A Chicago-area man has been charged with making death threats to a Muslim American civil rights leader, reports the Chicago Tribune.
Marvin Meyer of Oak Forest is accused of leaving a threatening phone message on the line of Sufyan Sohel, deputy director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, Chicago.
“You are not welcome here. Take your (double expletive) back to Syria. We will kill you,” Chicago Police say Meyer said on the voice mail.
Sohel is actually American born whose parents immigrated from India, despite Meyer’s alleged reference to Syria.
According to Patch, prosecutors said Meyer left his phone number on the message saying “Do I seem afraid of you?”
“His comments were very violent in nature, and he threatened to kill people, and that raised flags and that kind of shook me because when people use that sort of language, it made me both fearful for me and my team, but I also got a sense of being unwelcome in the only country that I’ve ever called home,” said Sohel.
Meyer is being held on $75,000 bail and will be required to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet should be be released.
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