A man from Ohio is now in federal custody, after threatening to kill his wife and carrying out mass shootings in Las Vegas and in a church.
Wei Li of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, has been charged with making threatening communications and with destruction of evidence.
On November 6th, the 28-year-old Li had sent various text messages to his estranged wife, threatening violence, including a promise to, “make the biggest [mass shooting] in history.”
His former wife contacted the authorities after receiving the death threat, and indication of a possible mass shooting. Li was planning on killing his wife, if his green card was not approved, and was planning to, “shoot up a Las Vegas hotel and casino,” in revenge. However, it was not clear that he had a particular Vegas hotel in mind.
He also sent his estranged wife numerous images of himself, posing with pictures of knives and firearms alongside the death threats he sent her. He also claimed that he possessed an automatic rifle, with which to cause a massacre.
In one of the other messages he sent his wife, Li had texted that she “would be blamed for all the deaths,” the FBI had said in a release.
He also happened to indicate his plans to carry out a mass shooting at a church with at least a thousand people in attendance.
In a joint interview on November 10th, the FBI agents and Cuyahoga Falls Police detectives had asked Li to unlock his phone.
He had complied but had also deleted a string of messages.
Initially, Li had lied about having erased the messages. Ultimately, he had admitted deleting them because they were “bad,” the news report said. Li had told the detectives that he was not being “serious” about these threats, and they were harmless.
The authorities had him arrested and are holding him on a $500,000 bail, while the case is transferred to federal courts.
