A Texas man faces hate crime charges in New York after allegedly threatening mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in a series of anti-Muslim messages wishing death and violence against him and his family.
Jeremy Fistel, 44, of Plano, Texas, was arrested September 11 and extradited to Queens this week.
Fistel was arraigned in Queens criminal court Thursday following a grand jury’s 22-count indictment that charges him with four counts of making a terroristic threat as a hate crime, four counts of making a terroristic threat, seven counts of aggravated harassment in the second degree as a hate crime, and seven counts of aggravated harassment in the second degree.
A series of increasingly alarming voicemails and written messages that were left for Mamdani and shared by law enforcement officials call for the candidate’s rape and murder.
Other messages label him a terrorist and tell him to go back to Uganda and that Muslims “don’t belong” in the United States. Another message wishes “terminal cancer” and “a painful death” on Mamdani and for an Israeli military bullet to “go through your skull.”
Another tells him that he “deserves” to be “six feet under” with the hope that “somebody does it quickly” and “shoots you in the f****** face.”
“Let me be very clear — we take threats of violence against any office holder extremely seriously — and there is no room for hate or bigotry in our political discourse,” Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement Thursday.
If convicted of the top charge, Fistel faces up to 15 years in prison. His next court appearance is November 19.
The messages were allegedly left with Mamdani’s office on June 11, June 18, July 8 and July 23.
The investigation was spearheaded by the New York City Police Department’s Hate Crimes Task Force with support from the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service.
A spokesperson for Mamdani’s campaign thanked Katz’s office for “treating this matter with the seriousness it deserves,” adding that “unfortunately, threats of this nature are all too common — and they reflect a broader climate of hate that has no place in our city.”
The charges arrive at an extraordinarily tense moment in American politics after a streak of high-profile acts of political violence and threats against elected officials and public figures.
Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead during a campus speaking event in Utah last week, and in June, Minnesota Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman was assassinated along with her husband inside her home.
Mamdani, a state assemblyman who represents the borough of Queens, remains the frontrunner in the race for New York City’s next mayor after defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary earlier this year.
The 33-year-old democratic socialist — whose campaign has relentlessly focused around affordability issues — would be the city’s first Muslim and Indian American mayor, if elected.
He has faced a wave of racist and Islamophobic attacks since securing the Democratic primary, including from Republican members of Congress and the White House. Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned Mamdani’s citizenship, falsely branded him a communist, threatened to arrest and deport him, and suggested his administration would “run” New York City should he win in November.
Mamdani also has faced attacks over his criticism of Israel’s government and his opposition to the war in Gaza, where more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed. Right-wing figures have smeared him as antisemitic while the candidate pledges to devote significant resources to combating antisemitic hate crimes in the city.
After New York Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed him this month, Trump suggested he would withhold federal funding to the state in retaliation. “This is a rather shocking development, and a very bad one for New York City,” he wrote on Truth Social. “How can such a thing happen? Washington will be watching this situation very closely. No reason to be sending good money after bad!”
In 2012, Fistel pleaded guilty to a marijuana distribution charge in Brooklyn and was sentenced in 2019 to time served, with two years of probation, according to court records. He was also ordered to forfeit $50,000.
Fistel said that he had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Massachusetts and studied accounting at the University of Maryland, according to a letter to the judge presiding over that case.
He began working at John Hancock Life Insurance Company in 2010, around the time of his arrest, according to filings.
