The explosion shook the bottles on the dressing table in Dr. Trent Pierce’s West Memphis home, shattering the 8 a.m. calm on Feb. 4, 2009.
The doctor’s wife, Melissa, thought an electrical transformer had blown. Instead, her husband, then-chairman of the Arkansas State Medical Board, had triggered a hand grenade rigged to a spare tire leaning against his Lexus.
“I heard the most God-awful sound you have ever heard,” Melissa Pierce testified. She recalled finding her husband of 30 years charred and unrecognizable, sitting beside his SUV in the circular driveway. He would survive, but he lives with lasting injuries.
Another physician, Randeep Mann, now lives in a federal prison in Tucson, Arizona, convicted of conspiring to injure Pierce by bombing. Sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years, Mann, 62, still maintains his innocence and points to cracks in the prosecution’s case, which held that Mann sought vengeance against Pierce for causing him to lose his permit to prescribe controlled pharmaceuticals.
Mann notes that authorities never identified any alleged co-conspirator or conspirators who might have made and planted the bomb. Mann himself had an alibi.
A dozen years after the crime, he is intensifying his fight to overturn the convictions, which relied in part on the testimony of a jailhouse informant.
In August 2010, after a five-week trial, Mann was convicted of charges related to property damage to Pierce’s vehicle, obstruction and possession of unregistered weapons. An Indian immigrant, he had been a pain management doctor and was a licensed firearms dealer at the time of the blast.
As to the person or persons who left the bomb in Pierce’s driveway, the U.S. attorney’s office in Little Rock said via email last month that it couldn’t confirm or deny any continuing investigation. Mann, who appealed to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis but saw his convictions upheld, had attorney John William Simon of St. Louis file his latest motion in Little Rock in January for the U.S. District Court to overturn the convictions.
“Things are looking better,” Mann said in a letter to Arkansas Business. “Heck, when you are doing life, anything and everything looks better. All I can say is keep watching. This new round is just beginning.”
For more than a year, Mann has been writing Arkansas Business to tell a story he declined to tell at trial. He raises doubts about a case that produced no physical evidence tying him to the bombing, nor any witnesses to any plot.
Federal prosecutors conceded that no direct evidence proved Mann’s role in the bombing, but in 2011 told the Court of Appeals that “there was more than enough evidence from which the jury could reasonably and legally infer his guilt.”
That evidence, the government said, included Mann’s access to the type of grenade used in the bombing, his vengeful motive to harm Pierce, and his previous violent statements against the medical board. The government also had testimony from a man who said he heard Mann make statements that were “tantamount to a confession,” according to filings by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Karen Whatley and Michael Gordon.
Mann says evidence that surfaced after his conviction should compound doubts about his guilt, but he believes that Americans naturally resist concluding that he was wrongly convicted. “You will have a problem getting the public to believe it,” he said in a letter to Arkansas Business. “Such things ‘never’ happen in our great Nation, the one with the best legal system in the world.”
The Hunt for the Bomber
As doctors operated on Pierce’s ravaged body in February 2009 — his wounds included loss of his left eye, bone injuries, cuts and damage to both eardrums — agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives quickly identified Mann as a person of interest.
David Oliver, a special agent with the ATF, testified at the trial that he asked the medical board for a list of five doctors who had been recently disciplined. His hunch was that the bomber might have an ax to grind with the board. Mann was on the list.
A doctor since the 1980s, Mann had grown up in India and graduated from the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune. He and Sangeeta “Sue” Mann married in 1983 and emigrated to the United States. He had a number of internships and internal medicine roles at places that included MedStar Good Samaritan Hospital and Johns Hopkins Hospital, both in Baltimore.
The Manns moved to Memphis in 1992, and he practiced in area emergency rooms.
Outside of medicine, Mann began building a collection of semiautomatic weapons and other firearms, considering them an investment after noting how weapons prices were escalating in India. He received a federal firearms license in 1990, which meant he could buy and sell certain types of machine guns. At one point, his collection was worth about $1.5 million, Mann said.
In 1998, a motorcycle crash injured Mann’s back and left him unable to stand for long periods, ending his career as an emergency room physician. Envisioning a private practice, he was drawn to Arkansas for its seasons and scenery, he told Arkansas Business.
Mann had a massive patient load in Russellville and saw patients seven days a week, he said, but he never felt truly welcomed.
“I knew I would go down one day,” Mann said. “I just did not know how.”
