MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – According to police, staff at a Miami Beach kosher bakery noticed their point-of-sale system for taking orders was going haywire: Orders were being added and deleted at random, but, more concerningly, it began to print chilling messages like “I have a gun,” “I’m outside,” and “I’m coming in.”
Staff initially suspected that a recently laid-off assistant manager at the Tasty Beach Cafe, located at 4041 Royal Palm Ave., hacked the system and was behind the threats, which were also sent to specific employees via text messages, an arrest report states.
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“The hacking of the P.O.S. system caused (the owner) to shut down the restaurant for the day, send the employees home and the loss of profits,” police wrote in the report.
But, on Wednesday, new information came to light, police said: The man behind the chaos and threatening messages was instead a current employee, Dianundre Turpin.
Clover, the company behind the system, determined that Turpin used his unique PIN to log in to the system to send the threats, the report states. Police said they also determined the threatening text messages came from a phone number registered to the 22-year-old.
Turpin, of Miami Gardens, is accused of sending threats like “bombing the bakery,” “I will follow you home n slit your throat” and “Im gonna throw the bomb.”
He also threatened to rape a specific employee, the report states.
“Tell (her) she’s gonna need a casket b4 the week is over,” police said he wrote.
Detectives then went to Tasty Bakery Cafe Wednesday and arrested Turpin, who was working that day.
Authorities said Turpin, a Trinidadian national, confessed to making the threats.
The arrest report doesn’t include information about his alleged motive, including whether anti-Semitism played a role; none of the messages police described contained anti-Semitic themes and Turpin is not facing any hate crime charges.
He is, however, facing two counts of written threats to kill or do bodily injury as well as one count of threatening to throw or place a bomb.
Turpin’s bond was listed as “to be set” in Miami-Dade jail records, which also show that he was out on felony bond on multiple charges related to credit card fraud at the time of his arrest.