Massachusetts man charged with threatening school shooting in Facebook post
A man in Massachusetts was arrested and accused of threatening to commit a mass shooting at a school, according to local police.
Justin Moreira, 29, of Hyannis, was arrested on Saturday after Barnstable and Yarmouth police received multiple reports that a man was threatening a school shooting on Facebook.
WPRI reports that investigators obtained a search warrant for Mr Moreira's home. They found no firearms there, according to police.
Mr Moreira has been charged with making terroristic threats and has been ordered to be held without bail. He'll appear in Barnstable District Court on Tuesday.
Police said that the investigation into his threats are ongoing and that anyone with further information regarding the threats should report what they know.
According to Cape Wide News, Mr Moreira has a criminal record, including a prior federal convictions for illegally buying a firearm and a silencer.
During that incident, Mr Moreira was reportedly charged with purchasing the firearms over a "darknet market."
The website he allegedly used operates on the dark web and an undercover agent secured messages showing Mr Moreira inquiring about the potential purchase of several different firearms. The man reportedly settled on a Walther PPK/S .380 calibre pistol and a silencer, which he bought using $2,500 worth of Bitcoin.
In 2016, Mr Moreira was sentenced to 42 months in prison after pleading guilty to three counts of felony possession of ammunition and firearms.
Mr Moreira's arrest comes nearly a week after an 18-year-old man attacked Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The gunman killed 19 students — all fourth graders — and two faculty members at the school. He was eventually killed by Border Patrol agents after spending nearly 90 minutes inside the classroom.
Mass shooters have occasionally used social media to telegraph — or in some cases, broadcast — their attacks. Prior to the Uvalder shooting, the gunman reached out to a girl he had been chatting with over an app to tell her that he shot his grandmother and that he planned to shoot up an elementary school.
Weeks before the Uvalde shooting another gunman attacked a predominantly Black neighborhood grocery store and live-streamed the shooting on a helmet mounted camera. He killed 10 people in his attack.
Another mass shooting, which took place between two mosques in New Zealand, live-streamed his attack for 17 minutes over Facebook Live.
Often in these instances the footage stays online for hours before the platforms where they're hosted remove them. By that point, those sympathetic to the shooters or the morbidly curious will often have made copies to share among other online in private communities.
However, some people — like Mr Moreira — post their threats to social media ahead of time. In some cases those threats are acted upon and a potential shooter is thwarted. Others, like shooter Elliot Rodger, posted numerous videos to hosting platforms, including one explaining why he was about to carry out a shooting.
