The 5G Arsonist: How a Lone Texan Radicalized Online and Waged a One-Man War on U.S. Infrastructure
When dawn broke over San Antonio on September 9, 2021, a hazy almond-tinged smoke crept across the sky above the city’s Far West Side. Thick plumes twisted upward from a 132-foot cell tower that loomed over an office park just north of SeaWorld. A mile away, a paramedic staying at a local hotel pulled out his phone, snapped a photo of the strange sight, and uploaded it to the r/sanantonio subreddit. “Cell tower on fire around 1604 and Culebra,” he captioned the post.
As is standard for viral Reddit threads, the comment section quickly filled with tongue-in-cheek one-liners. “Blazing 5G speeds,” one user quipped. Another joked, “I hope nobody breathes that in—5G-fueled Covid transmission is way stronger that way,” a dig at conspiracy theorists who blamed 5G tower radiation for the Covid-19 pandemic. The wisecracks kept coming: “Can you hear me now?” “Free hotspot!” “Great, some hero trying to save us from 5G.”
That self-styled hero was already reading the thread. As 27-year-old Sean Aaron Smith scrolled through the comments on his phone, he relished the flood of attention the fire was getting, even if most of it was laced with sarcasm. Lean, heavily tattooed, and until recently completely uninterested in politics, Smith had come to believe 5G was the linchpin of a globalist plot to turn humanity into mindless zombies. To fight this supposed scheme, he had spent the previous five months setting Texas cell towers on fire.
Smith’s reckless, idealistic campaign against 5G was exactly the kind of evolving security threat that the U.S. government had started flagging as a top priority in 2021. Just two weeks after Smith’s fire went viral on Reddit, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray addressed the shifting landscape of political violence in a speech marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. “Today, the greatest terrorist threat we face here in the U.S. is from what are, in effect, lone actors,” he said, noting these individuals often move “quickly from radicalization to action, often using easily obtainable weapons against soft targets.” More and more of these people, Wray emphasized, turn to violence after being radicalized by outlandish conspiracy theories that spread unchecked online.
In the years since Wray issued that warning, political violence in the U.S. has evolved exactly as he predicted. Dozens of recent attacks have been carried out by people whose steady diet of fringe online content has convinced them that government oppressors, permissive liberals, or shadowy global cabals must be stopped by any means necessary. “This conspiracy rhetoric doesn’t just come from anonymous, extreme accounts like HitlerLover4Chan88 on Twitter anymore,” says Jonathan Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “It comes from blue-check, gold-check verified accounts—people who carry legitimacy for a huge swath of the public. Some of these paranoid influencers even hold positions of power. You’ve got far-right Groypers running Department of Homeland Security Twitter accounts. You’ve got legislative bills being introduced based on fringe conspiracies like climate modification.”
Once radicalized to believe violence is the only moral choice, lone actors increasingly carry out opportunistic attacks on U.S. technological infrastructure, which remains largely unguarded despite its critical importance to daily life. The types of targeted sites and the motivations behind attacks vary wildly: In 2022, an unidentified shooter opened fire on two electrical substations in North Carolina, in what investigators believe was a far-right plot to disrupt a local drag show. Two years later, a Tennessee man was arrested for allegedly plotting to bomb Nashville’s power grid with drones to accelerate an impending race war. This past July, a member of a militia group that peddles weather-manipulation conspiracies allegedly destroyed an Oklahoma radar station. And since early 2024, unknown saboteurs have been cutting fiber-optic cables in California and Missouri. (Tracking the true number of infrastructure attacks has grown harder since the Department of Homeland Security shut down its Terrorism and Targeted Violence database in March.)
Smith stands out among these recent extremists for one key reason: he was far more prolific than any other. The SeaWorld-area fire was his seventh of 2021; over the next seven months, he would burn 15 more towers. Over the past year, I spoke at length with Smith about the origins of his anti-5G campaign, hoping to understand how and why vulnerable people are being radicalized to destroy the core infrastructure of modern life.
