Complaint says Unglesbee identified salt; hazmat teams attended two offices
Matthew Unglesbee, 36, remained in the custody of US marshals on Tuesday after his arrest on federal charges of perpetrating a hoax and sending threatening communications through the mail. The Justice Department announced the arrest in a press release Monday, when an eight-page criminal complaint was also unsealed.
Charis Hobbs, a task-force agent with the FBI’s Springfield office, said Unglesbee admitted during an interview Sunday that he sent the letters to four unidentified politicians. Those recipients were members of Congress whose offices in northern Illinois handled the mail. Hobbs said Unglesbee wrote his name and his Quincy home address on each of four white, letter-sized envelopes.
Unglesbee told Hobbs the substance he placed inside the envelopes was salt because it “kind of looks like” anthrax, according to the complaint. Preliminary testing did not reveal the presence of any biological or chemical toxin.
The complaint said each letter contained a white granular substance and a handwritten message that read “ha ha.” A letter to an unnamed US senator also contained granules and read “Hah enjoy the gift.”
Staff members at all four congressional offices did not open the envelopes, the complaint said. The offices had alerted each other to look for mail bearing Unglesbee’s name. After staff called authorities, FBI personnel trained in handling weapons of mass destruction and threats of biochemical toxins were sent to three of the politicians’ offices on Wednesday, and hazmat response teams attended two.
FBI agents retrieved the communications bearing Unglesbee’s address and then visited his home. There, they found another envelope that was empty and addressed to the Washington DC office of one of the same Congress members but had not been sent, according to the complaint.
Unglesbee told investigators that he mailed the four letters “after hearing someone in a restaurant mention the news story of other letters being sent,” the filing said. He denied participating in the other suspicious mailings.
Earlier in October, the FBI and US Postal Inspection Service said they were investigating multiple reports of suspicious letters sent to state officials and election offices across the country.
The complaint said Unglesbee told investigators he anticipated the Congress members would “take it serious” because the powder could be perceived to be anthrax, which he said he knew was dangerous and would cause hazmat teams to have to respond. It said he claimed he was joking but recognized the recipients would not know he was joking and could perceive the communication as a threat.
Ryan Presley, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Springfield field office, said authorities were focused on “keeping our public institutions safe from intimidation.” He said: “Mailing unknown substances to congressional offices creates fear and disrupts the public institutions vital to our democracy. We, along with our partners, will remain vigilant in identifying and holding accountable those whose actions threaten to intimidate public officials or disrupt our democratic systems.”
Unglesbee was tentatively scheduled to appear for a detention hearing Wednesday afternoon in federal court in Springfield.