Wednesday, April 29, 2020

MAYBE THE RAT WAS ALIVE WHEN IT WAS DROPPED OFF AT THE POST OFFICE

Man guilty of sending dead rat to ex-wife in Florida

Associated Press
April 25, 2020

TAMPA — An Indiana man faces up to fives years in federal prison for threatening his ex-wife over several years and mailing a dead rat to her Florida home.

Romney Christopher Ellis, 55, of Indianapolis pleaded guilty Thursday in Tampa federal court to making interstate threats and mailing injurious articles, according to court records.

According to a criminal complaint, Ellis had engaged in a four-year-long campaign of harassment against his ex-wife, who lives in Tampa, through text messages, photographs, videos and mailings.

He threatened to decapitate and set her on fire, investigators said. He routinely made racially and sexually charged statements in the text messages, including sending sexually explicit images of himself.

Ellis sent text messages stating that he had traveled from Indiana to Florida to see his ex-wife. On one occasion, Ellis mailed a package to the victim’s home containing a dead rat and black rose.

Postal inspectors executed a search warrant at Ellis’s Indianapolis home in February. Prosecutors said they recovered a handwritten note containing the names and addresses of his ex-wife, as well as her family and friends.

1 comment:

bob walsh said...

I know of a former U of Wisc language professor who was locked up for mailing his ex a string of news stories detailing accounts of women being murdered by their ex-husbands. There were no direct threats, nothing in the envelopes but the news stories.