Late construction, ‘odd’ behavior recalled by neighbor of Dilworth exploded home
The Chicago arrest of the Dilworth man whose home exploded May 2 came at the city’s Union Station after he arrived by Amtrak, according to new details in an arrest warrant obtained by The Charlotte Observer.
Michael E. Barnette, owner of 1645 Lombardy Circle, was detained by Amtrak and arrested by the Chicago Police Department after getting off a train in Illinois on May 9.
The Chicago police arrest report said there was a warrant for arson in North Carolina for the 41-year-old, and extradition documents from Mecklenburg County.
Barnette had a backpack filled with personal items, a cell phone, and $500 in cash when arrested.
He “requested to call the Pentagon switchboard,” the arrest report said.
The Charlotte Fire Department said Tuesday that Barnette was in the process of being extradited and that he was a suspect in the explosion. Mecklenburg County property records showed he purchased the home in 2012.
The home exploded and caught fire shortly after 6 a.m. No one was inside at the time, but two people — a neighbor and firefighter — sustained minor injuries.
The homes on either side of Barnette’s lot, which now sits a taped-off pile of brick and rubble, were condemned. One of those neighbors, Abigail Cousino, said that while Barnette could be “a little odd,” he seemed to change in the weeks leading up to the explosion.
Neighbor notices odd behavior
Cousino, who moved into an apartment next door to Barnette in 2023, said that the neighbors were always cordial to each other, often greeting each other or chatting when passing one another.
Barnette mostly kept to himself inside of his home or could be seen sitting in his backyard, she said.
Recently, he started leaving his windows open with no screens, and the lights on in his house all night for several days, Cousino said. And he also started stacking a large amount of wood from his backyard shed inside of his home, she said.
Another time, Barnette pulled up to the house in a Home Depot rental van with “a weird amount” of 25-gallon trash bins, Cousino said, guessing there may have been 15 of them.
“I started hearing construction happening in the house, like sometimes really late at night, where he was sawing things, he was hammering things,” she said. She said she thought it was odd he was doing construction since he was trying to sell his home.
A couple of nights prior, Cousino said she could hear his smoke alarms chirping through the open windows, “as in, they have been disconnected.”
Alarmed by all of this, she said she considered calling the police to do a wellness check, but worried she was being paranoid. The night before the explosion, Cousino said she waited to catch sight of Barnette to ask him what was going on and if he sold the house.
“He was like, ‘No, I didn’t sell the house,’ and I said, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry to hear that,’” she said. “He said, ‘It’s okay. We’ll chat later, but I have a plan.’”
A gasoline smell, then explosion
Cousino, a college teacher, said she wakes up early to check on her plants.
She was in the middle of her routine the morning of the explosion when she said she smelled natural gas. She looked at Barnette’s house and saw his back door and window were open and jokingly wondered to herself if Barnette planned to blow up his house. She said she chalked the smell up to construction of a large apartment building up the street.
When she walked into her backyard she smelled gasoline.
“Then the house exploded,” Cousino said. If she had been on her front porch, she said, she’d be dead or seriously injured.
The explosion destroyed her apartment’s front porch, and the refrigerator from his kitchen blew over right next to where her front porch used to be. The fire from the explosion damaged her apartment, burning through the roof into the attic and making it unlivable.
Aside from some clothes and dishes in her kitchen, Cousino’s “little life” she had just built was destroyed. She’s currently staying with a friend, and will stay at her landlord’s home for a couple of weeks while he’s on vacation, but is trying to figure out where she’ll live next.
This story was originally published May 14, 2025 at 10:57 AM.
