Judge detains man charged with making antisemitic threat

Edward Arthur Owens Jr., 29, sent multiple messages expressing hate for Jews and Israel before threatening the official May 20, officials said.

By JUSTIN VELLUCCI
TribLive

An Elizabeth man charged with sending an elected official an antisemitic threat online had texted a friend minutes earlier, asking “Are you ready to hunt down Jews for extermination?” a federal prosecutor said Thursday.

Edward Arthur Owens Jr., 29, sent multiple messages expressing hate for Jews and Israel before threatening the official May 20, Assistant U.S. Attorney Carl Spindler told a judge inside a federal courtroom in Downtown Pittsburgh.

After a detention hearing that ran longer than two hours, U.S. District Judge Maureen P. Kelly agreed with the prosecutor that Owens was a threat to the victim and to the community.

She sent him to jail while he awaits trial.

Owens is charged with a single felony count of making an interstate threat. He was taken Thursday afternoon to Butler County Prison.

Officials have declined to name the targeted official.

Owens, sporting a scruffy beard and wearing an orange, jail-issued jumpsuit, spent most of the hearing, facing forward with his head bowed. He did not move as prosecutors rattled off numerous text messages they said illustrated the danger posed by Owens.

In the end, it was information about guns that kept Owens in jail, Kelly said when making her ruling.

When Owens arrived at the FBI’s Pittsburgh headquarters on May 30, he thought he was picking up his cell phone, which agents previously had confiscated and searched, prosecutors said.

At the South Side building, however, agents arrested Owens, then later found his 9mm pistol — “loaded, with one bullet in the chamber ready to go,” Spindler said — and 265 rounds of ammunition inside his truck, which was sitting in a guest parking lot, Spindler said.

They also found empty magazines for an AR-15, a weapon Owens maintained he had given to his mother.

“In light of the threats, in light of the vitriol, in light of the rhetoric, you lied to the FBI about the guns — and that is significant,” Kelly said. “The weight of the evidence against you is substantial and I think you know that.”

Owens has no previous criminal record.

Cellphone contents

The Elizabeth man had provided federal authorities multiple reasons why the threat, sent May 20 with a Facebook friend request and not seen by the alleged victim until two days later, did not come from him.

The threat read: “We’re coming for you (emoji of person raising right hand) (German flag emoji) be afraid. Go back to Israel or better yet, exterminate yourself and save us the trouble. 109 countries for a reason. We will not stop until your kind is nonexistent,” the criminal complaint said.

The reference to 109 countries is “an antisemitic claim that Jews have been expelled from 109 different countries,” according to the Anti-Defamation League, the complaint said.

Owens insisted his Facebook account had been hacked, prosecutors said. Later, he said the last time he lost access to the account was more than a decade ago.

Owens also accused someone else of sending the threat under the name “Casey Jones,” prosecutors said. He later recanted, admitting to the FBI that he used the fake name to sell items on Facebook Marketplace.

“Maybe I sent it,” Owens later told FBI agents, according to prosecutors. “But I was blackout drunk.”

A person who lives with Owens said they spent the evening with him on May 20 and did not observe him to be drunk, the FBI said.

Owens maintained to authorities that “he did not harbor any biases … against any individual or group for any reason,” authorities said.

The contents of his cellphone suggested otherwise, the U.S. government argued.

In one text, Owens wrote that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler “did nothing wrong in World War II,” FBI Special Agent Abigail Patcher testified.

“Jews run the world. Jews run the media,” Patcher said Owens wrote elsewhere.

Owens said he’d take responsibility for the messages and stressed he was “just a keyboard warrior getting rage-baited online,” Patcher said.

The agent later defined a “keyboard warrior” as someone who posts comments online and “says whatever they want to say behind the alleged anonymity of the internet.”

“Well, look at what the Jews are doing to the world,” Owens texted a friend on May 10, Patcher testified.

Increasing volatility

Patcher said he texted a different friend at 6:57 p.m. on May 20: “You ready to hunt down Jews for extermination?”

Twenty-six minutes later, according to prosecutors, Owens sent the threat to the elected official.

In the days that followed, Owens sounded increasingly volatile, prosecutors said.

He called Jews “animals” and took screenshots on his phone of inaccurate translations of the Talmud, a Jewish text, according to authorities.

Spindler said some passages, which are “espousing antisemitic propaganda,” were similar to ones used by the gunman who murdered 11 Jews at a Squirrel Hill synagogue in 2018 and is now on death row after being found guilty.

On the night of the threat, Owens also searched the internet for “NYC synagogue” and references to conspiracy theories about Israelis and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, prosecutors said.

‘Evolving’ depression

Attorney Samir Sarna, who represents Owens, recommended that Kelly put his client under house detention — with electronic monitoring — at Owens’ mother’s house in Butler County.

Sarna said Owens, who smoked marijuana daily and had a “serious” problem with alcohol, needed drug and alcohol treatment and mental health treatment.

Owens’ mother, Wendy Burtner-Owens, took the stand in his defense, saying depression has been “evolving” in her son, who she calls “Ted.”

“I really want to get him mental health assistance and have been for a little while now,” Burtner-Owens testified.

Owens’ mother also testified that she asked Owens to turn over two of his guns — a rifle and AR-15.

“I was more concerned about him harming himself,” she told Kelly.

Owens handed over two of the guns, keeping a 9mm pistol, days after he first was questioned by FBI agents.