Craig Cobb Sent to North Dakota State Hospital for Mental Evaluation

December 05, 2013

Ryan Lenz

Craig Cobb, the racist activist who was working to build an all-white enclave in the tiny town of Leith, N.D., until he was arrested on charges of terrorizing the townsfolk last month, has been sent to a state mental hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, police said.

Cobb’s hospitalization last week came after he stopped eating as part of what he said was a spiritual journey. According to Sheriff Dean Danzeisen in Mercer County, where Cobb was being held, he was only drinking water. When he was asked if he needed to see a doctor, he agreed to a psychiatric evaluation.

“So, just like any other prisoner, we took him to the doctor,” Danzeisen told Hatewatch. “It wasn’t like he was drugged or in a straitjacket.”

Cobb stopped eating following his Nov. 16 arrest after the Grant County Sheriff’s Department received several complaints that he and his roommate, Kynan Dutton, 29, were toting guns and having heated, threatening exchanges with townsfolk.

At the time, Cobb claimed he and Dutton were patrolling the town because of acts of violence against them, though that appears to have been imagined. Pictures depict Cobb in a jean jacket and flip-flops, a rifle resting on his hip, pacing through town. He was charged with seven counts of terrorizing, a Class C felony.

The terrorizing charge came shortly after Cobb returned to Leith from an appearance on NBC’s “The Trisha Goddard Show,” where the results of a DNA test he submitted to were revealed, showing that he is 14 percent sub-Saharan African.

In response to the criminal charges against him, Cobb has tried to bargain his way out of jail, offering to sell his home, leave North Dakota and abandon his plans to build a racist town if the criminal charges were dropped – a far cry from the defiance he exuded when his project first became publicly known.

“I’ll be glad to get out of the state,” Cobb told the Associated Press last week from the Mercer County Jail in Stanton. “And I’ll never come back to North Dakota.”