FBI: Amherst man planned stabbing spree at Big Y, threatened Tennessee police
The arrest comes weeks after Amherst's Luke Brissie was involuntarily committed for a mental health evaluation, after he told FBI agents who visited him in April that he was planning on carrying out a mass stabbing at a local grocery store that morning, according to court records.
On Monday, Magistrate Judge Katherine Robertson ordered that Brissie remain temporarily detained after she held an initial hearing in his case. Prosecutors have charged him with communicating a threat in interstate commerce, and they asked that he remain detained until his trial.
'Because no condition or combination of conditions can reasonably assure the safety of the community … he must be detained,' Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Merck wrote to the judge.
Prosecutors said Brissie sent messages through Instagram on April 5 to a member of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, threatening to bomb or shoot him because he had responded to the 2023 mass shooting at a Nashville elementary school that left three adults and three students dead, according to court records.
In his messages to the officer, images of which were included in court documents, Brissie described the perpetrator of the 2023 massacre at The Covenant School in Nashville as his 'spiritual mother.'
Brissie also wrote that he would bomb an FBI office, and harm a person he said was another officer in Tennessee. He also wrote that 'in a couple of days ... I'm going to commit mass stabbing at a grocery store called big (expletive) y.'
The officer, identified as 'M.C.' in court documents, took screenshots of the messages and reported them. Meta Platforms, which owns Instagram, provided police with information related to Brissie's account, according to court records.
FBI agents in Nashville contacted agents in Boston and told them to 'locate and interview Brissie as soon as possible,' the criminal complaint says.
When FBI agents showed up at Brissie's house in Amherst, he told them he was surprised the officer received his messages.
'Brissie also told agents that he intended to bomb the FBI Boston Field Office and had, in fact, planned on conducting a mass stabbing at a nearby grocery store the morning that he was encountered by agents,' says the criminal complaint.
Brissie's message to the Tennessee officer came days after officials in that state released a report into the 2023 massacre at The Covenant School that said the shooter had taken years to plan the attack and took care not to tip off his family or doctors.
In his message to the officer, Brissie said he is bipolar, and a note in the docket of his court case says, 'There's a competency issue that needs to be addressed.'
Brissie's court-appointed attorney and a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts did not immediately return requests for comment.
While Brissie described the shooter in female terms, police in Tennessee said the perpetrator of the massacre identified as male. However, officials used female pronouns in the report to comply with a Tennessee state law that says the sex of a person is determined at birth.
In January, then-President Joe Biden announced that he awarded the Medal of Valor — the highest award for valor that can be bestowed to an officer — to five Nashville police officers for their conduct responding to the school shooting.
The heavily armed shooter at The Covenant School shot at officers Jeffrey Mathes, Rex Engelbert, Ryan Cagle, Zachary Plese and Michael Collazo as they arrived at the elementary school, according to the White House.
'Still, the officers entered the school, cleared classroom after classroom, and ran towards the sounds of gunfire,' the White House statement says.
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