Ex-Reporter Charged With Making Bomb Threats Against Jewish Sites -
By BENJAMIN WEISERMARCH 3, 2017
A former reporter for a news website was charged on Friday with making more than a half-dozen bomb threats against Jewish community centers, schools
and a Jewish history museum, federal authorities said.
“We are committed to pursuing and prosecuting those who foment fear and hate through such criminal threats.”
said that its director, James B. Comey, and top bureau officials had held a meeting on Friday with Jewish community leaders to discuss the recent increase in threats to Jewish institutions around the country, and
that the investigation into the threats was “a top priority.”
Mr. Thompson was arrested on Friday in St. Louis, where a federal magistrate judge
ordered him held without bond pending a detention hearing on Wednesday.
In a threat made on Feb. 22 to the Anti-Defamation League in New York, the complaint says, a caller, using an untraceable phone number and a tool
that disguised the caller’s voice, said there was C-4, an explosive material, in the group’s New York office, and that it would be “detonated within one hour.” The office was immediately searched and no explosives were found.
In one threat, made on Feb. 1 against a Jewish school in Farmington Hills, Mich., the complaint says, Mr. Thompson claimed he had placed two bombs in the school
and was “eager for Jewish newtown,” an apparent reference to the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Conn., in which a gunman killed 20 students and six school employees.
The man, Juan Thompson, 31, of St. Louis, made some of the threats using his own name
and others implicating a former girlfriend as part of an effort to intimidate her, the authorities said in a federal complaint unsealed on Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
