Nathan Cerda, from Palmview, Texas, thought it’d be funny to threaten Pokemon GO players in his town with a “purge”. He is not laughing now.
Cerda made the following post to his Facebook page last week, in which he says he’s going to take some “modified paintball guns” out with some friends:
The post was reported to local police, who said that “due to the credibility of the threat and in the interest of public safety”, a warrant was issued on a charge of “terroristic threat”. Cerda was then arrested at his home in Palmview.
Harlingen Police Department made the following release yesterday on their Facebook page:
“Oh, but he was just joking with all those laughing emoji, that seems like a pretty serious crime to charge him with, jackass or no!”, you may ask. Note that a charge of “terroristic threat” is defined as:
… a crime generally involving a threat to commit violence communicated with the intent to terrorize another, to cause evacuation of a building, or to cause serious public inconvenience, in reckless disregard of the risk of causing such terror or inconvenience.
While here are some excerpts specifically from Texas’ statute, which says “A person commits an offence if he threatens to commit any offence involving violence to any person or property with intent to:”
– place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury
– place the public or a substantial group of the public in fear of serious bodily injury
Comments
17 responses to “Man Threatens Pokemon GO Players, Arrested For ‘Terroristic Threat’”
Seems pretty justified to me.
Seriously, what effect does people playing a game have on him? Why the need to be such a blatant asshole, joking or not?
Us vs Them mentality. People’s pea-brain logic making them resent Pokemon Go players, just because they are doing something they are not.
Totally different to the Us vs Them mentality of the Team Mystic vs Team Garbage vs Team WhyEvenBother, which is totally justified.
Oi, Team Hippie! Damn you and the Ponyta you rode in on. 😛
Please.
Mystic rides Horseas, and we look majestic as fuck doing it.
Better than Team POOPY-PANTS
Maybe someone captured his gym?
Human nature.
When ever people jump on a bandwagon, an opposing group will rise.
We have a guy at work who is on the Pokemon hate train at the moment. When I pointed it out it doesn’t affect him and that he was simply swept up in the natural anti-bandwagon, he got quite annoyed and went on a rant about how he didn’t care and kept parroting negative stories and memes he finds.
I like how his post is shared with Friends only, so someone on his friends list turned him.
I like that if you click the Facebook link all the police,judges etc are tagged in the press release, god their Facebook memories each year must be grim
I’m going to say that it was the friend who “liked” the post with the :O emoji.
Given whats happening over there at the moment this is completely justified. You should never makes these sort of violent threats and expect no repercussions.
On a related note this is just another anti-nerd bully getting what he deserves. Makes me happy to see him go down. ‘MURICA
I just have this image in my head of this Cerda dude being the typical Hollywood depiction of the school bully …. kind of like Biff from “Back to the Future”.
Good.
Terroristic Threat? He’s clearly white.
haters gonna hate
He liked his own post?!
that’s the real crime here
Gotta get that like ball rolling somehow!