An Alabama man is facing federal charges for allegedly sending threatening text messages to employees of Bangor International Airport, saying he was going to detonate a bomb at the Maine airport, according to an FBI indictment reported by The Decatur Daily.
Robert Tyler Wicks, of Decatur, Ala., has been charged with knowingly conveying false and misleading information involving an explosive device for his alleged threats.
According to the affidavit, submitted last week by an FBI agent and unsealed Wednesday, Wicks’ targeted two American Airlines employees at Bangor International Airport with threatening text messages on Feb. 13 and 14 of this year.
“The messages indicated that the sender knew personal details of the AA employees, had infected their phones with viruses, and the sender had ‘guns and s***’ ready with plans to ‘definitely do a bomb’ at the airport,” the affidavit said, per the Decatur Daily.
The sender of the text messages told the American Airlines employees that the incident would happen at 10:50 a.m. the following day.
Multiple agencies responded to the airport to help with identifying the source of the threats, according to the affidavit.
The airport received a phone call at 5 a.m. the next day, in which the suspect allegedly indicated that he wanted to talk to the bomb squad and said “I have a timer on these bombs…I’m panicking really bad right now.”
According to the affidavit, when an FBI agent spoke with the suspect, the suspect initiated a countdown of when the bombs were allegedly going to detonate and told investigators that the bomb was located outside of the airport, saying “I’m giving you five minutes. Hurry up.”
Investigators were able to determine that the phone number the suspect had sent the threatening messages from was a spoofed number generated through the TextMe phone application, which allows users to make texts and calls with a temporary burner number.
The affidavit states that the FBI were able to trace the IP address associated with the TextMe messages through the sender’s internet service provider, finding “Glyndon Wicks in Lewisburg, Tennessee.”
An investigator contacted Glyndon Wicks, the registered owner of the phone number found to be associated with the TextMe messages, and learned that Glyndon Wicks had recently moved from Tennessee to Decatur, Ala., with her son Robert Tyler Wicks.
According to the affidavit, at about 8 a.m. on Feb. 14, investigators at the airport observed an American Airlines employee on a FaceTime video chat with a contact named “Trey Live.”
Investigators determined during an interview with the employee that she was in a long-distance romantic relationship with a man calling himself Trey Live — found to have been an alias for Robert Wicks — who she had met on TikTok, the affidavit states.
Agents with the FBI in Huntsville conducted an interview with Wicks later that day, in which he allegedly claimed that he had just moved to Decatur the previous month and that his iPhone 16, iPhone 8 and Playstation had been hacked.
Wicks also allegedly admitted to agents that he was using the alias Trey Live while in an online relationship with the airport employee, and that he got contact information from the employee’s coworkers during a screen sharing session.
However, following a second interview with FBI agents, Wicks allegedly changed his story and admitted to making the bomb threats and to attempting to call a Washington, D.C., airport to make a threat, according to the affidavit.
Call records show that he sent more than a hundred messages to two American Airlines employees on Feb. 13 and 14, according to the affidavit.
The threats caused significant disruptions, including a five-hour delay of an American Airlines flight from Bangor to Reagan National Airport, costing the airline approximately $12,189, with total expenses related to the threats reaching $20,000, the affidavit indicates.
Wicks was arrested on Wednesday, and a public defender has been appointed to represent him. A hearing date before a federal judge has not yet been scheduled.