The Making of an Anti-5G Radical
Smith grew up in a three-bedroom trailer in northwest San Antonio, an only child to a carpenter father and a nurse’s assistant mother. He entered high school hoping to join the military, but his life derailed after his father developed alcoholism following a construction accident. With his father lost to addiction and his mother working 12-hour shifts that kept her rarely home, Smith looked for belonging elsewhere. He dropped out of high school in 10th grade to join a group of friends who spent their time doing drugs and committing petty crime. “The attention they gave me made me fiercely loyal,” he told me. “There wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for them.”
At 18, he went to prison for burglarizing a home while blacked out on Xanax. He spent most of the next six years behind bars after violating parole and picking up additional drug and firearms charges; his father died of cancer while he was incarcerated.
When Smith was paroled from his third prison sentence in November 2019, he was determined to leave his troubled past behind. He moved back into his mother’s trailer, got a job cooking at a Golden Corral, and started a relationship with 18-year-old Coley Lane Dupre, a former elite gymnast who had recently rebelled against her old life and moved in next door after leaving drug rehab. Things were going well until March 2020, when the Covid pandemic shut down Smith’s restaurant and the gymnastics studio where Dupre coached. Their new stable life was put on hold, leaving the couple to fill their days getting high and scrolling through social media.
During one of these late-night scrolling sessions, a short clip from a 2019 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience popped up in Smith’s Instagram feed. In the clip, Rogan pauses to light a joint, giving his guest—Eddie Bravo, a jiujitsu instructor famous for pushing 9/11 and flat Earth conspiracies—time to ask: “What do you think of, um, 5G and all that? Do you think any of that is legit?”
Rogan says he’s “terrified” of the new wireless technology, which was just starting to roll out across the U.S. “How much long-term testing have they done?” he asks. “Zero?” Bravo then tells Rogan to visit a website that hosts the government’s “400-page plan for the world,” which he claims includes revelations about 5G that will “blow your fucking head off.”
The clip had few concrete details, but it reminded Smith of a man he’d befriended in prison back in 2014. That inmate was obsessed with books about magnets and electricity, and often ranted about a sprawling communications “grid” being built for evil purposes. Smith had never paid much attention to those rambling rants back then, but two famous podcasters were echoing the same concerns.
When Smith started searching for more information about 5G online, he quickly became convinced the conspiracies were true. Social media was flooded with posts claiming 5G towers, which use higher electromagnetic frequencies than 4G, weakened human immune systems and made people more susceptible to Covid-19. (This claim ignores the fact that some of the hardest-hit Covid countries in 2020, like Iran, had no 5G rollout at all.) Even prominent public figures pushed the lie: actor Woody Harrelson falsely claimed on Instagram that China was tearing down its 5G towers to slow Covid spread.
As social media algorithms started feeding Smith more of this content, he learned that arsonists in the U.K. had burned more than 60 cell towers in spring 2020. That wave of violence was partly inspired by a British pastor and crypto consultant who claimed on YouTube that “the radio frequencies we are being exposed to are killing people.” The pastor gained credibility by claiming he was a former Vodafone executive; in reality, he had worked as a salesman for the company for less than a year, long before 5G even existed.
Smith’s suspicions only grew when he noticed his favorite 5G conspiracy posts often got taken down within hours of being posted. “If you said anything connecting 5G to Covid, you got censored—Facebook would take your post down, fact-check you,” he says. “And I thought, why are they so worried about censoring people on this subject? That’s what clicked for me.” Smith concluded that powerful people were hiding the dangerous truth about 5G.
With no chance of getting another restaurant job during the pandemic, Smith fell back into selling drugs in spring 2020. He drove around San Antonio’s eerily empty streets, delivering cannabis, cocaine, and other drugs to customers sheltering at home. On his routes, he noticed 5G towers were some of the only structures still being built. He sometimes stopped to ask construction workers why they were risking their lives to expand 5G. When they told him to leave, he took their rudeness as further proof the conspiracy was real.