Going Before the Board
In 2003, the medical board started receiving complaints that Mann was overprescribing narcotics. This led to a series of enforcement actions, including steps by the ATF, that Mann considered to be harassment.
In 2005, he filed a federal lawsuit against several agents alleging civil conspiracy and slander. His complaint said that the law enforcement officers had made statements accusing Mann of overprescribing medication, leading to the deaths and hospitalization of patients.
He said the officers also spread lies that he was exchanging drugs for sex.
The law officers denied the allegations, and the case was dismissed in 2006, the same year Mann was accused by the medical board of overprescribing drugs in cases that led to several deaths. Mann denies those accusations, but he nevertheless admitted overprescribing drugs and entered into a consent order with the board. As part of the agreement, he surrendered his Drug Enforcement Administration permit. Without the permit, he couldn’t prescribe narcotics, but he could practice medicine.
Mann told Arkansas Business he agreed to the order because he was scared and had been warned that the board could issue punishments as it saw fit.
In 2007, the board denied Mann’s request to reinstate his DEA permit. He asked again in 2008, but the board told him he needed to wait at least three years before it would consider allowing him his permit. Mann said a hearing was set for June 2009, but in January of that year the board received another complaint against him.
Despite losing his prescription privileges, Mann said, his practice thrived. He was helping chronic pain patients without relying on medications, making his practice “a lot less stressful and a lot more lucrative,” he said.
But prosecutors argued that the January complaint put Mann’s medical license — not just his DEA permit — in jeopardy, a threat that the government framed as an impetus for the bombing. Mann, however, said he didn’t receive notice of the complaint until after the bombing in February.
After the Bombing
Late on the day of the explosion, an ATF agent and special agent with the Arkansas State Police interviewed Mann and his wife at their home in London, just outside Russellville.
Drake Mann, no relation, a Little Rock attorney who represented Mann at the medical board, told his client not to talk to agents unless he was there. The physician didn’t listen; he talked to the agents and even showed them his collection of guns, which included a grenade launcher.
At the end of the interview, an agent asked Mann if he had done the bombing. “I was kind of taken back,” Mann told Arkansas Business. “I told them that it was one cowardly act and that I was no coward. I had boxed in school and college and was big into martial arts. For me it was man against man in a ring where one sorted out differences. … Personal conflicts were done in courts, again with no animus or hatred.”
Still, talking to the agents, “in retrospect, it may have been my biggest mistake,” Mann said. “It gave them my alibis and thereby provided them a template to build their case.”
He said he was at a Russelleville gym at 9:30 p.m. the night before the bombing. About three hours away in West Memphis, the Pierces’ housekeeper saw someone suspicious about 10:30 p.m. Investigators verified Mann’s alibi.
One development came about a month after the explosion, when a London city worker was in Mann’s neighborhood checking for water line leaks. The worker, Mark Rinke, testified at the trial that he was in a clearing at the end of a cul de sac within 1,000 feet of Mann’s house when he stepped on something buried in the ground.
Rinke started to pull the nearly covered object out of the ground, but then stopped, thinking he should mind his own business. He later told a coworker about the discovery, and they went back and dug up the item: an ammunition canister containing 98 40-millimeter grenades. They were compatible with the grenade launcher Mann had shown investigators the night of the bombing.
After the discovery of the grenades, agents obtained a search warrant for Mann’s house.
Tests later showed that the dug-up grenades were not the type used in the Pierce bombing. The search did lead, however, to a spare tire in one of Mann’s showers. He was arrested that day for possessing the unregistered grenades.
“In my subconscious I knew that this day would come, but no big deal, I would beat it,” Mann said. “They were wrong.”
“I thought there had been a big mistake and even had my wife schedule patients for the next day,” Mann said. “The misunderstanding would be taken care of and all would be fine.”
He has been behind bars ever since.
Building the Case
Shortly after the bombing, ATF Agent Norris talked to Velma Gales, a household employee who had worked for Trent and Melissa Pierce for a quarter-century.
Gales didn’t mention it then, but about five months later — in July 2009 — she told agents she’d seen a man jogging in place near the Pierces’ home the night before the explosion.
She described him as neither black nor white, but perhaps Iranian, with a baseball cap and a long ponytail hanging out. Gales said she didn’t report the suspicious activity sooner because she was afraid. “Look what happened to Dr. Pierce,” she testified. “If I told it, I was scared it would happen to me.”
