“Dozens of threats to execute grade-school kids”: Madness of a 9/11 truther
How a father with a Twitter account stopped a homegrown terrorist in his tracks
Skip to CommentsTopics: 9/11, Anti-Semitism, David Joseph Lenio, Editor's Picks, Guns, homegrown terrorist, John Hutson, Montana, News
How do you stop a bad man with a gun? How about a good man with a Twitter account? That’s how things played out over the President’s Day weekend.
It began on Saturday night with a single tweet by Jonathan Hutson—linking to a New York Times story about that day’s deadly attacks at a free-speech event and synagogue in Copenhagen—and a torrent of hateful responses, including threats to kill schoolchildren and Jews. It ended with the arrest of a 28-year-old suspect, David Joseph Lenio, late Monday afternoon at Whitefish Mountain Resort, near Kalispell in Flathead County, Montana, just one county east of Idaho, immediately south of the Canadian border. In the interim, Lenio had retrieved two rifles from a storage locker, one a semi-automatic to add to his semi-automatic pistol. If it hadn’t been a three-day weekend, there’s no telling what he might have done before the police and the FBI caught up with him.
“He had motive, and he had means,” Hutson told Salon, “and one sheriff’s deputy told me, ‘Thank God it’s Presidents’ Day weekend; because of the holiday we have an extra day to track him down and try to catch him.’ And they did. They also had a plan for the schools, to go on soft lockdown, and have enhanced security. They took it very seriously.”
Lenio is now in jail on felony charges of malicious intimidation and criminal defamation, and on a half-million dollar bond. But it’s easy to see that it could have ended up like another Sandy Hook instead.
“I can tell you as a mom, and as one of two rabbis in the Flathead Valley, this event really rocked the community,” Rabbi Francine Green Roston told Salon. That placed her in the very center of those most targeted by his threats.
“Thank you, Jon. Really, deeply, thank you,” Antonia Malchik, the mother of Whitefish first-grader tweeted Hutson in gratitude.
“I was terrified. It sounds so overblown,” Malchik, a writer, told Salon. “I’m from this area, but we recently moved back from upstate New York, and we lived quite close to Newtown, Connecticut, and ever since that happened … Yeah. I was terrified.”
“Thank you for your kind words, Antonia. I’m hearing from a lot of Montana Moms. I did what any Dad or Mom would do,” Hutson tweeted back.
“But you were paying attention & followed through,” Malchik responded. “For that we’re so grateful, to you & law enforcement.”
“I am a parent of a child in Whitefish, Montana,” another mother emailed. “Thank you for reporting David Lenio’s threats to the FBI. I cannot fully express my gratitude to you for your efforts in this particular situation and for the work you do for the Brady Campaign. Your humble response that you were just a concerned dad warms my heart.”
By day, you see, Hutson is communications director for the Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a job he’s held since last Dec. 1. But 24/7 he’s the father of a first-grade son, and that’s the role that was really key in motivating him, especially after his hate-filled interlocutor—original identified only as “@PyschicDogTalk2”— asked him where his own children went to school.
“That chilled my blood,” Hutson recalled, and it motivated him to keep working until the suspect, David Joseph Lenio, was safely in custody. By then, he’d already encountered “dozens of threats to execute grade-school kids and Jews.”
“It’s very difficult as a dad trying to explain to my first-grader what was going on,” Hutson reflected. “He got up on Sunday morning and he saw daddy on the computer, and he heard daddy on the phone, and he wanted me to play video games with him. And I wanted to, but I just couldn’t.” The pain was palpable in Hutson’s voice. “So I had to explain to him why I couldn’t play with him, why I had to be stuck on the computer and on the phone. And it broke my heart to shatter his innocence and reveal to him the idea, which was totally novel, that a bad man with the gun would want to shoot grade-school kids. And brag about it on the Internet.”
“His eyes got really wide and he thought about that all day,” Hutson continued. “That night, when I was putting him to bed, he said, ‘Daddy can you tell the police my idea? That man should be locked up for a long time, until he’s much, much better.’
“‘Yes, sweetie, I will,’ [Hutson replied]. And I did.”
While his own child’s safety—and the safety of others like him—was one factor looming large over Hutson, two others were the disturbing nature of the tweets—along with other online content from the same anonymous individual, who had already had one Twitter account closed down on Jan. 5 for violating terms of service—and his own experience as an investigative reporter, which he drew on to distinguish between ordinary Internet trollery and something distinctly more ominous.
Here’s a sample of Lenio’s tweets from just a one-hour period two days before their first encounter, drawn from list Hutson sent to law enforcement:
2:52 a.m. – 12 Feb. “I want to shoot up a school”
2:55 a.m. – 12 Feb. 2015: “Talk mental health all you want but if I must work for piss poor #homeless slave #wages & can’t get property in my homeland..I may kill kids”
2:57 a.m. – 12 Feb. 2015: “I bet I could get at least 12 unarmed sitting ducks if I decide to go on a killing spree in a #school Sounds better than being a wage slave”
3:38 a.m. – 12 Feb. 2015: “USA needs a Hitler to rise to power and fix our #economy and i’m about ready to give my life to the cause or just shoot a bunch of #kikes…”
3:50 a.m. – 12 Feb. 2015: “If I had to pick between being homeless or shooting up a school and becoming dead, I’d say shooting up the school… Social security my ass”
“The tone and the pace of his tweets was frantic,” Hutson said. “He was tweeting obsessively at all hours of the day and night, becoming increasingly unhinged over a 72-hour period.” Hutson spent hours sifting through the tweets, culling the examples that were threatening from the ones that were merely offensive, creating a list of tweets “that would be relevant to a law enforcement officer.” He didn’t want to report it in a way that would be “sorted into the free speech bin,” he stressed. “The issue is not, ‘Hey, I’m offended,’ the issue is ‘Hey, this is threatening, and this is specific, and this guy is increasingly unhinged,” he explained. “It was threatening imminent violence and he was being specific and graphic.
