A man was slapped with hate crime charges after he allegedly sent a racist letter to a woman in Staten Island and numerous homophobic letters to the Staten Island Pride Center demanding that “you and your sicko pals… be put out to pasture once and for all for the sake of mankind,” according to a criminal complaint obtained by Gay City News.
Brian Jones, a 48-year-old Staten Islander, has admitted to having sent the hate-filled screeds, according to authorities.
Roughly a half dozen letters were sent to the Pride Center, according to that group’s executive director, Carol Bullock, who told Gay City News the mail started flowing in after New York City Pride in 2018 and continued up until the weeks before the alleged bigot was nabbed this month.
Bullock believes some of the letters were motivated by the organization’s boycott this year of the Staten Island Yankees after the team partnered with the fast food chain Chick-fil-A, whose owner has donated millions of dollars to anti-LGBTQ organizations and politicians. (The team has since severed that relationship.)
“You and your sicko pals keep ramming your twisted, perverted agenda down the throats of heterosexuals, aka normal people. The LGBTQ community doesn’t deserve to have anything in this country whatsoever and that includes so-called rights,” Jones wrote in one of his letters to the Pride Center on May 31, according to the criminal complaint provided by the Richmond County District Attorney’s Office.
Jones also allegedly used that handwritten letter to peddle baseless accusations of pedophilia against gay men, writing, “Gay men like little boys and for that they deserve to be castrated with a pair of rusty grass shears!”
Three months later, on August 30, authorities say he sent another letter to the Pride Center and told the organization that it should “be bulldozed as well as destroyed with countless wrecking balls… fuck your demented agenda and you bastards are well on your way to hell for your abnormal and deviant behavior. If you were in a Muslim country you would have been dead years ago!”
The next day, according to prosecutors, Jones sent a package filled with racist letters and news clippings to an unidentified woman on Staten Island. He allegedly scrawled racial slurs and unleashed a series of offensive statements including, “N*****! Die! Animal! Savage! Castrate! Lowlife! Thug!”
Jones admitted to the crimes when he was busted by authorities, according to the Richmond County District Attorney’s Office.
“I’m not going to lie,” he admitted, according to the complaint. “It’s me. It’s my handwriting. I don’t like when they shove things in my face. I don’t have to deal with that.”
In total, Jones was hit with two counts of aggravated harassment as a hate crime in the second degree, one count of aggravated harassment in the second degree, and one count of trespassing to cap off his furious crusade against queer and black folks.
Bullock, who said the letters eventually started to target her directly, stressed to Gay City News that the notes would not stop her or the Pride Center from continuing to serve the community.
“Everyone keeps asking, ‘Is this going to affect your work?’ I say every day that the good we do outweighs something like this,” Bullock said on September 19. “I’m just so honored to work here.”
Bullock, citing an ongoing investigation, would not shed light on how investigators linked the man to the letters, and Richmond County District Attorney Michael McMahon did not respond to requests for further details beyond the information in the criminal complaint.
Bullock thanked local prosecutors for making progress on the case.
“I’m happy that they identified the individual and it’s certainly a scary situation and a scary feeling to receive that kind of communication,” she said. “I’m just really happy with the district attorney and his team of detectives because they reacted so quickly.”
