Arrest in Miami IRS Office Bomb Threat
FBI terrorism task force agents investigating an antigovernment bomb threat in Miami last week went looking for a man named “Rabbit,” but ended up arresting “Squirrel,” instead.
Today, Morris R. “Squirrel” Whitehead sits in a jail without bond, accused in U.S. District Court of willfully making a telephone threat to damage or destroy an Internal Revenue Service office in Miami.
The threat was made on April 20 when someone called the FBI’s Miami Field Office and said -- while being recorded -- that “the IRS Building in Miami should be evacuated within two hours because it was going to go up in smoke.”
Agents quickly obtained the caller’s cell phone number and located the woman subscriber a short time later, court documents say. The woman told agents she had loaned her cell phone a couple of weeks earlier to a man she only knew as “Rabbit.” She agreed to walk about the neighborhood with officers to see if she could spot “Rabbit.”
Within five minutes, she spotted the man she knew as “Rabbit” in the 1500 block of Northwest 68th Street in Miami, federal court documents say. As officers approached “Rabbit,” an FBI agent dialed the number tied to the bomb threat and quickly heard a phone ringing in the suspect’s pocket.
When agents asked the suspect if he was “Rabbit,” he said he actually was known as “Squirrel,” the documents say. As a follow-up, agents asked “Squirrel” if he knew why they wanted to talk with him “to which he replied that he made a telephone call earlier that day,” threatening to blow up the IRS office.
A criminal complaint says “Squirrel” waived his Miranda rights and said his name was Morris R. Whitehead. The 53-year-old suspect told agents that “if he had wanted to go through with the threat, he would have lit the building on fire rather than using a bomb." But he acknowledged his threat would have been interpreted as a bomb threat.
Whitehead also told agents that he “had wanted to get arrested and go to jail,” and figured making a threat against a federal government building would be the fastest way to be arrested. He told agents that “his prayers had been answered when he saw the FBI agents arrive.”
If convicted, Whitehead faces a maximum of 10 years in federal prison.
