Cottman Avenue in northern Philadelphia is a busy but slightly down-on-its-luck urban thoroughfare that has had a strange couple of years.
You might remember the truly bizarre 2020 press conference held—for no discernible reason—at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a half block off Cottman Avenue, where a not-yet-disbarred Rudy Giuliani led a farcical ensemble of characters in an event so weird it has been immortalized in its own, quite lengthy, Wikipedia article.
Then in 2023, a truck carrying gasoline caught fire just a block away, right where Cottman passes under I-95. The resulting fire damaged I-95 in both directions, bringing down several lanes and closing I-95 completely for some time. (This also generated a Wikipedia article.)
This year, on January 31, a little further west on Cottman, a Learjet 55 medevac flight crashed one minute after takeoff from Northeast Philadelphia Airport. The plane, fully loaded with fuel for a trip to Springfield, Missouri, came down near a local mall, clipped a commercial sign, and exploded in a fireball when it hit the ground. The crash generated a debris field 1,410 feet long and 840 feet wide, according to the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB), and it killed six people on the plane and one person on the ground.
The crash was important enough to attract the attention of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. (The airplane crew and passengers were all Mexican citizens; they were transporting a young patient who had just wrapped up treatment at a Philadelphia hospital.) And yes, it, too, generated a Wikipedia article.
NTSB has been investigating ever since, hoping to determine the cause of the accident. Tracking data showed that the flight reached an altitude of 1,650 feet before plunging to earth, but the plane’s pilots never conveyed any distress to the local air traffic control tower.
Investigators searched for the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, which might provide clues as to what was happening in the cockpit during the crash. The Learjet did have such a recorder, though it was an older, tape-based model. (Newer ones are solid-state, with fewer moving parts.) Still, even this older tech should have recorded the last 30 minutes of audio, and these units are rated to withstand impacts of 3,400 Gs and to survive fires of 1,100° Celsius (2,012° F) for a half hour. Which was important, given that the plane had both burst into flames and crashed directly into the ground.
It’s a truism at this point to say that Americans own a lot of guns. Case in point: This week, a fire chief in rural Alabama stopped to help a driver who had just hit a deer. The two men walked up the driveway of a nearby home. For reasons that remain unclear, a man came out of the house with a gun and started shooting. This was a bad idea on many levels, but most practically because both the fire chief and the driver were also armed. Between the three of them, everyone got shot, the fire chief died, and the man who lived in the home was charged with murder.
But despite the ease of acquiring legal weapons, a robust black market still exists to traffic in things like “ghost guns” (no serial numbers) and machine gun converters (which make a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic). According to a major new report released this month by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, there was a 1,600 percent increase in the use of privately made “ghost guns” during crimes between 2017 and 2023. Between 2019 and 2023, the seizure of machine gun converters also increased by 784 percent.
Ars Technica has covered these issues for years, since both “ghost guns” and machine gun converters can be produced using 3D-printed parts, the schematics for which are now widely available online. But you can know about an issue and still be surprised when local prosecutors start talking about black market trafficking rings, inept burglary schemes, murder—and 3D printing operations being run out of a local apartment.
Philadelphia story
I live in the Philadelphia area, and this is a real Philadelphia story; I know all of the places in it well. Many people in this story live in Philadelphia proper, but the violence (and the 3D printing!) they are accused of took place in the suburbs, in places like Jenkintown, Lower Merion township, and Bucks County. If you know Philly at all, you may know that these are all west and northwest suburban areas and that all of them are fairly comfortable places overall. Indeed, The New York Times ran a long story this month called “How Sleepy Bucks County Became a Rival to the Hamptons.” Lower Merion is one of the wealthier Philly suburbs, while Jenkintown is a charming little northwest suburb that was also the setting for the long-running sitcom The Goldbergs. Local county prosecutors are more often busting up shipments of fake Jason Kelce-autographed merch or going after—and later not going after—comedian Bill Cosby.
But today, prosecutors in Montgomery County announced something different: they had cracked open a local 3D-printing black market gun ring—and said that one of the group’s 3D-printed guns was used last month to murder a man during a botched burglary.
Mug shots of Fuentes and Fulforth. Credit: Montco DA’s Office
It’s a pretty bizarre story. As the police tell it, things began with 26-year-old Jeremy Fuentes driving north to a Bucks County address. Fuentes worked for a junk hauling company in nearby Willow Grove, and he had gone to Bucks County to give an estimate for a job. While the homeowner was showing Fuentes around the property, Fuentes allegedly noticed “a large gun safe, multiple firearms boxes, gun parts and ammunition” in the home.
Outside of work, Fuentes was said to be a member of a local black market gun ring, and so when he saw this much gun gear in one spot—and when he noted that the homeowners were elderly—he saw dollar signs. Police say that after the estimate visit, Fuentes contacted Charles Fulforth, 41, of Jenkintown, who was a key member of the gun ring.
Fuentes had an idea: Fulforth should rob the home and steal all the gun-related supplies. Unfortunately, the group was not great at directions. Fuentes didn’t provide complete and correct information, so when Fulforth and an accomplice went to rob the home in December 2024, they drove to a Lower Merion home instead. This home was not in Bucks County at all—in fact, it was 30 minutes south—but it had a similar street address to the home Fuentes had visited.
