Ex-cop Arrested For Threats Against Barack Obama
A former US police officer was arrested and indicted for his intent to shoot President Barack Obama. According to the Secret Service, Michael Stephen Bowden, ages 78, went at a veterans clinic in Spartanburg for a routine medical examination. During the exam, he told the doctors that he thought about killing himself and he even bragged to the nurses that he intended to go to Washington D.C. and shoot down president Obama, as he had not made enough efforts to help the African-Americans. And, according to the doctors, there were clues that the man really wanted to kill himself this April.
Bowden had worked four years in the US Navy, then other three years served as a cop in New York, before working for 18 years as a captain of the New York Fire Department. He retired and moved to South Carolina after suffering a heart attack on the job some 35 years ago. And on November the 16th he was arrested by Secret Service agents in his home in Woodruff. The former cop did not deny the accusations and told the officers that if he had the chance, he would shoot President Obama himself.
In the house, the agents found three semi-automatic rifles and a shotgun under Bowdenʼ bed, all fully loaded and ready to be used. A gun was found near the entry door, while in the suspectʼs sonʼs room law enforcement officials had the surprise to discover other nine shotguns, two rifles and another gun. The man had been arrested without bond, until a mental evaluation would be completed, on charges of threatening president Obama.
Michael Stephen Bowdenʼs son told the media in the United States that his father told the nurses about his plan to kill Barack Obama only to get their attention, after his suicidal screening in April had gone unnoticed. He also said that the medication Bowden had been taking since his heart attack could be the source of the old manʼs irrationality, and that he was affraid that he could do something reckless, so he made all those statments seeking medical treatment.
Bowden is not the only one threatening Barack Obamas life in the last two years. According to the author Ron Kessler, Obama is receiving some 30 death threats a day, while other reports mention that federal agents had seen a 400-fold increase in threats since President George W. Bush’s last year in office. The most famous plot to kill President Barack Obama was that of two neo-Nazi skinheads from Tennessee, who planned to shoot down 88 black people, behead another 14 and finally kill Obama himself. And not later than last October the Vermont comedian Chris King was arrested for posting on his Twitter page a message saying that he is going to kill the president.
So far, nearly 1 in 10 presidents have been assasinated or shot while in power, while another 11 escaped assasination attempts unscathed. The last US president shot in office was Ronald Reagan, in 1981.11
