Michigan FBI agents thwart man they say plotted synagogue mass shooting
A Michigan man who owned a mini-arsenal and a Nazi flag was plotting a mass killing at an East Lansing synagogue, federal authorities said Friday.
Seann Patrick Pietila reportedly admitted to posting antisemitic messages on Instagram, where he also praised fellow right-wing zealots who successfully executed mass shootings in Norway in 2011 and New Zealand in 2019.
According to CBS News, law enforcement agents discovered the Nazi flag and firearms including a 12-gauge shotgun, a .22 caliber rifle, and a Sig Sauer .40 caliber pistol in the suspect’s Upper Peninsula home.
Investigators said his phone contained a note referencing East Lansing’s Shaarey Zedek Congregation synagogue and the date March 15, 2024. That will be the fifth anniversary of a mass shooting in a Christchurch, New Zealand where a white supremacist killed 51 people.
Investigators said the suspect attended high school in East Lansing in 2021, but now resides in Pickford Township near the Canadian border.
CBS News reports Pietila also had an equipment list in his phone that included pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails.
Western Michigan U.S. Attorney Mark Totten said in a statement obtained by the Detroit Free Press that the suspect “evinced a neo-Nazi ideology, antisemitism, glorification of past mass shooters, and a desire and intent to mimic past mass shooters or mass casualty events” during online communication.
Pietila reportedly told investigators he had no intentions of executing a mass murder. He will be in court again on June 22. Pietila is charged with interstate communication of threats.
Pietila’s court appearance Friday came on the same day a Pittsburgh jury convicted Robert Bowers of killing 11 people at that city’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.
