Pennsylvania
How two teens from wealthy Pennsylvania suburbs became suspects in an attempted ‘ISIS-inspired’ attack in New York City
BUCKS COUNTY, Pa. — Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi have a lot in common: They’re both teenagers. They’re both first-generation Americans. Both live on tree-lined streets in the affluent suburbs north of Philadelphia.
“Nothing crazy happens around this area,” said Logan Lombardi, who went to high school with Kayumi.
For all their similarities, however, authorities say the only known link between the pair is what they did together last Saturday: attempt what investigators describe as an ISIS-inspired attack by throwing explosive devices at a protest outside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s residence.
Federal prosecutors allege that Balat, 18, and Kayumi, 19, drove to Manhattan from Pennsylvania the morning of March 7, parking a few blocks away from Gracie Mansion before slipping into a crowd that included participants in an anti-Islam demonstration and a group of counterprotesters. The pair was arrested after Balat threw two jars packed with explosive materials at protesters and law enforcement, according to prosecutors.
Neither of the devices detonated, and no one was injured. Balat and Kayumi are being detained on several federal charges, including attempting to provide support to the Islamic State, after prosecutors said the pair made statements about the terrorist group.
Body-camera video from the New York City officers who arrested Kayumi shows him responding “ISIS” to someone in the crowd asking why he had done it, according to a federal complaint.
After waiving his Miranda rights, prosecutors said, Balat pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State and told authorities that he hoped to inflict more carnage than the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which left three dead and more than 260 others injured.
Lawyers for Balat and Kayumi did not immediately return requests for comment. Balat’s attorney, Mehdi Essmidi, told NBC News on Monday that Balat has “complicated stuff going on” and suggested that his client did not know Kayumi prior to Saturday.
“They’re strangers to each other,” he said.
Classmates recall a quiet, independent student
While authorities have not detailed how the teenagers knew each other, the two grew up roughly 4 miles apart in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Kayumi lives in Newtown, Pennsylvania, on a street lined with 4,000-square-foot brick homes, and manicured lawns. His parents emigrated from Afghanistan and became U.S. citizens in 2004 and 2009, according to CBS News.
On Thursday, no one answered the door, though a Mercedes sat in the driveway. Neighbors a few houses away told NBC News they didn’t know Kayumi or his family well and said they mostly kept to themselves.
Kayumi enrolled part time at nearby Bucks County Community College in September 2024, according to a college spokesperson.
Earlier that year, he had graduated from Council Rock High School North, which has a football field and track, roughly a dozen newly paved tennis courts and a student parking lot packed with luxury cars. Students said the area is not known for the violence prosecutors now allege.
“The high school and the town — people are pretty affluent,” said former classmate Connor McCormick. “There’s not really a whole lot of controversy at all.”
The high school said in a statement that “there is no evidence that he has posed a threat to any Council Rock schools” and encouraged concerned students to consult with their school counselors.
Another former classmate, Matt — who asked that his last name not be published due to fears of retaliation — said he and Kayumi were in smaller classes for children with learning disabilities.
Matt said that although he and Kayumi saw each other a lot, their conversations were typically brief and one-sided.
“He definitely was very quiet,” Matt said. “He would not talk unless you tried to talk to him, you know what I mean? Like, he would not say a word.”
Matt said that while Kayumi did not get bullied regularly, he was sometimes a target.
“He wasn’t really that violent, but if someone would say something to him, like disrespecting him or something, he wasn’t afraid to say something back,” Matt said.
Matt and Lombardi recalled that Kayumi was involved in at least one physical altercation at school. The two former classmates did not witness the fight and could not recall who else was involved or who instigated it. They said they remember the altercation because physical violence at their high school was “very uncommon.” A representative for the school declined to comment on Kayumi’s student records.
Lombardi, 19, said he used to sit next to Kayumi on the bus to and from school nearly every day during their sophomore year. He described Kayumi as “independent” but not someone who shied away from conversation.
“He didn’t have any telling signs if we’re comparing it to what just happened,” Lombardi said. “He would not in any aspect whatsoever have been my first guess.”
Lombardi said that although they spoke often during their sophomore year, Kayumi was not on his list of people to say goodbye to at the end of high school.