Another turning point for the U.S. attorneys came in allegations made by Steven Briscoe, who was housed with Mann in the Pulaski County Detention Facility in August 2009. Briscoe, who was awaiting sentencing for being a felon in possession of a firearm, told the authorities that while he was jailed, Mann offered him $50,000 to kill Pierce. Mann “really needed this done,” Briscoe said, “because Dan and them didn’t do a good job the first time.” Mann didn’t make clear who “Dan and them” was, Briscoe testified.
The Manns have a son named Dan, but no official has suggested he was involved in the bombing.
On the witness stand, Briscoe said he had testified for the government against two other inmates who made jailhouse confessions to him. For his testimony in those two separate cases, Briscoe’s sentence was reduced. He said, however, that he was testifying against Mann “on my own free will” and wasn’t promised anything in return.
“You can call me an informant or snitch or whatever you want to,” Briscoe said. “I’ve got a conscience and I’ve got a heart, and I can tell you what he said to me.”
The U.S. attorney’s office did grant immunity to Lloyd Hahn of St. Charles, Missouri, who testified that he sold Mann weapons and eight concussion-type grenades in the late 1990s. That type of grenade was used in the Pierce bombing.
Mann’s Side of the Story
Mann’s defense attorney, Blake Hendrix of Little Rock, said in the trial’s closing arguments that the London city worker’s story of finding the grenades near Mann’s house didn’t make sense. “Why bury something in a clearing if you wanted to hide it? The story is simply implausible,” Hendrix said. “Whoever buried those 40-milimeter grenades, I suggest to you that they wanted them to be found.”
Tests of the canister showed no physical link to Mann. After the trial, Mann’s attorneys hired experts who examined photographs of the hole. They said the canister, 14.5 inches high and 18.5 inches long, was too big to fit in it. One expert said the maximum depth of the hole was just under 9 inches.
The ammunition canister did match a canister found in Mann’s home, the government said. But Hendrix noted that such canisters are common.
Mann told Arkansas Business that there was a simple explanation for the spare tire being in the shower: He was trying to wash algae off it. The spare tire came from his Mazda RX-7, whose hatchback had leaked. He said he didn’t want to clean it outside in the cold weather, so he scrubbed it in one of his seven bathrooms. Doing so didn’t seem unusual to him, Mann said.
Hendrix also raised questions about the Pierce housekeeper’s belated disclosure about seeing a jogger the night before the blast. “I gather the government’s trying to say that that is Dr. Mann’s accomplice,” Hendrix told the jury during his closing statement. “It’s still fuzzy and murky.” He said there were two problems with her statement. “One is, it just raised ethnicity, and that’s, frankly, offensive,” he said. He also wondered why she waited months to report what she saw. “She said she’s back working at the Pierces’ house,” he said. “There was nothing to be scared of.”
Mann’s attorneys also argued in their appeal that the grenades Hahn said he’d sold Mann were not actually the type used in the bombing. “Even assuming it was, it was speculation to conclude Mann supplied one to the bomber,” the appeal said. “Hahn sold eight devices to Mann as long as 15 years before the bombing, and to conclude he supplied the bomber with one requires the unreasonable inference that Mann kept eight MK3A2s in his possession for over a decade, even though the seven others were never found.”
‘Tore Up My Family’
On the third day of deliberation, the jury returned guilty verdicts against Mann for the charges relating to the bombing, possession of weapons and obstruction.
When the guilty verdicts were read, “the ATF agents were high fiving and all smiles,” Mann said. Meanwhile, his wife fainted.
“When I asked the U.S. marshals to lay her down, they refused to do so or let me come close to her,” Mann said. “This saga has tore up my family.”
Pierce, meanwhile, continues to practice family medicine at his clinic in West Memphis. Pierce was unavailable for comment last week, but the clinic’s website said he “plays an active part in the community, sings tenor in the First Methodist Church choir, and many days at lunch can be caught at Sonic!”
Mann said life in prison is like being in a nursing home. There are running tracks, indoor and outdoor basketball courts and ping-pong tables and pool tables. “It does sound good, but not a utopia by far,” he said.
For a while he taught classes to inmates seeking their GED degrees. He stopped because of his back problems. These days he sits in his unit, watching TV, doing legal work or reading books.
“The routine here is one of boredom. It is my destiny. I can handle it,” Mann said. “More people have suffered greater. I will not quit fighting this ordeal.”
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