On 30th October, a 21-year-old Cornell University student identified as Patrick Dai was arrested for circulating horrendous anti-Jewish death threats over the campus. The death threat posts by Dai had put the Ivy League campus on high alert over the weekend.
Patrick Dai, a junior engineering associate at the highly regarded university, was named in a federal complaint. The authorities are said to have charged the student for using interstate communications to make murder threats or injure another person, which might put him in prison for up to five years. He might also be imposed with a monetary fine of $250,000.
Dai, the resident of Pittsford, New York was charged just hours after New York State Police officers identified him as a person of interest in connection with online threats to “bring an assault rifle to campus.”
Some of the threat messages shared by Dai included calls to follow Jewish persons to their homes and slit their throats. “If you see any Jewish person on campus, follow them and slit their throats. Rats need to be eliminated from Cornell,” the anti-Jewish death threat read.
“The genocidal fascist zionist regime will be destroyed. Rape and kill all the Jew women before they birth more Jewish Hitlers. Jews are excrement on the face of the Earth. No Jewish civilian is innocent of genocide,” another message read.
Some of the messages also extended support to Palestine. The messages read, “Allah-hu-Akhbar! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Glory to Hamas. Liberation by any means necessary.”
The parents of the accused meanwhile refused to accept the fact that their son had done something like this. They claimed that he was undergoing severe depression. “My son is in severe depression. He cannot control his emotions well due to the depression. No, I don’t think he committed the crime,” the father of the accused said.
As per the reports, Dai fell into a deep depression in 2021, one year after beginning his engineering studies at the prestigious university.
He entered the school as one of five National Merit Scholars from Pittsford-Mendon High School, as well as a 12-time AP Scholar who volunteered at Rochester General Hospital.
Dai collaborated at Cornell as an undergraduate advisor, tutoring other engineering students in the computer language for programming MATLAB, and as the director of logistics for the institution’s Science Olympiad.
According to his LinkedIn, Dai also worked as a leader of orientation and received a promotion to supervisor after only two months on the job. Dai’s parents claimed that he changed dramatically after just one year, even though he had no history of violence.
“He was always very nice to society, well organized, helpful to my family and his classmates before 2021. He told us he lost his life goal and motivation … As parents, we tried to give him more love,” his father said.
Dai took two semesters off from school, in the spring of 2022 and 2023, at the doctor’s recommendation to try to recover, but he struggled with regaining his ambition.
Dai’s communications with his parents had been shut just days before his arrest, around the time he allegedly threatened to “shoot up 104 West,” a university dining hall that caters primarily to Kosher diets. He also threatened to “slit the throat” of any Jewish men he encountered on the campus.
“My wife called him or sent messages to him many times but got no answers. She was worrying that he might commit suicide and drove to his apartment to see what happened. By the time she made the 80-mile trip to the Ithaca building, Dai had already been arrested,” Dai’s father added.
In a statement issued Tuesday, Joel Malina, Cornell’s vice president for university relations, confirmed the arrest of a Cornell student but did not name Dai. “We remain shocked by and condemn these horrific, antisemitic threats and believe they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We know that our campus community will continue to support one another in the days ahead,” Malian said. The school also said that heightened security has been deployed at the campus.
On October 7, over 2,500 Hamas terrorists invaded Israel by land, air, and sea, killing 1,400 people, the vast majority of whom were civilians, and kidnapping 230 people, including 30 children. The smallest is nine months old. Entire families were massacred in their homes, and over 260 people were slaughtered at an outdoor music festival.
The terrorists raped the Israeli women and also didn’t spare the elders and the children. The videos of these horrific incidents were also made viral. The attack on Israel by the Hamas terrorists marks the most brutal attack against Jews after the Holocaust.
After the attack by Hamas, Israel launched a counter-attack on Gaza. Over 5,000 Palestinians have been killed so far, including women and children as well as journalists, medical workers, and first responders, with more than 15,000 injured. IDF has been asking Gazans to move away from Northern Gaza but Egypt has closed the Rafah crossing and has declared that it won’t allow any refugees from Gaza.
