Release denied for suspect in Masonic center shooting plot
Judge says nature of plan posed ‘an unreasonable risk to safety’
A Milwaukee man the FBI says had planned a mass shooting but whose lawyers argue is merely a blowhard “Palestinian Walter Mitty” will remain jailed until his trial, a federal magistrate judge has ruled.
“It comes down to this,” wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge David E. Jones. “It should not take the spiritual guidance of two religious leaders to dissuade a person from committing mass murder.
“A person whose moral compass depends so heavily on the advice of others on such a fundamental question of human decency presents an unacceptable risk.”
Samy Hamzeh, 25, has been detained since his arrest in January 2016 when he bought two machine guns and a silencer from undercover FBI agentsafter months of conversations Hamzeh had with a pair of FBI informants.
Most of the recorded talks were in Arabic, and once they were all translated and transcribed, Hamzeh’s counsel argued they showed it was really the informants who steered the talk of violence, and that Hamzeh — who had emphatically canceled the plot to shoot up to 30 people after consulting two imams — had a solid entrapment defense.
In June, they requested his release on bond before his trial set for February. They warned he might otherwise spend as long in pre-trial detention than the likely sentence he would face if convicted of possessing the guns — about two years.
The court’s pretrial services also recommended Hamzeh’s release.
Jones heard from those lawyers and prosecutors at a spirited hearing July 12 and suggested his ruling would come the next week, but it was not filed until Thursday.
His 21-page order acknowledges Hamzeh’s lack of any criminal record or connections to terrorist groups, his good employment history, local family and that he ultimately told the informants they should not carry out the shooting.
But Jones said the nature of the plot, even though it was aborted, convinced him Hamzeh’s release “would pose an unreasonable risk to safety.”
Hamzeh’s conversations with the informants “may have been just boastful talking, but it is shocking to the conscience,” Jones wrote.
“Well-centered individuals do not harbor fantasies of killing other people. He was also apparently erratic in his personal conduct, was susceptible to suggestion and harbored a great deal of pent-up anger.”
In his first discussions of a gun with one of the informants, Hamzeh said he only wanted a handgun, for protection on his delivery job, and to defend himself if people ever attacked him for being Muslim.
The talks took a bizarre turn in January 2016, when the informants, through use of YouTube videos, convinced Hamzeh that Masons supported the Islamic State, the terrorist group that Hamzeh felt was disgracing all Muslims. That led to a plan to kill people at the Humphrey Scottish Rite Masonic Center, 790 N. Van Buren St.
The trio toured the center and discussed what Jones called a chillingly detailed plan for how to kill the most people there and escape, including specific instructions on how and when to kill the front desk receptionist.
Jones acknowledged a psychological report showed Hamzeh doesn’t suffer from mental illness and is not likely violent, and that Hamzeh’s entrapment defense might well be persuasive at trial.
Nonetheless, Jones concluded, he was convinced the better choice was to keep Hamzeh jailed until trial.