A 21-year-old Charlotte man is accused of threatening to kill President Barack Obama.
Donte Jamar Sims was arrested after a U.S. Secret Service protective intelligence research specialist on Tuesday found five threatening statements on Twitter from the user name “@DestroyLeague_D.” All the statements were dated on Monday.
“Well Ima Assassinate president Obama this evening!...Gotta get this monkey off my chest while he’s in town,” one of the statements said.
Two minutes later, there was another tweet: “Ima hit president Obama with that Lee Harvey Oswald swag.”
The other three tweets were sent in the next 12 minutes.
“The Secret Service is gonna be defenseless once I aim the Assault Rifle at Barack’s ForeheadF* the #DNC!” one of the statements said.
Another said: “he wont even make it to the coliseum.”
“Plotting president Obama’s Murder,” the next statement said.
Sims is now jailed awaiting a detention hearing on Tuesday to determine whether he should remain in custody until his trial. Threatening the president is punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Sims was charged twice in 2011 with misdemeanor possession of marijuana. Those charges were dismissed. He was charged again this year with misdemeanor possession of marijuana. That charge is still pending. He has not been charged with a violent crime.
Records obtained from Twitter through a search warrant, court documents said, showed that the account “@DestroyLeague_D” is registered to Sims.
Secret Service Special agent Wayne Bourg went to Sims’ home in Charlotte on Wednesday to question him.
Sims admitted that he used Twitter and that his account was named @DestroyLeague_D, the agent wrote in an affidavit.
Bourg wrote that Sims admitted using his Twitter account from his home to publish the five threatening statements and “smiled as I read the statements aloud to him.”
“Sims stated that he published the statements because he hated President Obama,” Bourg wrote. “Sims asserted that he was high on marijuana when he made the threats but that he understood what he was doing and that it was wrong.”
Sims was arrested and transported to the police department. After Sims waived his Miranda rights, Bourg wrote, the agent continued to question him.
“At this time, Sims’s demeanor changed and he asserted that he was sorry he sent the messages threatening to kill the President of the United States and provided me with a written apology,” Bourg wrote. Staff researcher Maria David contributed
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