A 63-year-old man admitted he sent threatening text messages to a member of a political party who was recruiting poll watchers. <\/p>\n
John Courtney Pollard, of Philadelphia, changed his plea Wednesday from not guilty to guilty of a single count of making interstate threats. <\/p>\n
In September 2024, the victim, a political party employee, posted their personal phone number on social media and asked individuals interested in working as poll watchers to contact them. <\/p>\n
Pollard sent one text message to the victim\u2019s phone at around 10 p.m. Sept. 6: <\/p>\n
\u201cHey, (redacted). I\u2019m interested in being a poll watcher.\u201d<\/p>\n
When ten minutes passed without a reply from the victim, Pollard sent another message, police say: <\/p>\n
\u201cI will KILL YOU IF YOU DON\u2019T ANSWER ME!<\/p>\n
Your days are numbered, (EXPLETIVE).<\/p>\n
GONNA (EXPLETIVE) FIND YOU AND SKIN YOU ALIVE AND USE YOUR SKIN FOR (EXPLETIVE) TOILET PAPER, YOU (EXPLETIVE) KKK(EXPLETIVE)\u201d<\/p>\n
The situation was treated as an incident involving interstate threats, despite the fact Pollard and the victim were both in Pennsylvania at the time. That\u2019s because Apple\u2019s iMessage platform does not have a data center in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
When Pollard sent the text messages, those texts digitally traveled out of state to a data center, which then transmitted the text back to the victim\u2019s phone. <\/p>\n
He could face up to five years in prison and three years of supervised release, and a fine not greater than $250,000.<\/p>\n
Pollard is scheduled to be sentenced March 31, 2026. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 63-year-old man admitted he sent threatening text messages to a member of a political party who was…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":427242,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,1448,2830,1311,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-427241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-pa","10":"tag-pennsylvania","11":"tag-philadelphia","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115668874908447465","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}