US Man charged with sending dozens of violent threats to LGBTQ teams

A Long Island man was charged Monday with threatening violence in opposition to LGBTQ teams and leaders in dozens of hate-filled letters, together with one warning of an assault that will make the mass capturing at a homosexual nightclub in Florida “look like a cakewalk.”
The man, Robert Fehring, 74, of Bayport, New York, despatched the letters over the course of eight years beginning in 2013, based on a federal legal grievance wherein he was charged with making threats by way of the US mail.
A search of his house final month by FBI brokers turned up two loaded shotguns, a whole lot of rounds of ammunition, two stun weapons, an American flag-patterned machete and a DVD titled “Underground Build Your Own Silencer System,” the grievance says.
Investigators additionally discovered a stamped envelope addressed to a lawyer who had labored on LGBTQ-related instances, the grievance says. Inside had been the stays of a useless fowl.

“The defendant’s hate-filled invective and threats of violence directed at members of the LGBTQ+ community have no place in our society,” Breon Peace, the US lawyer in Brooklyn, mentioned in an announcement asserting the costs.
Fehring’s lawyer, Glenn Obedin, mentioned in an announcement that his shopper “respects the legal process, and asks that the process be allowed to play itself out to its appropriate and lawful conclusion.”
David Kilmnick, the president of the New York LGBT Network, which operates 4 group centres on Long Island and in Queens and runs the annual Long Island Pride occasion, mentioned he had combined emotions about Fehring’s arrest.
Most of the letters that Fehring is charged with sending went to Kilmnick, his group and different LGBTQ organizations and leaders on Long Island.
Kilmnick mentioned he was glad somebody had lastly been charged with making the threats. But he additionally expressed frustration over the failure of the Suffolk County, New York, police — which had investigated a number of the letters in recent times — to make an arrest sooner.
“There is no reason why we had to live through this fear and anxiety for the past eight years,” Kilmnick mentioned.
In an announcement, the Suffolk County Police Department mentioned that its Hate Crimes Unit investigates each report that it will get.

Its investigation into the threats attributed to Fehring by federal authorities “became part of a larger FBI investigation that our department fully cooperated with,” the assertion mentioned. The division referred all different inquiries to the FBI, which didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
According to the grievance, investigators recognized not less than 60 letters from Fehring, postmarked from June 2013 to September of this yr, wherein he mentioned he would use weapons and explosives to assault LGBTQ teams and other people. Copies of a number of the letters had been discovered throughout the FBI’s search of his house, the grievance says.
A May 20 letter addressed to the manager director of a bunch concerned in planning LGBTQ occasions warned of a serious assault on New York City’s Pride March this yr, the grievance says.
In the letter, based on the grievance, Fehring mentioned that “we” would use radio-controlled units at “numerous strategic places, and firepower aimed at you from other strategic places.”
“This will make the 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting look like a cakewalk,” he wrote, the grievance says. In June 2016, Omar Mateen fatally shot 49 individuals at Pulse, a homosexual nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
Kilmnick mentioned that the primary threatening letter despatched to his group, in 2013, warned of violence that will make the Boston Marathon bombing pale as compared.

The different letters that Fehring is accused of sending, based on the grievance, embrace one this yr threatening to shoot a high-powered rifle at a Long Island Pride occasion in June; one other warning an area Chamber of Commerce member that ambulances can be wanted if the group allowed an LGBTQ occasion to proceed; and a 3rd describing a Brooklyn barbershop as a “perfect target for a bombing.”
If convicted, Fehring, whom Newsday recognized as a retired highschool trainer, band director and monitor coach, faces as much as 5 years in jail.

Court information present that he sued the Suffolk County police unsuccessfully after being taken into custody in 2010 after an off-duty officer noticed him conceal a shotgun beneath a raincoat and produce it right into a Long Island workplace constructing.
After an preliminary look in US District Court in Central Islip, he was launched on a $100,000 bond, confined to house detention and ordered to put on a monitoring machine, officers mentioned.
Kilmnick expressed outrage over Fehring’s launch given the character of the threats he’s charged with making and the weapons that had been seized from his house.
“This guy should not be out on bail,” Kilmnick mentioned.