Small S.C. Town Has Own Ideas On USF Arrests

By GRETCHEN PARKER The Tampa Tribune

Published: Sep 4, 2007

GOOSE CREEK, S.C. - Look at a map of Berkeley County, punched through with Lake Moultrie and hugging the boundaries of North Charleston, and it's hard to miss the Naval complex. It takes up a giant corner, sprawling over miles and miles of flat, woodsy landscape.

But it's not what it looks like. These are not military towns. The complex's heyday was 20 years ago; the base that was the heart of it closed 11 years ago. What used to be a community that set its store on the military has evolved into a retiree and vacation area known as a boater's and hunter's haven.

The Naval Weapons Station is still here, though. That's what has got folks a little jittery, as they digest the news that two young Egyptian men who live in Tampa were arrested here on suspicion of having explosives in their car. The news is more serious, they realize, now that the two have been indicted by a federal grand jury.

But don't jump to conclusions, several locals said. They are fiercely proud of their local sheriff's department for keeping on top of who's coming and going and who could be a danger to them. But several said they want the two accused to be tried fairly, for the courts to give a full airing of this case.

They want to know who these men are. Most of all, they want to know why they were here.

"I think they ought to get to the bottom of it and find out if they really was making bombs, pipe bombs or whatever they were carrying," said Lou Spatholt, a retired Navy welder who makes his home on four acres in Moncks Corner, the seat of Berkeley County's government and the location of the jail holding the suspects.

A month ago, 21-year-old Youssef Megahed and 24-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, both engineering students at the University of South Florida, were stopped for speeding by a sheriff's deputy here.

The deputy was suspicious when they rushed to put away a laptop and weren't clear about where they were going. He searched the car and found what his report described as pipe bomb materials. The bomb squad confirmed it.

So observers here, who have been paying attention to news reports, try over and over to tear apart the pieces of what the students might have been doing.

But it all comes back to one question that hasn't been answered: "Why did they have the stuff in the back of the car?" Spatholt asked. "That's the thing of it, you know?"

Men Said They Needed Gas

Knowing the local highways and back roads, locals try to figure out which way the men were headed - how they could have been on the way to a North Carolina beach, as they said - and the likelihood that they were trying to get near the weapons station.

By now, many have read the news reports that Megahed's attorney, high-profile Charleston lawyer Andy Savage, said the two were off the main roads because they were buying cheap gas at a Murphy's station at the Wal-Mart on U.S. 176. Locals are taking that into account, as they try to piece together what is becoming a world-famous road trip.

"I could have bought that story, if they were going north, if they were on I-95 or U.S. 52 or Highway 17 or 17A. But the road they were on was between all those roads," said Al Bailey, a retired subcontractor who lives on U.S. 17A, across the street from the house he was born in. It's around the corner from where the car was pulled over.

The Toyota Camry was pulled over on U.S. 176. It's not a two-lane blacktop with a view of cows. It's a busy four-lane highway with fast-food restaurants and new drugstores with just-planted oak trees. There's also a Wal-Mart - with a Murphy's gas station.

It's on the way to the Naval Weapons Station.

The Camry was headed away from the weapons station when it was pulled over opposite a Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall. If you roll down the window, you can just hear the noise of crickets in the woods. They're barely audible, though, over the whoosh of constant traffic.

'I Can't Worry About It'

For those who live here, U.S. 176 is a main artery through town. When the traffic stop escalated into an all-out search, authorities blocked off at least a half-mile for hours that Saturday evening. The flashing lights of deputies' cruisers and firetrucks caused a lot of talk.

Some thought it was a drug bust, before they heard more about it. But the news didn't freak everyone out, people here said.

"There could be 10 people going up and down the road right now with bomb-making material. I can't worry about it," Al Bailey said, sharing a pack of cigarettes with his wife as they rested on the front porch and watched traffic fly by. Life, he said, has to go on.

Life for the most part is quiet here. Many people still make their living working at the Naval Weapons Station. There are 11,000 people working at the station, more than half of whom are civilians. But the work force on the complex has been shrinking since 1990.

The brig is still here and is active, but it's common knowledge that there's only one prisoner who is considered an enemy combatant - Ali al Marri, a terrorist suspect who's been there for four years and is also a client of Savage's.

The days of the Navy shipyard employing a huge chunk of the population are long over. Before the base closed, it used to be that everyone knew someone who worked there.

A Growing Area

Outside the weapons station, the Navy is not readily visible.

But American flags fly from the modest homes near the station, and picturesque downtown Moncks Corner uses flags as the banners on the antique-looking lampposts. Several described the area as patriotic - maybe because it's the home of so many military retirees.

It's not the hick countryside that some media reports have made it out to be, locals say. It has grown quickly; the highway Bailey lives on has grown, in his lifetime, from a quiet side road into a four-lane thoroughfare. He grew up in a house without electricity and remembers lying in bed and looking at the stars, through the slats in his cedar shake roof.

Most people here are white, but nearly a quarter of the 146,000 who live in Berkeley County are black. The number of Hispanics is growing steadily alongside the rest of the population.

The diversity is visible near the heart of Moncks Corner, when church lets out on Sundays. Worshippers in their good suits and heels flow out of the white Baptist church and the black Baptist church, just a few hundred feet apart. They walk under the flag banners, down the block toward a barbecue lunch at the mom-and-pop restaurants.

On the same street is a small mosque, next to an antique shop and a used bookstore. At First Baptist Church, a Spanish-speaking Sunday school is starting in a couple of weeks.

A tiny brick barber shop advertises in capital letters, "all nationalities welcome."

Still, people are not afraid to stray from the politically correct. Several said that having a Middle Eastern background made the students more likely to be checked out, and rightly so.

"They weren't born here. They should look at them more closely," said Spatholt, the Navy retiree.

As he talked, inside the shop where David Hoffman was wrapping up butchered deer meat for him, Hoffman tried to present a more measured response.

"I hope it'll come out, the truth of what happened, what was really going on." In his experience, he said, the whole story is usually something "right down the middle."

Researcher Michael Messano contributed to this report. Reporter Gretchen Parker can be reached at (813) 259-7562 or gparker@tampatrib.com.