When Smith wasn’t selling drugs, he was usually alone in the trailer with Dupre—his mother was working even longer hours at a local hospital overwhelmed by Covid patients. The couple watched videos from Alex Jones’ InfoWars and British conspiracy theorist David Icke, who is famous for claiming the world is secretly run by shape-shifting reptilian humanoids. These sources pushed increasingly elaborate, dark stories framing 5G as the core of a plot to enslave entire nations.
One popular narrative claimed governments deliberately released Covid-19 to force people into lockdown, giving construction crews time and space to build out 5G networks. Once vaccines were developed, 5G radiation would interact with graphene oxide nanomaterials supposedly added to the injections, giving governments the power to control citizens’ behavior or kill them en masse if they revolted. “If 5G continues and reaches where they want to take it,” Icke warned in an April 2020 interview, “human life as we know it is over.”
This narrative, often pushed by people selling overpriced jewelry and trinkets that claimed to block 5G radiation, made perfect sense to Smith. He had never cared about politics before: “My mindset was always, this has nothing to do with me,” he says. But the anti-technology content he was consuming melted his apathy. “I saw America eventually turning into the same surveillance state that China is now,” he says. “Our freedoms gone, all that.” He convinced Dupre too, showing her patents that included the phrase “voice to skull,” which the pair misinterpreted as proof the government could use 5G to implant thoughts in people’s heads. (The patents in question make no such claim.)
On the evening of July 17, 2020, Smith was driving to a customer’s house when police pulled him over for a routine traffic stop. He was arrested on drug and firearms charges, which would almost certainly lead to his parole being revoked and a return to prison. But Smith realized he wouldn’t have to face a parole violation hearing until court reopened on Monday. Dupre bailed him out on Saturday, and the couple went on the run.
Life as fugitives made it harder for the pair to keep researching 5G. They mostly stayed at local drug houses, where Smith’s drug dealing made them welcome at first, but conflicts with unpredictable meth users always forced them to leave after a few days or weeks. Both were robbed and assaulted at gunpoint, and they bounced from one dangerous situation to the next.
As the stress of being on the run wore on Smith, he started thinking about how to find purpose again. “I wanted to be a better person,” he says. “I was still stuck in this old lifestyle, but part of me wanted to help people.” In late November 2020, he decided to go beyond passively consuming content from podcasters and algorithms: he would go see a 5G tower in person.
Smith and Dupre spent a night driving around San Antonio looking for an accessible tower. Most were locked behind chain-link fences topped with razor wire. Finally, they found an unsecured one tucked away in a suburban neighborhood. As they approached, they were unnerved by the loud, eerie hum coming from the structure (caused by cooling fans and electrical components, standard for cell towers). They thought they could feel sinister energy waves radiating off it. Dupre was so shaken she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. “Babe, it feels wrong,” she told Smith as she stepped back.
Smith walked forward anyway and put his hand on the tower’s metal base. In that moment, he was overwhelmed by sadness that so many people had no idea what these dangerous structures were doing in their communities. “That’s when I really made the decision,” he recalls. “I snapped. I thought, man, I’m going to do something about this.”
The Arson Campaign
Now that they were ready to act, Smith and Dupre discussed how to fight 5G. They considered starting their own podcast or educational website, but settled on making homemade orgonite crystals, which alternative medicine communities claim block electromagnetic fields. In the cramped kitchens of the drug houses they stayed in, they filled muffin tins with colored resin and scraps of metal—steel wool curls, copper wire coils. When the resin hardened, they placed the crystals next to San Antonio’s 5G towers, an act of protest they called “gifting.” Dupre made crystals shaped like hearts and flowers to hand out to strangers to raise awareness about 5G.