It is not immediately clear what Kayumi has been doing since leaving high school and starting community college. A college spokesperson said Kayumi withdrew from the school by March 9.
Kayumi’s mother filed a missing person report for her son on March 7, saying she last saw her son at around 10:30 a.m. — two hours before his arrest, according to the complaint.
“If he’s going to be five minutes late, he calls,” Kayumi’s father told The New York Times in an interview.
Teens allegedly drove to New York with explosive materials
Balat grew up 4 miles south of Kayumi on a similarly tree-lined street in Langhorne, Pennsylvania.
His father, Selahattin Balat, immigrated to the U.S. from Turkey and became a citizen in 2017, according to a lawsuit he filed against the Department of Homeland Security over his citizenship application in 2015.
On Thursday, a man who identified himself as Balat’s father answered the front door of the family’s palatial home and declined to comment.
Balat is a senior at Neshaminy High School in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, according to a school spokesperson. The spokesperson confirmed to NBC News that Balat has been finishing his senior year remotely since September.
When asked for comment on last week’s incident, the Neshaminy School District shared two letters from the district’s superintendent to parents and staff, including one that said there was no information indicating concerns about Balat related to the school.
The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Balat had been selling designer sneakers at a markup, sometimes for hundreds of dollars, out of a Wawa parking lot since he was 13 years old. He was also selling products on Facebook Marketplace as recently as 19 days before the incident in New York.
One of Balat’s neighbors, who asked that NBC News not publish her name due to fears of retaliation, described the family as “loving,” “open,” “welcoming” and “kindhearted.”
She said she didn’t speak with Balat much over the last few years, but that he seemed like a “typical kid.” Balat shoveled her driveway during a snowstorm a few years ago.
“It doesn’t surprise me because this is the world we’re in right now,” she said. “But it does surprise me that it’s right here.”
On March 2, Balat purchased a fireworks fuse from Phantom Fireworks in Langhorne. Surveillance video shared with NBC News shows him arriving at the company’s Penndel location at around 12:15 p.m., registering his identification with an employee — a step the company requires of all customers — and buying a single 20-foot roll of green safety fuse with cash.
Phantom Fireworks Executive Vice President Alan Zoldan said the company searched its records for the suspects’ names after the attempted bombing and found a match for Balat, which led employees to the roughly 10-minute store visit captured on video. Zoldan also showed NBC News a copy of a subpoena he said federal prosecutors sent to the company.
Five days later, prosecutors say, Kayumi and Balat drove from Pennsylvania to New York City in a black Honda registered to one of Balat’s family members, crossing the George Washington Bridge to Manhattan at around 11:36 a.m. ET.
At about 12:15 p.m. ET, Balat threw an explosive device toward the area where protesters gathered at an anti-Islam rally outside the mayor’s official residence on the Upper East Side, according to officials. The rally was led by conservative provocateur Jake Lang and attracted fewer than two dozen protesters and more than 120 counterprotesters, according to authorities.
Shortly afterward, Kayumi handed off a second explosive device to Balat, who dropped the device near police officers before the pair was arrested, according to the complaint.
After waiving his Miranda rights, the complaint says, Kayumi said he “was affiliated with ISIS; watched ISIS propaganda on his phone; and was partly inspired to carry out his actions that day by ISIS.”
Investigators recovered a notebook from the car Balat and Kayumi drove, which contained handwritten notes that reference “materials that could be used to build explosive devices,” according to the complaint.
Authorities also removed “explosive residue” from a Pennsylvania storage unit believed to be connected to the incident. A senior law enforcement official briefed on the investigation told NBC News that local police detonated some of the components out of caution late Monday.
Investigators are still trying to determine how Balat and Kayumi met and what led them to allegedly plan the attack.
For Matt, it’s been difficult trying to reconcile the classmate he remembers and the allegations against him.
“We just thought he was a normal kid, like all of us, pretty much,” Matt said. “We were all shocked.”
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania Publishes Long-Awaited Study on Radioactivity in Landfill Runoff – Inside Climate News
A decade ago, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection published a study on radioactivity in the oil and gas industry, motivated by fears that increasing volumes of toxic fracking waste could pose risks to the environment and public health. That study concluded, in part, that more research was needed—especially regarding the impacts on landfills where this waste is disposed.
