UPDATE: Germantown Man Blows Off Hand With Explosive

Federal authorities investigating; the artist has had explosive issues before.

Fox 29 reports:

A Philadelphia man now faces a slew of charges after ATF and police search his Germantown home, just hours after they say he blew his hand off with an explosive device.

The district attorney’s office says Douglas Ferrin was unconscious Thursday evening at Einstein Medical Center.

“He was out here, at like four o’clock in the morning, I heard him just screaming, like oooh, help,” neighbor Robert Lawton said.

The station reports Ferrin served 162 days in jail, three years ago, on a conviction of “reckless burning or exploding.” Ferrin was also accused in Florida a few years back of setting off an explosion with five pounds of gunpowder. All of which, if true, probably means the day of the blown-off hand was pretty much an inevitability.

[Update 2:20 p.m.] It appears that Ferrin is also a well-regarded artist — the self-portraits of the artist (also at his Facebook page) seem to match Fox 29’s photo above.

The Art Room in 2013 published an interview with the artist Ferrin that included this exchange:

TD: You have recently had to spend some time in jail. Would you care to talk about this? 

DF: My advice is don’t go to jail. I’ve recently finished an article about my experience there that I’m hoping to publish, and I’ll let you know if it does. It was the second most terrible experience of my life and I came out of it a changed, darker person.

The American jail and prison system has nothing to do with rehabilitation or correction: it is simply about punishment; also, it is a huge money making machine (albeit a broken machine) for the private companies that run it, such as Aramark, Prime Medical and Wackenhut. It is interesting to note that fully one percent of all American adults are incarcerated. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Almost everyone I met while in jail was there for the same reason that I was: getting drunk and doing something stupid. I myself blew up a toilet with an M-80. No one was hurt, or even close to being, but I spent six months in a medium security lock-up for my idiotic crime. Six months is the standard amount of time in lock-up before seeing a judge.