But Smith quickly grew tired of gifting, seeing it as too mild of an approach. He was becoming more radicalized by the day, learning about other people who had made big sacrifices to oppose mobile technology. He particularly admired John Robert Patterson, an Australian telecom technician who believed he got sick from overexposure to electromagnetic fields. In 2007, Patterson famously stole an armored personnel carrier and rammed seven cell towers in Sydney before surrendering to police. The rampage didn’t slow Australia’s wireless rollout at all, but Smith admired how Patterson kept speaking out about a supposed cover-up of mobile technology’s dangers even after getting out of prison.
Smith also closely followed the December 25, 2020, bombing in downtown Nashville, where a lone man named Anthony Quinn Warner blew himself up in an RV. The FBI concluded Warner was motivated by suicidal desperation and a mix of incoherent conspiracies, including a belief the government was covering up an alien invasion. But Smith only fixated on the fact that Warner detonated his vehicle in front of an AT&T network facility—proof, to Smith, that 5G was the real target.
In February 2021, a massive ice storm knocked out power across most of San Antonio for days. Smith used the blackout to sneak onto multiple 5G tower sites, cutting through fences with bolt cutters. He studied the fiber-optic cables that ran out of the base stations, across the ground, and into the towers’ access hatches. He realized it would be easy to set these exposed cables on fire. He imagined flames climbing up the inside of the tower, burning the antennas 100 feet above ground, turning the tower into a giant torch that would get San Antonians’ attention. “I didn’t have any other way to get people’s attention,” he says. “I thought, if I burn this tower over here, someone will see it and ask, why would someone burn these down? Then they’ll look into it.”
On the morning of April 10, 2021, Smith pulled up to a 5G tower behind a discount eyeglass shop. He picked the spot because he could escape quickly onto the nearby I-410 highway. He lit a homemade Molotov cocktail and threw it over the fence. To his disappointment, the bomb landed just off target, only causing minor damage when it shattered on the ground. He fled so quickly he dropped his lime-green lighter at the scene. As he sped toward the highway, he knew he needed to refine his method if he was serious about changing the world.
To practice, Smith went to a remote stretch of South Texas countryside to test his incendiary devices. He tried homemade napalm grenade-like devices using a recipe he found online, but eventually decided throwing bombs from outside the fence would never work—the failure rate was too high, no matter how well designed the bombs were. Instead, he needed to get inside the fence to burn the cables up close. That meant spending five minutes or more on site, which increased his risk of getting caught.
Smith came up with a simple, effective method to minimize his risk of being caught. He scouted targets using Google Earth, focusing on towers near wooded areas where he could escape after starting the fire. He collected costumes to make him look like he belonged on the site: construction worker outfits and security guard uniforms, most of which he traded drugs to get. As long as he could cut through the fence without being seen, no one would question him kneeling next to the tower stuffing accelerant-soaked rags into the cable hatches.
Smith became a prolific arsonist starting that April: over his first six weeks of attacks, he hit a tower by a tattoo shop, one outside an upscale apartment complex, and a third at the end of a residential cul-de-sac. Dupre came with him on the last attack, but couldn’t bring herself to climb through the hole Smith cut in the fence. Unlike Smith, she was too scared to take part in actual property destruction.
After that stressful outing, Dupre begged Smith to stop his arson spree. Things were finally looking up for the couple: through a connection with a local San Antonio rapper he knew, Smith got an off-the-books handyman job at a small commercial building, and the landlord let the couple stay in a vacant unit. Dupre didn’t want Smith to ruin their semi-stable life by drawing more attention to himself. But Smith was too caught up in his anti-5G mission to stop. “The fires gave me meaning,” he says. “It gave my life purpose, being able to fight against something.”
In late May, Smith went to burn a tower in the Oak Hills neighborhood. Overconfident after evading capture for months, he lingered too long before lighting the gasoline-soaked rags he’d stuffed in the cable hatch. When he finally flicked his lighter, he accidentally ignited the fumes that had built
