A Texas man was arrested last week after he allegedly made repeated threats against the Democratic nominee for New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced Thursday.
Jeremy Fistel of Plano, Texas, allegedly made Islamophobic death threats via text and voicemail messages to Mamdani, who is South Asian American and Muslim. Some said, “Watch your f—ing back every f—ing second til you get the f— out of America,” told him to go back to Uganda, and wished terminal cancer on him and death on his family and friends, according to the DA’s news release.
Fistel was arrested in Texas and extradited to Queens on Wednesday after an investigation by the New York Police Department’s Hate Crimes Task Force. He pleaded not guilty to charges related to harassment and making terroristic threats as a hate crime. He is due back in court on Nov. 19, having posted bail. If convicted, Fistel faces up to 15 years in prison.
Katz said in a statement announcing the arrest that her office “take[s] threats of violence against any office holder extremely seriously — and there is no room for hate or bigotry in our political discourse.”
“We cannot and will not be intimidated by racism, Islamophobia, and hate,” Dora Pekec, a spokesperson for Mamdani’s campaign, told MSNBC. “Zohran remains steadfast in his conviction that New York must be a city where every single person—regardless of faith, background, or identity—is safe, protected, and at home.”
Pekec said the campaign is grateful to the district attorney for “treating this matter with the seriousness it deserves.” The news comes after recent incidents of political violence, including the fatal shooting of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk in Utah last week and the June assassination of Democratic Minnesota House Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband. Mamdani wrote on X that he was “horrified” by Kirk’s killing, adding that “political violence has no place in our country.”
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
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