Sailor gets revenge for Internet insult

ELM MOTT, Texas — A Navy man who got mad when someone mocked him as a “nerd” over the Internet climbed into his car and drove 1,300 miles from Virginia’s Northern Neck to Texas to teach the other guy a lesson.

As he made his way toward Texas, Petty Officer 2nd Class Russell Tavares, a fire control technician, posted photos online showing the welcome signs at several states’ borders, as if to prove to his Internet friends that he meant business.

When he finally arrived, Tavares torched the guy’s trailer.

This week, Tavares, 27, was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading no contest to arson and admitting he set the blaze.

“I didn’t think anybody was stupid enough to try to kill anybody over an Internet fight,” said John G. Anderson, 59, who suffered smoke inhalation while trying to put out the 2005 blaze that caused $50,000 in damage to his trailer and computer equipment.

The feud started when Mr. Anderson, who runs a haunted house near Waco, joined a picture-sharing Web site and posted his artwork and political views. After he blocked some people from his page because of insults and foul language, they retaliated by making digitally altered obscene pictures of him, he said.

Mr. Anderson, who went by the screen name “Johnny Darkness,” traded barbs with Tavares, aka “PyroDice.”

Investigators say Tavares boiled over when Mr. Anderson called him a nerd and posted a digitally altered photo that made Tavares look like a skinny boy in high-water pants, holding a gun and a laptop under a “Revenge of the Nerds” sign.

Tavares obtained Mr. Anderson’s real name and hometown from Mr. Anderson’s Web page about his Museum of Horrors Haunted House.

Tavares took leave from his post as a weapons systems operator at the AEGIS Training and Readiness Center in Dahlgren, Va., and started driving. Investigators said Tavares told them that he planned to point a shotgun at Mr. Anderson and shoot his computer.

Instead, when he got to Elm Mott — after posting one last photo of a “Welcome to Texas” sign — Tavares threw a piece of gasoline-soaked plastic foam into the back of Mr. Anderson’s mobile home and lit a flare.

Tavares’ attorney, Susan Kelly Johnston, said his trip to the Waco area was a last-minute decision during a cross-country trip to visit his parents in Arizona. She said he never intended to hurt Mr. Anderson and did not think he was in the trailer when he set the fire.

Detective James Pack of the McLennan County Sheriff’s Office caught up with Tavares after talking to people in several states and Spain, who were involved in the online feud. Tavares’ cell-phone records showed that he was in the Waco area at the time of the fire, Detective Pack said.

Tavares told investigators that Mr. Anderson had spread computer viruses and insulted his online contacts for too long, Detective Pack said.

“He lost everything — all over an Internet squabble,” the investigator said.

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