On Friday, the agency released a follow-up study that specifically examined landfill leachate, the liquid byproduct formed when rainwater passes through waste, picking up contaminants along the way.
“The takeaway here is that there is no risk to human health from radiation in landfill leachate,” said Jessica Shirley, DEP’s secretary, in a press release. DEP’s study analyzed samples from 49 landfills in Pennsylvania over two years, from 2021 to 2023. That includes 23 landfills that received oil and gas waste, according to state records.
But environmental and policy experts warned that this study was too narrow to draw definitive conclusions about the potential for long-term harm from leachate contaminated by such waste.
“This is an interim report,” said Daniel Bain, an associate professor of geology and environmental science at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied oil and gas waste. “This is not, ‘We’ve looked at the problem; it’s not a problem.’ It’s, ‘We’ve looked at the problem. There doesn’t appear to be a problem now.’”
The snapshot DEP captured in this study doesn’t preclude different results in the future, Bain said, and provides little insight into cumulative environmental effects.
The study acknowledges its determination that there is “no current cause for concern” is based on limited data. “It is important to recognize that more landfill leachate samples and radiochemistry analysis is warranted to generate additional data to confirm these initial findings,” the study’s authors wrote in their conclusions.
David Allard, the former director of DEP’s Bureau of Radiation Protection, who oversaw the 2016 study on oil and gas waste, said he was “not surprised” by the results. “It’s in line with what they were seeing early on,” he said. “I’m comfortable with the findings” that radioactivity from leachate doesn’t currently pose a threat to human health.
However, DEP should implement consistent, long-term monitoring, Allard said. “The landfills will change over time. My opinion is there should be at least annual sampling.”
In 2021, then-Gov. Tom Wolf announced that landfills in Pennsylvania would be required to regularly test for radium. Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was then the attorney general, supported Wolf’s decision at the time. DEP confirmed in December that the requirement had not been implemented, and it did not announce any such rule alongside the new report.
DEP found that samples from only 11 of the landfills exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s limits for combined radium-226 and 228 in drinking water, and none of them exceeded the much higher annual average standard for radium set by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for untreated wastewater from facilities licensed to use radioactive material.
Neither of these numbers is ideal for assessing leachate. “There really are no standards for leachate,” Allard said.
DEP also found “no correlation” between samples that exceeded the EPA standard and landfills that, according to state records, had accepted oil and gas waste. But a 2025 Inside Climate News analysis found that some of those records are full of inconsistencies. Discrepancies totaled almost 1.4 million tons between what Pennsylvania oil and gas operators said they’d sent and what landfills said they’d received, with some landfills reporting far more incoming oil and gas waste. One possible explanation is waste coming in from other states.
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Oil and gas operators reported creating nearly 8.8 million tons of solid waste between 2017 and 2024. About 6.3 million tons of it went to landfills across the state.
Environmental groups in Pennsylvania have worried about the consequences of generating and disposing of so much oil and gas waste since the fracking boom began two decades ago. Oil and gas waste is often radioactive, and it can also contain heavy metals and other toxic chemicals.
Former DEP Secretary David Hess, who now runs the publication PA Environment Digest, pointed out several previous issues related to radioactive fracking waste, from it being sent to public wastewater treatment plants that couldn’t properly handle it to treatment equipment needing to be decontaminated for radiation.
“Like a lot of things with the shale gas industry, we are the guinea pigs and have to learn things the hard way,” he said.
Several studies have shown that some radioactivity from oil and gas waste has already found its way into the environment—for example, downstream of discharge points from facilities that processed or accepted that waste.
“They are just acting like the end of the pipe is the end. They aren’t thinking about what’s going to happen as things accumulate in the streams,” Bain said of the DEP study.
He cautioned that the nature of the pollutants in oil and gas waste—and the total volume produced by the state every year—means regulators will need to keep a close eye on radioactivity in the environment and at landfills for a long time to come.
“Now that we’ve allowed it to happen, we’re going to have to be watching forever,” he said.
