THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Last Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included "STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!"
On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim man she connected with online, her family says. Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.
Now, she is in the custody of the Irish police, along with six other individuals, arrested as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit murder, according to officials familiar with the case. The nature of the authorities' suspicions about Ms. Paulin-Ramirez couldn't be determined on Friday.
Ms. Paulin-Ramirez's interest in Islam "came out of left field," said her mother, Christine Holcomb-Mott, in an interview at her home Friday, wearing a blue sweatsuit with a silver cross around her neck.
"I'm angry with her right now," Ms. Holcomb-Mott said. "I'd like to just choke her. But I'm worried about her, too. I love my daughter."
Nearby was a stack of photos of Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, with a sparkling smile, and her son, who has brown hair and eyes. Her mother looked at the images over and over, as college basketball played on the TV.
Ms. Paulin-Ramirez had been in contact by phone and email with her mother, stepfather and an aunt, her relatives said. But none of them has heard from Ms. Paulin-Ramirez in recent days, they said.
Ms. Paulin-Ramirez is the second American woman to be linked to an alleged plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist who made fun of the Prophet Mohammed. An indictment was unsealed this week against Colleen R. LaRose, 46, a suburban Philadelphia woman who authorities said used the Web alias "JihadJane." >>> Vanessa O’Connell in New York, Stephanie Simon in Colorado and Evan Perez in Washington | Friday, March 12, 2010
