FBI says Chicago man threatened beheadings at SIU
A Chicago man charged with mailing threats of rapes, killings, bombings and beheadings at an Illinois university he attended surfaced as a suspect by anonymously calling the FBI and campus police with tips about the letters, an FBI agent alleges in court documents.
Derrick Dawon Burns, 21, was arrested Monday on eight federal felonies related to the mailings investigators said were sent over a yearlong span in 2012 and last year, most often warning that Southern Illinois University's Carbondale campus where he studied criminology would be targeted.
Some of the handwritten letters included the signoffs "Terrorist of America" or "Terrorist for Alqaeda," an FBI agent said.
Online court records don't show whether Burns has an attorney. He's jailed without bond, pending a detention hearing Wednesday in Chicago.
The letters - bearing such titles as "The War on SIUC," "The War on SIU" - "collectively included various threats to rape and murder, to blow up buildings, and to cause major damage to property," FBI Special Agent Joseph Shevlin, assigned to investigate domestic-terrorism matters, wrote in an affidavit attached to the criminal complaint.
They first surfaced in the fall of 2012, threatening to kill Southern Illinois students, blow up three dormitories there, and to rape and decapitate female students, Shevlin said.
"Give me $50 million or SIU is history," Shevlin said that letter read.
Subsequent letters threatened bombings at the Carbondale campus and others in at least six other states. One letter, threatening the destruction of the Carbondale campus' three dorms, prompted the precautionary evacuation of those 2,100-student complexes.
The author of the letter insisted he had raped and killed several students at the Carbondale school, burying the bodies in mass graves or dumping them in a campus lake. The letters' author also pledged to unleash "deadly chemical powder" on unsuspecting students.
The investigation took a turn in July of this year, when a man with a distinctive voice called the FBI and the Carbondale campus' police to anonymously report that a man he knew only as "Big Russ" told him in October 2012 that he was behind the threats.
"Big Russ told the caller that he hated SIU, and that everyone was going to pay, and that he had raped a couple of girls on campus," Shevlin wrote. "Big Russ also told the caller that his work at SIU was not done, and that he was going to return to do a lot of destruction."
Both calls originated from a phone traced to Burns, with that phone's number listed as a contact one for Burns in SIU-Carbondale records, Shevlin wrote. When questioned last month by the FBI in Chicago, Burns admitted being the "tipster" but denied involvement with the threatening letters.
Fingerprint samples Burns supplied to investigators matched those found on four of the seven letters, Shevlin's affidavit alleged.
Rae Goldsmith, an SIU-Carbondale spokeswoman, said Tuesday that Burns was enrolled there for four semesters between the fall of 2011 and the end of last year but no longer is a student.