Florida man arrested in Texas after authorities were alerted to suspected “mass casualty” plot targeting Elon Musk’s Tesla Cybertruck delivery event.
(Video: WVUE)
Wednesday, 28-year-old Paul Ryan Overeem of Orlando, Florida was arrested in Austin, Texas and charged with Terroristic Threat, a third-degree felony, after allegedly planning to attack Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas and CEO Musk. According to the arrest affidavit reviewed by CBS Austin, it was the man’s social media activity that had tipped off the electric car manufacturer and led to the alleged plot’s aversion.
“I sure am crazy though,” and “If I’m saying I’m gonna kill people then you should take this seriously,” were just some of the posts on Instagram attributed to the suspect that led Tesla’s Senior Manager of Security Operations to file a Suspicious Activity report earlier in November.
Chatting under the name “ufotnoitalumis,” the suspect was said to sent the messages on Nov. 9 in a private chat. Made aware of the apparent threats, Tesla went on to notify authorities who submitted a subpoena to Instagram allowing the the Travis County Sheriff’s Office to investigate the threats.
“But yeah so at teh [sic] Tesla event I’m planning to attach [sic] so up to you guys to stop me,” said one message as another read, “I plan on killing people at that even [sic] ok [sic] November 30th and I would like you do something about it so I don’t have to.”
“I need to be stopped,” the suspect urged as he reportedly blamed technology for his woes, “I wanna die. My thoughts haven’t been free for over a year. All the electronics around me.”
Travis County Sheriff’s Detective Jennifer Boland indicated the statements amounted to the suspect’s potential to “carry out his threats of a mass casualty event.”
The Instagram subpoena allowed authorities to obtain a cellphone number associated with the account and on Wednesday that phone pinged in Austin. Law enforcement arrested Overeem after tracking down his truck and he was said to have told officers he had weapons in his car, though a sheriff spokesperson did not reveal if that were true, and had intended to end his own life after carrying through with his plot.
“I was going to shoot up Elon Musk and the plant,” the suspect allegedly said believing the tech entrepreneur and Neuralink co-founder Shivon Zilis had been monitoring him through cameras.
“A lot of people don’t realize how much their cellphones give them away,” Texas attorney Adam Muery told KVUE. “I mean, typically, like if you were with AT&T, they have your GPS location every 30 seconds. And so they can, most people don’t realize but you can go back and see everywhere somebody has been.”
Theron Jenkins, whose son worked the Thursday delivery event, expressed his concerns over the threats telling KVUE, “Hearing things like that, you think, are my kids safe? It’s really scary. It is really, really scary. And I pray about it every day.”
Overeem was held on a $300,000 bond and was scheduled to appear in court on Dec. 11.
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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