SYRACUSE, NY — A former Cornell University student has been arrested for posting statements threatening violence against Jewish people on campus last fall, after the start of the war in Gaza, was sentenced to 21 months in prison on Monday.
Patrick Dai, of the Rochester, New York, suburb, was charged by federal officials in October with posting anonymous threats to shoot and stab Jewish people on a Greek Life forum. The threats came amid a spike in anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric related to the war and shocked Jewish students on campus in upstate New York.
Day pleaded guilty in April to post threats to kill or injure another person via interstate communications.
He was sentenced in federal court to 21 months in prison and three years of supervised release by Judge Brenda Sannes, federal prosecutors said. The judge said Dai “significantly disrupted campus activities” and committed a hate crime, but noted that he had an autism diagnosis, struggled with mental health and was non-violent. according to cnycentral.com.
Dai, 22, faced a maximum prison sentence of five years.
“Every student has the right to pursue their education without fear of violence, based on who they are, what they look like, where they come from, or how they worship,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a news release. “Anti-Semitic threats of violence, like the vicious and graphic ones made by the defendant here, violate that right.”
Dai’s mother has said that he/she believes The threats were partly caused by the medications he was taking for depression and anxiety.
Prosecutor Lisa Peebles has argued that Dai is pro-Israel and that the posts were a misguided attempt to gain support for the country.
“He believed, mistakenly, that the posts would create a ‘backlash’ against what he saw as anti-Israel media coverage and pro-Hamas sentiment on campus,” Peebles wrote in a court document.
Dai, then a third-grader, was expelled from the Ivy League school in Ithaca, New York.
