Monroe man gets 1 year in jail for threats to massacre Jews

EVERETT — For threatening to massacre dozens of Jews, a Monroe man must serve one year in jail.

“I would just like to apologize and let you know I’m remorseful,” Dakota Reed said to a judge Tuesday in Snohomish County Superior Court.

He said nothing else.

Reed had pleaded guilty in May to two counts of threats to bomb or injure property, for spewing violent speech on fake Facebook pages for months.

“I’m shooting for 30 Jews,” read a post in late 2018. “No pun needed. Long ways away anyways. See you Goys.”

Reed, 20, never named a particular person or place he would target. Yet he made repeated references to shooting up a synagogue in the year 2025; wrote about “pulling a Dylann Roof;” and yelled on a streaming video, while armed with an AR-15-style rifle, that he planned “to shoot up a (expletive) school.”

The hate crime law in Washington requires the threat to be against a “specific person or group of persons.” Prosecutors were not sure a judge would find Reed’s threats specific enough to qualify. So he was charged with another crime where a person’s aim is to arouse mass panic. Under state guidelines, both crimes carry about the same jail sentence.

A sentencing memo by deputy prosecutor Andrew Alsdorf noted that Reed’s behavior “certainly appears to violate the spirit of” the hate crime law.

“Above and beyond his threats to harm synagogues and schools, the defendant’s words carried the unmistakable, menacing bite of anti-Semitic and racial hatred,” Alsdorf wrote. “He developed the themes of his threatening vision by immersing himself in a toxic online subculture of memes and normalized hate speech in the public square, most of it tolerated in plain sight until the Defendant turned to threatening violent acts.”

The posts came to the attention of the FBI when the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish watchdog group, tipped off authorities in fall 2018.

Reed had been writing under the pseudonyms Tom Shill, William King and variations on those names.

Guns were seized from Reed’s home near Monroe when he was arrested in December. In his posts, he wrote that he’d been emboldened by a recent surge in hate groups nationwide. Reed told investigators that the violent threats were fictional, and that his white nationalist views were protected under the First Amendment.

Prosecutors countered that he crossed a line.

After being booked into jail, Reed posted $50,000 bond, then kept writing threats on social media.

“Y’all mind if I go in to a random courthouse in the movie Narnia and take my M32 grenade launcher?” read one post on a page under his legal name.

The defense asked for a first-time offender waiver. That could have meant no additional time in jail.

“We shouldn’t be punishing Mr. Reed for all the things that have happened in America,” his defense attorney Rick Merrill said. “… I don’t think he ever intended to hurt anbody.”

The defense attorney said Reed knew he made a mistake.

“He was in jail about a month, and after that, he was a completely different person,” Merrill said. “ … He shows a tremendous amount of remorse.”

Merrill told the judge that Reed wasn’t a member of any hate groups, but corrected himself, when the prosecutor noted the evidence showed otherwise.

Reed had boasted of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He’d aligned himself with a hate group that advocates an ethnostate in the Northwest. He’d posted a British fascist banner on his wall, and photographed himself holding a gun in front of it.

The yearlong sentence requested by prosecutors was the most allowed under state guidelines.

Superior Court Judge Paul Thompson concluded that Reed’s “intentional, offensive, hateful actions … were designed to cause fear in the community.”

As part of his sentence, Reed must surrender the military rifle that he showed in a video, and as a felon, he’s prohibited from possessing guns at all.

Reed is banned from going near a school or synagogue while he’s on probation for a year.

And after his release from jail, he’ll have to register with local law enforcement for four years, to ensure he doesn’t have access to weapons.

Reed had no criminal record as an adult.

At age 12, Reed had lit a piece of paper on fire, thrown it in a dumpster, and run away when the trash went up in flames, according to juvenile court records. Two days later he lit a roll of toilet paper on fire in the men’s restroom at Lundeen Park in Lake Stevens. Two friends turned him in. He’d also once been in trouble for bringing a knife to school.

Around the time of his arrest, he’d been working at a local Fred Meyer. Detectives had asked him why he disliked Jews, according to charging papers. He claimed a Jewish person had once gotten him fired.

“I’ve been around some Jews in my life,” he said. “There’s a community here in Washington. They’ve done things as far as to, um, maybe it wasn’t too personal but I’ve had them lie to me, I’ve had them, um, I guess, well, this one probably wasn’t their fault, but I’ve had girls like them over me. I’ve, uh — what was the other one?”

Caleb Hutton: 425-339-3454; chutton@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @snocaleb.