“I’m relieved that instead of clicking on the radio or firing up the Internet and reading about school shooting in Kalispell, we’re reading about a dangerous man who has been locked away from the community and no longer has guns in his hands,” Hutson reflected. “I thought, if I don’t stay up and keep on this guy, to bring him down and he goes through with his threat, I won’t be able to bear that. And that’s what I tried to communicate to the sheriff in Oregon. And even after it turned out that this man had no tie to their tiny town, or their county or their state, they stayed with the story, because they got it, and they made sure that the police in Michigan and Montana got it, too.”
As he was putting together his list of tweets to make his case to law enforcement, Hutson was also looking for clues about the then-unknown tweeter’s identity, interests, habits and location.
“While I profiled this gentleman, I told the FBI and local law enforcement that the man threatening to shoot up a school and a synagogue was a young and athletic white supremacist, worked a low-paying job, probably in a restaurant, possibly as a cook, and that he enjoyed snowboarding and marijuana, and that he owned more than one gun,” Hutson said. “I said they could track his IP address through his Twitter account. [Which proved crucial in apprehending him.] I said he had a history of negative experiences with mental healthcare.”
Hutson then ticked off all the ways that had proven true. “When they arrested this white supremacist, he had just finished a day of snowboarding in Montana. He had marijuana and a pipe in his van (along with jugs of urine). He worked as a cook in a local restaurant, and had three guns. He had on Sunday retrieved ammunition and two rifles—a bolt-action and a semi-automatic—from his storage locker. His father, who lives in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, area told Michigan police that he believed his son was mentally ill.”
He was less successful in identifying where Lenio was. Mistaking Lenio’s invocation of the white nationalist fantasy homeland “Cascadia” for an actual place—and reinforced by Lenio’s retweeting a tweet from Sen. Ron Wyden, saying “Happy Birthday, Oregon”—Hutson’s first guess was Linn County, Oregon, about 70 miles south of Portland in the Willamette Valley, home to an unincorporated community, and a state park named “Cascadia.” So Hutson first contacted the FBI office in Portland. Followed by the Linn County Sheriff’s Department, sending them an email with a culled collection of 37 tweets, including the ones listed above.
“There’s a Holocaust-denying bigot on Twitter who appears to be experiencing suicidal ideation–specifically, thoughts of suicide by cop—and who is tweeting that he wants to shoot and kill 30 or more ‘grade school children’ and Jews because he is angry at being homeless and ready to give his life ‘for the cause,’” Hutson wrote. “Over the past 72 hours, he has apparently become increasingly unhinged.”
Hutson also examined Lenio’s online videos, and interactions with other like-minded individuals. The picture that emerged from these was not as frantic as the recent Twitter record, but it was clearly disturbed. “It seems that he’s intelligent, but it seems to me that he’s mentally ill,” Hutson said. “He’s intelligent, his ideas are sophisticated, although illogical.” Indeed, while his thought processes showed disturbing content, they could be seen as potential evidence either of mental illness, or of a sophisticated epistemological strategy.
At the time, Hutson was focused entirely on the former, concerned with the very real threat of imminent violence. He even reached out to other white supremacists, to see if they could help identify or locate @pyschicdogtalk2. He figured they might help, since his threatened execution of school kids would be terrible for their cause. It didn’t pan out, but Hutson was willing to try anything that might help avoid a tragedy.
Yet, it’s a mistake to think that only crazy people think the way Lenio did. The point was addressed head on by Rachel Carroll Rivas, executive director of the Montana Human Rights Network. On the one hand, “It is important to note that there are only a few actors in these larger extremist movements that act violently on their legitimate frustrations of economic insecurity,” she said, but “it is also important to remember that while some of those violent actors may struggle with mental health instability, the ideology of these movements can make everyday people spin deeper and deeper into the fear, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories to the point of violence.”
Now that Lenio is no longer an imminent threat, we can look at that same online material to see what it can tell us about how that ideology works to warp people’s understanding. Rivas said something more that drives home how important this can be. “Just like far-right extremists succumb to conspiracy theories that give simple answers to complex questions, society as a whole does the same when placing the blame only on the individual and/or their mental state and not on the movement, ideology, beliefs and those spewing hate through the microphones,” she said. “In addition, we vilify those struggling with mental health issues when we call all of these violent actors ‘crazy.’ There is more to it and it behooves us to understand and stand against these beliefs and movements of the extremist right.”
Precisely because Lenio’s online ideological ramblings are so uneven, crude in some ways, sophisticated in others, they provide an interesting way to approach such material. One of his most telling YouTube creations is “Channel Surfing for 9/11 Truth: A Video Investigation,” a nearly 90-minute video, combining his own ramblings with a variety of video clips from different sources. It provides examples of his muddled, illogical and/or self-contradictory thinking, at a more leisurely pace, so that watching it one can become familiar with the themes, catchphrases and mental tics that obsesses him, as well as the fears and forces he is struggling with.