shapiro with a sledgehammer if he encountered him. Meanwhile, new details have emerged that paint Balmer as a quintessential dead-ender with a troubling assault charge on his rap sheet — and a mother who’d tried in vain to get police to lock him up in the days leading up to the arson attack. 

In an appearance at the Dauphin County District Court, Balmer was charged with eight crimes, including attempted murder, aggravated arson, burglary, terrorism, reckless endangerment and prowling at night. As he was escorted both to and from the courthouse, Balmer made strange faces for the media throng, crossing his eyes and sticking his tongue out. 

While police say they’re still working to determine a specific motive, they say Balmer told them that he “harbored hate” toward Shapiro, confessing that, if he came across Shapiro, he was going to beat him with the small sledgehammer he’d used to break windows and break into the mansion. While Balmer struck on the first night of Passover, police have not yet asserted that he deliberately chose that night because Shapiro is Jewish.

On Monday, police announced that Balmer is hospitalized after some medical event unrelated to his crime. In conflicting reports, AP says Balmer denied having any mental illnesses when addressing the judge, but the New York Post says Balmer told the judge that he had a dangerous mental health issue, and that he’d had bad effects from associated medications, saying they “led him to different types of behaviors.” His mother told various outlets that Balmer has bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and had stopped taking his pills. She also said that, in the days before the arson, she’d approached four police departments trying to get him “picked up,” to no avail. “He wasn’t taking his medicine, and that’s all I want to say,” Christie Balmer told AP. 

Balmer had a court appearance already scheduled for this week — for a 2023 assault charge in which he was accused of punching relatives — including his wife — and stepping on the previously-broken leg of his 10-year-old son. His family situation is far from clear: When the judge asked him if he had children, Balmer simply replied “a lot.” Politico says he has at least three. 

The police initially described Balmer as deploying “homemade incendiary devices” in the early Sunday-morning attack. All those syllables might have had some people imagining moderately creative firebombs, but Balmer told police he poured gas from a lawnmower into Heineken beer bottles and then walked about an hour to the mansion. After scaling a 7-foot fence, he smashed the window of a piano room and tossed the first Molotov cocktail inside. Then he smashed his way into the residence, set the dining room ablaze and fled. 

While police were alerted to a breach before the fires were started, they failed to locate Balmer before he did his work, and also failed to find him before he scaled the same fence and escaped. Yesterday, police said he was arrested at an unspecified Harrisburg location a dozen hours after the attack; it’s now been revealed that Balmer turned himself in at state police headquarters after telling his “ex-paramour” what he’d done and asking her to notify the police. 

Balmer, who has described himself on Facebook as a certified master mechanic, told the judge he is unemployed welder with no money and that he’s lived with his parents for a year. Philadelphia’s WPVI reports that Balmer is a former Army Reservist who was a construction equipment repairer (MOS 62B) from 2004 to 2012, though never deploying. The Army Reserve wouldn’t disclose the character of his discharge. 

His lawyer said Balmer had “fallen behind in his mortgage due to several hardship factors, including injuries from an auto accident leading to his inability to work and maintain an income and a separation from his wife.” He’s also been involved in custody battles and just finalized his legal separation from his wife in February. In the previously-described domestic violence incident Balmer told responding officers that he’d taken a bottle of pills to try killing himself. 

After every high-profile attack on an official or mass murder, social media lights up with both left- and right-wingers eager to associate the perpetrator with the “other side.” In this case, Balmer’s own social media profile is muddy, as you might expect from an apparent bipolar schizophrenic. The first authoritative analysis, posted by right-leaning Daily Mail, focused on his anti-Biden comments, but new posts have come to light that seem to indicate a decided leftward tilt:

• In one social media conversation, Balmer claimed he was a “registered Socialist,” but he has no party affiliation associated with his active voter registration. He didn’t vote in 2024, but did vote in 2022. 

• Amid a discussion of high gas prices, he leveled some vague criticism of Donald Trump: “I said the same (expletive) when Trump took office. I don’t play favorites especially since they all suck.”  

• He shared a meme that said “Stop Being Democratic or Republican.” 

• He voiced support for the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, in the context of the death of Ahmaud Arbery, who was gunned down in Georgia in 2020 after running through a neighborhood and being chased down by residents (whose use of deadly force many conservatives also found wholly unjustified). 

Meanwhile, with Balmer opening up to police about so many aspects of his attack, it’s odd that they’ve shared Balmer’s confessed hatred of Shapiro, but haven’t shared any elaboration on the root of that hatred.