When they invaded the Lower Merion home on December 8, the two burglars found not an elderly couple but a 25-year-old man named Andrew Gaudio and his 61-year-old mother, Bernadette. Andrew was killed, while Bernadette was shot but survived.
Police arrested Fulforth just three days later, on December 11, and they picked up his fellow burglar on December 17. But the cops didn’t immediately realize just what they had stumbled into. Only after they searched Fulforth’s Jenkintown apartment and found a 9 mm 3D-printed gun did they realize this might be more than a simple burglary. How had Fulforth acquired the weapon?
According to a statement on the case released today by the Montgomery County District Attorney, the investigation involved “search warrants on multiple locations and forensic searches of mobile phones,” which revealed that Fulforth had his own “firearm production facility”—aka, “a group of 3D printers.” Detectives even found a video of a Taurus-style gun part being printed on the devices, and they came to believe that the gun used to kill Andrew Gaudio was “one of many manufactured by Fulforth.”
In addition to making ghost gun parts at his “highly sophisticated, clandestine firearms production facility,” Fulforth was also accused of making machine gun converters with 3D-printed parts. These parts would be preinstalled in the guns that the group was trafficking to raise their value. According to investigators, “From the review of the captured cellphone communications among the gun trafficking members, the investigation found that when [machine gun conversion] switches were installed on AR pistols, it increased the price of the firearm by at least $1,000.”
Fuentes, who had initially provided the address that led to the murder, was arrested this morning. Authorities have also charged five others with being part of the gun ring.
So, a tragic and stupid story, but one that highlights just how mainstream 3D-printing tech has become. No massive production facility or dimly lit warehouse is needed—just put a few printers in a bedroom and you, too, can become a local gun trafficking kingpin.
There’s nothing novel about any of this, and in fact, fewer people were shot than in that bizarre Alabama gun battle mentioned up top. Still, it hits home when a technology I’ve both written and read about for years on Ars shows up in your community—and leaves a man dead.
A bunch of eighth graders in a “wealthy Philadelphia suburb” recently targeted teachers with an extreme online harassment campaign that The New York Times reported was “the first known group TikTok attack of its kind by middle schoolers on their teachers in the United States.”
According to The Times, the Great Valley Middle School students created at least 22 fake accounts impersonating about 20 teachers in offensive ways. The fake accounts portrayed long-time, dedicated teachers sharing “pedophilia innuendo, racist memes,” and homophobic posts, as well as posts fabricating “sexual hookups among teachers.”
The Pennsylvania middle school’s principal, Edward Souders, told parents in an email that the number of students creating the fake accounts was likely “small,” but that hundreds of students piled on, leaving comments and following the fake accounts. Other students responsibly rushed to report the misconduct, though, Souders said.
“I applaud the vast number of our students who have had the courage to come forward and report this behavior,” Souders said, urging parents to “please take the time to engage your child in a conversation about the responsible use of social media and encourage them to report any instances of online impersonation or cyberbullying.”
Some students claimed that the group attack was a joke that went too far. Certain accounts impersonating teachers made benign posts, The Times reported, but other accounts risked harming respected teachers’ reputations. When creating fake accounts, students sometimes used family photos that teachers had brought into their classrooms or scoured the Internet for photos shared online.
Following The Times’ reporting, the superintendent of the Great Valley School District (GVSD), Daniel Goffredo, posted a message to the community describing the impact on teachers as “profound.” One teacher told The Times that she felt “kicked in the stomach” by the students’ “savage” behavior, while another accused students of slander and character assassination. Both were portrayed in fake posts with pedophilia innuendo.
“I implore you also to use the summer to have conversations with your children about the responsible use of technology, especially social media,” Goffredo said. “What seemingly feels like a joke has deep and long-lasting impacts, not just for the targeted person but for the students themselves. Our best defense is a collaborative one.”
Goffredo confirmed that the school district had explored legal responses to the group attack. But ultimately the district found that they were “limited” because “courts generally protect students’ rights to off-campus free speech, including parodying or disparaging educators online—unless the students’ posts threaten others or disrupt school,” The Times reported.
Instead, the middle school “briefly suspended several students,” teachers told The Times, and held an eighth-grade assembly raising awareness of harms of cyberbullying, inviting parents to join.
Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association—which is the largest US teachers’ union—told The Times that teachers have never dealt with such harassment on this scale. Typically, The Times reported, students would target a single educator at a time. Pringle said teachers risk online harassment being increasingly normalized. That “could push educators to question” leaving the profession, Pringle said, at a time when the US Department of Education is already combating a teacher shortage.
While Goffredo said teachers had few options to fight back, he also told parents in an email that the district is “committed to working with law enforcement to support teachers who may pursue legal action.”
“I reiterate my disappointment and sadness that our students’ behavior has caused such duress for our staff,” Goffredo’s message to the community said. “Seeing GVSD in such a prominent place in the news for behavior like this is also disheartening.”
