A 19-year-old Texas man was slapped with a two-year prison sentence Monday for threatening to blow up the Federal Reserve in a Twitter post, federal prosecutors announced.
Joel Hayden Schrimsher told the FBI he was just being “edgy” when he said in a post last year, “I’m gonna mail a bomb to the Federal Reserve,” the US Attorney’s Office in Southern Texas said in a press release.
When cops raided Schrimsher’s home in Harlingen on June 6, 2019, they found chemicals and bomb-making recipes, along with a phony certificate on his cellphone declaring himself “Most Likely to Damage Federal Property,” prosecutors said.
Authorities said they also found items glorifying Nazis, racist photos, and pics of school shootings on his phone, the Valley Morning Star said.
“The FBI and our law enforcement partners take threats of violence very seriously,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Christopher Combs said in a statement. “While law enforcement is committed to investigating these threats, members of the public play a critical role in helping law enforcement protect our community from violence by reporting online threats.”
Schrimsher admitted he posted the threat but said he wasn’t serious, while his father testified at an earlier hearing that the chemicals found by cops were used to make a smoke bomb at a family cookout several years earlier, the Morning Star said.
But US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez sentenced Schrimsher to 24 months in prison and he is waiting for transfer to a federal penitentiary.