A Washington man has been charged with threatening to kill officer Darren Wilson, who recently resigned from the Ferguson police force after shooting and killing Michael Brown.
According to reports, Jaleel Tariq Abdul-Jabbaar is charged with three counts of making interstate threats to Wilson, his family and other officers via Facebook statuses. With each count carrying up to five years in prison, he is facing 15 years behind bars. The 48-year-old was arrested by federal authorities at his Kirkland, WA home and has faced a judge in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
“Although we each have the right to express our views about the decision reached by the state grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, we cannot tolerate violence or threats of violence that are intended to intimidate, and ultimately silence debate,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Annette L. Hayes in a statement. “Such threats are crimes, and the individuals who make them must be held to account.”
According to court documents where Wilson was identified as ‘D.W’, shortly after Brown’s death on Aug. 9th, Abdul-Jabbaar used Facebook to threaten Wilson and continued until late November. In these statuses, he would make statements like “We need to kill (the officer) and anything that has a badge on” and asked how many “REAL BLACK MEN” willing to go to Ferguson and “give back those bullets that [D.W.] fired into the body of Michael Brown. If we’re unable to locate Officer [D.W.] then we’ll return them to his wife and if not her then to his children.”
Abdul-Jabbaar also used Facebook in efforts to get a gun asking someone, who was not identified, to “hook a ninja up on the connect” in October. He then messaged this same person saying “Time to kill a cop” after the grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson.
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