There was a time in Cody Balmer’s life where, from the outside, you might say things were on an even keel.
He was a married home-owner, working full-time as an auto mechanic at a well-regarded shop, and a fixture at his kid’s youth sports events.
“Always seemed like a hard-working family man,” one casual acquaintance from those days told PennLive Monday afternoon, as everyone looked for causal clues to why Balmer would have drawn up and executed a scheme to firebomb the Governor’s Residence in Harrisburg early Sunday morning.
We don’t have Balmer’s precise thoughts on that yet.
The 38-year-old, who surrendered to police later Sunday, was arraigned Monday afternoon on attempted homicide and other counts stemming from the arson attack that caused a rushed evacuation of Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family, and left major damage to several public areas of the residence.
Police will be poring over his computer and cellphone files in the days to come, as they try to understand whether the attack should also be charged as a hate crime.
We’ll all learn more about that another day.
But Balmer’s paper trail of mortgage foreclosures, custody fights and lower-level brushes with the law — and at one point, even an attempted suicide — also paint a picture of a guy for whom life appeared to be melting down.
He crashed during the past week — his saddened mother, Christie, told reporters Monday morning that she had tried to get her son hospitalized on a mental health commitment late last week — starting two days before Saturday’s nightmare.
Penbrook Police said that, at that time, Cody Balmer had not been violent, and he had not made any threats of violence against anyone, so they didn’t feel they had a legal case for an involuntary commitment.
Now, said Christie Balmer, frustrated at descriptions of her son as a domestic terrorist, it’s too late.
“This whole thing could have been avoided if they had picked him up that night,” she told PennLive. “He’s just somebody who is mentally ill.”
Balmer, a 2005 graduate of Dauphin County Vocational Technical School, eventually landed a job as a line mechanic at Kinderman’s Auto Care in Harrisburg.
These were, his mother said Monday night, some of his best days.
But as is the case with most lives, things didn’t always move in a straight-line fashion.
Balmer was charged in February 2015 with two counts of forgery after obtaining and altering a paycheck meant for a Royer’s Flowers employee and trying to cash it as his own.
It was not immediately clear how Balmer got possession of the check, but he pleaded guilty and was ordered to serve 18 months probation.
After that, Balmer had little public record of trouble until 2022, when the financing company holding the mortgage on his Canby Street home in Penbrook moved to foreclose.
In January 2023, Balmer reached a crisis point.
Court records from the incident said Cody took a bottle of pills with the intention of killing himself on Jan. 29, the same day in which he got into a fight with his then-wife, Adrian Jones.
He struck her and Jones’s 13-year-old son, who stepped in between Cody and his wife, in the face according to court records, and threw repeated elbows at another, younger boy.
Cody then punched Jones in the face, she told police, and he later bit her hand.
Balmer was given an 18-day commitment at the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute at that time — it’s where he was diagnosed as bipolar, his Mom recalls — and charged with two counts of simple assault upon his discharge.
The assault case remains open in Dauphin County Court, though Balmer and Jones’s divorce was finalized earlier this year.
Sometime later in 2023, Cody Balmer left his job at Kinderman’s after unspecified disagreements with the owner, Dipesh Modi.
Nothing outrageous, Modi said Monday.
“He just didn’t agree with my vision for the business,” Modi said, “and it was one of things where, OK, I’m the boss. If you don’t do it my way you can’t work here any more.”
So now, that man with a family, his own home and a stable job was suddenly on the verge of losing all three.
Balmer’s Facebook postings from the last several years often touched on national politics and criticisms of the government as a whole.
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Other posts insinuated Balmer felt let down by society.
“Take the day off from being the bigger person and choose violence, you deserve it,” said a post that Balmer reposted to his account on June 29, 2021.
In 2022, around the time foreclosure proceedings had begun on the Canby Street house, Balmer wrote on Facebook:
“Can’t pay rent? Sell your (expletive) organs! No more organs? (Expletive) die then this is America be grateful for the opportunity you had.”
Balmer found a buyer willing to pay $60,000 for the home, but while awaiting his lender’s approval to accept the sale for less than the amount Balmer still owed on the property — what’s known as a “short sale.”
It meant that Balmer walked away debt-free, but with no real assets either.
He has spent about a year now living with his parents.
Most recently, Cody Balmer worked as a welder with Morgan Truck Body. His Mom said he left that position several weeks ago.
Christie said her son has not been taking his medications prescribed for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder recently.
And his mental detachment was hard to miss, she said.
“He was talking about demons, and that he was clairvoyant,” Mrs. Balmer said. “He told us that he ate a battery.”
So she called for help.
But officials have said this week, they heard nothing about violence.
Then on Sunday, we all heard about it.
Pennsylvania State Police have said Balmer has admitted to pouring gasoline from a lawnmower into two Heineken beer bottles that he carried with him early Sunday to the Governor’s Residence at 2035 N. Front St. in Harrisburg.
Balmer climbed over a fence encircling the property, then broke two windows with a small sledgehammer, according to an affidavit of probable cause. He threw the beer bottles into the house, court documents said, starting fires that severely damaged the home’s historic piano and dining rooms.
Court documents said Balmer harbored a hatred against Governor Josh Shapiro, but it’s not clear he knew the Shapiros were in the Residence that night.
Asked what he would have done if he had encountered the governor, police said Balmer stated he “probably” would have beat Shapiro with the sledgehammer.
That never happened. Almost as soon as alarms were triggered at the Residence, members of the governor’s executive detail rushed Shapiro and his family out of the property without injury.
Balmer, during his arraignment Monday, declared to Magisterial District Judge Dale Klein that he does not have mental health issues.
His Mom, aching for her son and what he’s accused of having done, saw that as just more proof that he does.
A preliminary hearing is tentatively set for 11 a.m. April 23, before Magisterial District Judge Matthew Pianka in Harrisburg.