A North Carolina man is facing federal charges over a comment posted online in which he allegedly threatened to “shoot up a black pre-school,” after which the victims would be “skinned,” according to an FBI probable cause affidavit reviewed by The Independent.
Zachary Charles Newell, 25, was arrested Monday on one count of making an interstate threat to kidnap or injure.
On Sunday, a cybercrime team at Google flagged a disturbingly violent YouTube comment to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center, the affidavit states. It says the comment had been uploaded to the video-sharing site four days prior, at 10:37 a.m. local time, by a user with the screenname “CommentatorsHateMe.”
Posted beneath a video by YouTuber “Andrew Esquire,” a Florida lawyer whose real name is Andrew Clifford d’Adesky, CommentatorsHateMe wrote, “I’m gonna shoot up a black pre-school. 20 black babies will be shot and then skinned like the animals they are,” the affidavit goes on.
In the video, d’Adesky was discussing a reported Los Angeles police investigation into Raja Jackson, an MMA fighter who apparently went off-script while making an appearance in a professional wrestling match and put his opponent in the hospital with severe injuries.