Woman obsessed with Capital Gazette attack accused of threatening to shoot newspaper reporter at Massachusetts office
A woman obsessed with the Capital Gazette attack threatened to shoot a reporter at a Massachusetts newspaper simply because he wanted to be taken off an email list, a prosecutor said Tuesday.
Investigators say Amy Zuckerman sent an email to a reporter at the Walpole Times earlier this month that includes two references to shooting him through a window, according to the Milford Daily News.
“It doesn’t take much to offend her,” Norfolk County assistant DA Courtney Kiernan said in court Tuesday, according to the newspaper. “In this case, a reporter, the journalist, simply asked to be removed from an email chain. This was not a warning. It was said in anger, not in concern."
Zuckerman was arrested on July 7, one day after sending the email. She was charged with making terroristic threats.
Kiernan added that the 64-year-old Zuckerman also sent a threatening email to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, another newspaper in Massachusetts, and mentioned the Capital Gazette, the Maryland paper where five journalists were murdered last month.
“This is not a benign threat,” said Kiernan, according to the Milford Daily News. “There’s a well-established history of threatening behavior.”
Amy Zuckerman, the woman accused of emailing threats to a journalist at @TheWalpoleTimes, is being held without bail until her dangerousness hearing, now scheduled for Monday. https://t.co/ikRdvRF5OD
— Daily Hampshire Gazette (@DailyHampGaz) July 12, 2018
Zuckerman's lawyer claims that she used a voice-to-text app when she sent the email to the Walpole Times reporter: “It’s not at all clear that the words that appeared in the email are the words that came out of her mouth,” Ethan Yankowitz said, according to the Milford Daily News.
Yankowitz said that Zuckerman's psychotherapist does not believe she is a "danger to herself or others," according to the newspaper. The lawyer said she is mentally ill and obsessed about the safety of reporters in wake of the Capital Gazette shooting.
“She is worried someone else will do so something,” he said in court, according to the Milford Daily News.
A judge denied the lawyer's request for release and ordered Zuckerman to be held without bail for 120 days.
