Accused online hate group leader faces Sacramento judge on weapons restraining order
Accused online hate group leader Andrew Richard Casarez encouraged school shooters, wished he could replicate the 2018 Parkland high school mass shooting and called the 2015 massacre of Black parishioners at a Charleston, South Carolina church “the right answer,” a Sacramento County deputy testified Thursday as authorities argue to block the Orangevale man from keeping guns calling him a danger to the community.
Sacramento County sheriff’s Deputy Nate Grgich, detailed to the Sacramento FBI Terrorism Task Force, testified that Casarez online, on podcasts and in man-on-the-street-style interviews in San Francisco discovered by investigators show “multiple excerpts” of Casarez talking about the shootings. Of the Charleston shooting, for instance, Casarez “speaks specifically about what Dylann Roof did – that that was the right answer and that more people needed to do it,” Grgich said.
The emergency gun violence restraining order slapped on Casarez in July stays in place for now after a Thursday telephone hearing marked by technical glitches pushed the Sacramento Superior Court hearing into a second day scheduled for Aug. 20 before Sacramento Superior Court Judge David De Alba.
Hate researchers call Casarez, 27, one of the white power movement’s most violent extremists and a Sacramento FBI terrorism task force has been keeping tabs on him. Casarez is being investigated by sheriff’s detectives for blanketing a Hazel Avenue synagogue with anti-Semitic fliers in 2017 and 2018.
Local investigators say since being outed in July as “Vic Mackey,” the alleged head of the “Bowl Patrol,” the hundreds of online devotees of Roof, the teenage South Carolina white supremacist who shot and killed the nine parishioners at close range in 2015, he is potentially more dangerous as a “lone wolf” attacker wanting to prove his fidelity to the cause. A gun found by deputies executing a search warrant in July adds to the threat, sheriff’s officials said.
But Casarez’s attorney, Alan Donato, is having none of it. In court papers, Donato argued that Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office “helped incite a national media spectacle” in filing the emergency order, then used the court order to trample Casarez’s constitutional rights. By seizing Casarez’s legally registered 9 mm handgun, deputies used intimidation meant to silence the Orangevale man.
“No crime was committed – no act,” Donato said, arguing the order be lifted. De Alba declined.
“There’s much more (information) than what’s in the (sheriff’s) petition,” De Alba said. “I intend to give the sheriff’s department every opportunity to present it.”
Donato and Casarez will see De Alba face to face next week. The judge ordered Casarez to appear in his courtroom Aug. 20.
This story was originally published August 13, 2020 at 4:49 PM.
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