The Florida man arrested and charged on Friday in connection with the wave of improvised explosive devices mailed this week to prominent Democrats and critics of Donald Trump tried to pass himself off as a member of the Seminole Nation.
Cesar Altieri Sayoc’s mixed heritage was actually Filipino and Italian.
Sayoc, a registered Republican, has lived in South Florida for decades, according to court documents, property records and other documents. On social media he posted several verbal attacks against critics of Trump.
According to the Miami Herald, he was born in Brooklyn in 1962, the son of a Filipino immigrant, and attended North Miami Beach High School, according to information from ancestry.com, the genealogy company that tests the DNA of customers to reveal ancestral roots. His mother, Madeline Sayoc Altieri, of Italian descent, was born in Brooklyn.
An immigration naturalization certificate for a Ceasar Sayoc of North Miami Beach, believed to be the father of Cesar Sayoc, shows the elder Sayoc was naturalized in March 1970.
The Miami Herald also found on ancestry.com, a genealogy company, that the elder Ceasar Sayoc, who was born in 1932, immigrated from the Philippines. He died in 2009.
The younger Sayoc, 56, of Aventura, was arrested Friday for allegedly mailing pipe bombs to at least 13 prominent Democrats.
“This was someone lost,“ attorney Ron Lowy told Anderson Cooper on CNN Friday.
He told Cooper that Sayoc was “abandoned by his father” and was desperately seeking an identity. He “was looking for anything and he found a father in Trump,” said Lowy. Sayoc had never been politically active until Trump’s campaign for the presidency, said Lowy, who represented Sayoc in the past on various criminal charges.
It’s “my opinion that he was attracted to the Trump formula of reaching out, Trump reaching out to these types of outsiders, people who don’t fit in, people who are angry at America, telling them they have a place at the table, telling them that it’s okay to get angry,” said Lowy on CNN. “I believe that was a motivating factor.”
It appears that Sayoc lived in a fantasy world and most of what he claimed in Linkedin, Facebook and other social media sites were most likely fabrications. He inferred on his social media pages that he was a member of the Seminoles, a Native American tribe based in Florida. The tribe said they have no records on Sayoc.
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HEAVY
‘Heavy’ obtained a copy of the father of the suspected mail bomber. |
The FBI visited a condominium complex Friday and learned that Sayoc’s mother is in a hospital bed after having surgery, The family lawyer told WSVN-TV, that the suspect is “mentally ill and insecure.”
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RE: Filipino American arrested for allegedly mailing bombs to Trump critics: Nah he ain’t Filipino American, he’s just white