Aug. 13 (UPI) — A former Cornell University student has been sentenced to nearly two years behind federal bars for posting threats online targeting his school’s Jewish community.
Patrick Dai, 22, of Pittsford, N.Y., was handed the 21-month sentence Monday, four months after he pled guilty in April to posting threats to kill or injure another person using interstate communications.
Dai was a junior at Cornell in late October when he posted threatening messages to the Cornell section of an online discussion forum.
Excerpts of the posts reproduced in statements from the Justice Department show he threatened to “shoot up” 104 West!, Cornell’s kosher dining room that is located next to the Center for Jewish Living facility, as well as “bomb jewish house.”
He also threatened to bring an assault rifle to campus to “shoot all you pig jews,” according to federal prosecutors, who added that he vowed to stab and slit the throat of any Jewish man he saw at Cornell and rape and throw off a cliff any Jewish woman. Jewish babies, he said, according to prosecutors, would be beheaded.
Dai was quickly identified after the posts were published online and he has remained at the Broome County Jail since his arrest.
“Every student has the right to pursue their education without fear of violence based on who they are, how they look, where they are from or how they worship. Anti-Semitic threats of violence, like the defendant’s vicious and graphic threats here, violate that right,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said Monday in a statement.
United States Attorney Carla Freedman said Dai’s actions “terrorized” the Cornell campus for days “and shattered the community’s sense of safety.”
The threats were communicated less than a month after Hamas launched a bloody assault on Israel that killed some 1,200 Israelis and ignited the ongoing war between the Iran-backed militia and the Middle Eastern country.
Lisa Peebles, a federal public defender and Dia’s legal representative, told The New York Times in an email that her client is not anti-Semitic and that the posts had been a misguided effort to “expose the atrocities of Hamas and garner sympathy for the Jewish community.”
She explained that Dia is autistic and can function like a child between the ages of 5 and 10.
“He is deeply sorry for the hurt he caused,” Peebles said, The Times reported. She also suggested that the crime is what led to his autism diagnosis.
Dia was also sentenced Monday to three years’ post-incarceration supervised release that is to include no contact with his former university and mental health treatment. Other restrictions imposed as part of the sentence include monitoring of his electronic devices and use of the Internet.