In case you missed it, on Monday NBC’s Shaquille Brewster was covering the devastation Hurricane Ida had wrought on Gulfport, Mississippi, when an angry white man attacked him—live and on the air. By the end of the day, he’d been identified as Benjamin Dagley of Wooster, Ohio. Also by then, police had issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of assault, disturbing the peace, and violating a curfew. By Thursday afternoon, he’d been taken into custody at a shopping center in Dayton.
By then, we knew enough about Dagley that his attack on Brewster had been elevated from merely disturbing to frightening. It turned out that just four years earlier, Dagley had intentionally released poison gas at an electroplating plant in Cleveland—and somehow got a sweetheart deal in which he only got probation and minimal jail time. Looking at this, one has to wonder how in the world Dagley was even on the streets in the first place.
The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com reported back in 2017 that Dagley broke into Cleveland Plating, an electroplating plant in northeast Cleveland, and intentionally released a host of toxic chemicals.
Employees called police around 8 p.m. Aug. 22 after a security guard discovered gas escaping in one of the facility's chemical rooms.
Surveillance footage later revealed Dagley drilled into tanks of sodium cyanide, hydrochloric acid, yellow chromate, ferrous chloride, and sulfuric acid, according to a current owner, Ed Cochran.
"If you mix the (cyanide and hydrochloric acid), you basically have the cyanide gas of World War I," Cochran said. "It certainly would produce a toxic vapor that could kill."
Employees told police that the released chemicals "are severe enough to cause a large scale catastrophe, and Dagley knew what he was doing," the report says.
The guard who spotted the escaping gas was taken to a hospital to be checked out for possible cyanide poisoning. Reading this, we’re extremely lucky that was the only casualty—that is, the only one that we know about.
In his diary about Dagley's arrest this week, fellow Kossack Merlin196357, a biochemist by training, revealed just how badly this could have turned out.
Cyanide gas binds irreversibly to the hemoglobin protein in your red blood cells. This makes it so that hemoglobin can no longer bind oxygen. And if your red blood cells cannot pick up oxygen from your lungs, you die an unpleasant death.
Dagley was very much aware of what he was doing. It makes what happens after he was finally caught even more difficult to comprehend. When he was arrested later in 2017, he was charged with criminal use of a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon or explosive device; attempted felonious assault; felonious assault; inducing panic; breaking and entering; vandalism; and extortion. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to attempted felonious assault, inducing panic, and vandalism. For that, he got—drum roll, please—30 days in jail, five years’ probation, a $5,000 fine, and $13,570 restitution to Cleveland Plating. He also had to undergo anger management.
This made absolutely no sense. He knew exactly what he was doing, and that it could have potentially killed a lot of people. I initially wondered why he wasn’t charged with attempted murder, but it looks like he was initially charged with the equivalent of using a weapon of mass destruction, which could have carried as stiff a sentence. Considering the tragedy that could have unfolded here, the deal he got in 2018 barely qualifies as a phrase. By all rights, he should still be behind bars.
Under the terms of Dagley’s probation, he wasn’t allowed to leave the borders of Ohio, meaning that he had no business even being in Mississippi in the first place. If Dagley had gotten a credible sentence in 2018, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.
This situation, to my mind, illustrates one of the biggest problems with mass incarceration. When you fill the jails with people convicted for picayune crimes, eventually you don’t leave enough room for people who really do belong in prison. If willfully and knowingly creating poisonous cyanide gas doesn’t merit a lengthy prison sentence, I don’t know what does.
Suddenly, looking at the attack on Brewster again, he’s even luckier than we thought.
If I were Brewster and NBC News, I’d be wondering how in the world Dagley was even in a position to come after him, as should any fair-minded American. The prosecutors who hammered out this plea deal, as well as the judge who greenlighted it, have a helluva lot of explaining to do.