Manson landowner charged with hate-crime harassment
Published 1:30 am Tuesday, June 13, 2017
By Jefferson Robbins / The Wenatchee World
WENATCHEE — Already jailed for cyberstalking and illegally keeping firearms, a rural Manson extremist was served last week with nine additional charges of malicious harassment — a hate crime under Washington law — for allegedly threatening nearby landowners with anti-Semitic slurs and taunts.
David W. Allender, 52, referred to nine neighbors along Joe Creek Road as “satanic Jews,” published their home addresses and made threats to murder them on his website, Chelan County sheriff’s deputies said.
He also allegedly used digging equipment to cut trenches across the roadway and disrupt access to their land, which they had bought from Allender after he purchased and subdivided about 364 acres.
Prosecutors filed the nine counts of malicious harassment Wednesday. Allender is due to be arraigned in Superior Court on June 19. He’s also charged with possessing nearly half a pound of marijuana in his home, more than the one-ounce legal limit for personal use.
When charged, Allender was already held in the Chelan County Regional Justice Center after a May 26 arrest on a charge of cyberstalking one of his fellow landowners, and for unlawfully possessing firearms deputies said they found in his home during a subsequent search. He pleaded guilty in 2014 to two counts of second-degree assault after firing gunshots toward a family that drove near his residence to view land he had put up for sale.
Since buying his Joe Creek Road property in 2005, Allender has managed a network of blogs that solicited potential land buyers and partners for an e-commerce scheme, which he claimed would circumvent traditional banking systems. His websites repeatedly refer to a worldwide conspiracy by “Satanic Jews,” the same term he allegedly applied to the nine victims named in the felony charges.
Allender sold the Joe Creek parcels under covenants binding them to a homeowners association he controlled. Some fellow landowners said Allender’s threatening behavior and dictatorial control led them to fear for their safety when visiting the property, and to start legal action to reform the homeowners association.
None “are going to be around much longer,” Allender allegedly wrote in one website post, referring to the nine neighbors by name, “because by the grace of YHWH, we’re going to retake our country and world back from this psychotic, disgusting, hateful and racist tribe. …”
Malicious harassment falls under “crimes and threats motivated by bigotry and bias” as defined in state law. It encompasses threats, bodily harm or property damage intentionally committed by a perpetrator “because of his or her perception of the victim’s race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or mental, physical, or sensory handicap.”
