Maplewood man sentenced to federal prison for possessing pipe bombs

A Maplewood man who built pipe bombs and threatened to blow up his ex-girlfriend's van was sentenced in federal court to 30 months in prison.

Dylan Raymond Orr, 27, pleaded guilty Nov. 9 to one count of possessing an unregistered destructive device. The sentence includes three years of supervised release.

According to the criminal complaint, a lost cellphone was turned into the Savage Police Department on April 25 by an employee of Rick's Cabaret, a Minneapolis strip club. The employee was looking through the phone to try to find the owner's contact info and noticed texts with pipe bomb images.

Police searched the phone and found additional texts that contained pictures of pipe bombs and blueprints, the complaint says.

One image showed two pipe bombs next to mail with Orr's name and address.

Police searched his home April 28 and found pieces of disassembled bombs, including two six-inch pipe casings, end caps with holes drilled and a 350-gram bag of suspected explosive powder.

Some of the pipes had black residue on their inside walls which testing revealed to be nitroglycerin and nitrate, according to the complaint.

In their recommendation, prosecutors asked the court to factor in Orr's recent string of domestic violence cases, including Orr texting a woman he would cut her throat, and that he would blow up her van if she didn't move it.

Orr has been in jail since July 28. That's shortly after, prosecutors wrote in their position on sentencing, he kicked in the front door of a woman's house and slammed her head against the ground.

In arguing for the lower sentence, his defense attorney wrote that Orr had no intention of using explosives to injure or damage anything, and that he texted about bombs because he thought it would be a fun activity to detonate them. Orr would refer to the bombs as "hobby cannons" and talk about them in a similar fashion to stunts on shows like "Duck Dynasty," the defense said.