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Kiley Bense covers climate change and the environment with a focus on Pennsylvania, politics, energy, and public health. She has reported on the effects of the fracking boom in Pennsylvania, the expansion of the American plastics industry, and the intersection of climate change and culture. Her previous work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, the Believer, and Sierra Magazine, and she holds master’s degrees in journalism and creative writing from Columbia University. She is based in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania is investing $9 million in federal funds to add more EV charging stations along major roadways.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) this week announced funding for 12 new EV charging stations along major routes across the state. The projects are funded through the federal National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program.
The announcement builds on the $54 million Pennsylvania has already committed to public charging through NEVI. So far, the state has built 30 charging stations using NEVI funding, the most of any state in the US. An additional 53 stations are currently in planning or under construction.
Since Pennsylvania’s first NEVI charging station opened in December 2023, the stations have supported more than 80,000 charging sessions. PennDOT estimates those sessions have enabled over 9.6 million miles of electric driving and cut more than 2,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.
PennDOT Secretary Mike Carroll said the new projects are meant to fill in gaps between highway travel and local charging access.
“These projects will expand access to electric vehicle charging from our alternative fuel connections and bridge the gap between long-distance travel and community-based chargers,” Carroll said. “This is a critical step to improving reliability and access to meet the needs of EV drivers in the Commonwealth.”
Where the new EV charging stations are going
PennDOT’s NEVI Corridor Connections funding will support charging projects across multiple counties:
Berks County
- $825,958 – Sheetz, Fleetwood, along Route 222 near mile marker 73
Bradford County
- $1,141,968 – Dandy (operated by eCAMION USA), Towanda, along Route 6 near mile marker 178
Cambria County
- $1,121,968 – Perkins (operated by eCAMION USA), Johnstown, along Route 219 near mile marker 49
- $825,958 – Sheetz, Ebensburg, along Route 22 near mile marker 100
Lackawanna County
- $661,584 – Best Western Plus (operated by Universal EV LLC), Clarks Summit, along Route 6 near mile marker 328
Lancaster County
- $779,558 – Sheetz, Landisville, along Route 283 at Exit 26
- $623,630 – Sheetz, Willow Street, along Route 222 near mile marker 24
- $789,028 – Wawa, Lancaster, along Route 222 near mile marker 29
Lehigh County
- $789,028 – Wawa, Allentown, along Interstate 78 at Exit 57
Northampton County
- $789,028 – Wawa, Bethlehem, along Interstate 78 at Exit 67
Perry County
- $525,474 – Onvo Travel Plaza (operated by Raceway Management Company), Duncannon, along Route 15 near mile marker 67
Tioga County
- $500,034 – Onvo Travel Plaza (operated by Raceway Management Company), Mansfield, along Route 6 near mile marker 271
The state is also continuing to expand its NEVI program. Applications for NEVI Community Charging funding are now open for Pennsylvania’s southeastern region. Applications for other regions will roll out on a rolling basis, starting with the western region in the coming weeks.
Read more: Pennsylvania unlocks $100M to install EV chargers in communities
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At Arthur Rann Elementary School in Galloway Township, remediation crews are working to clear the air as investigators try to get to the bottom of fires in four separate HVAC units in less than a month.
The alarming issue sparked a call across state lines from New Jersey to northeast Pennsylvania.
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Plains Township Fire Captain Curt Nocera was told about the HVAC fires in Galloway that happened on two separate nights in January and February, plus a fifth in a classroom at Wildwood High School.
“I was honestly very shocked that he would have reached out to Plains Township with his concerns as well,” he said.
Captain Nocera was especially surprised because Plains Township just had a similar HVAC fire in a local school in November.
“We could not determine the actual cause of the fire,” Nocera said. “Our children and safety is top priority in my book.”
The units involved in each fire are all from the same brand: Airdale by Modine.
The half dozen fires all happened at night before school had opened for the day.
Investigators from both states have traded notes to figure out why the fires are starting and whether there’s a link.
“This is an ongoing problem that needs to be investigated,” Nocera said.
After the second batch of fires at the Galloway school, power was cut to the rest of the HVAC units.
NBC10 learned that a thorough check revealed evidence that some of them were starting to burn as well.
School district records show the units in Galloway and Wildwood were installed by the same company.
Both districts also used the same architectural firm to design the HVAC systems.
Neither the architectural firm nor Modine have returned NBC10’s requests for comments.
No one was hurt in any of the fires.
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