DAVIE, Fla. – Authorities arrested a Tamarac man Thursday after accusing him of threatening a woman he once had a crush on in high school.
According to a Davie Police Department arrest report, the woman told police that Erick Christian Mendez, 32, made his first threat in 2009, on their last day of high school.
Recommended Videos
Things evidently reached a boiling point late last month, when police said Mendez threatened a Parkland-style mass murder against the woman, her family and a friend.
Davie police Officer Justin Elmore wrote in the report that Mendez made the woman’s high school experience “very uncomfortable” after he confessed to having a crush on her in the ninth grade.
“She described how (Mendez) would follow her around school and stated that she believed he was obsessed with her,” Elmore wrote. “Sometime during their junior year, the defendant was expelled from school and blamed (her) for his expulsion.”
On their last day of high school, Elmore wrote that Mendez told the woman that she would “pay for her comments” and that he would “never forget about it.”
Over the following years, police said Mendez made multiple threats to the woman in online messages and detailed threats to the woman and her family in messages to others.
Elmore wrote that Mendez, in a 2020 social media message to a woman who knew the victim, blamed her for a “swatting” incident at his home and claimed she called him a “terrorist,” which she said she hadn’t opened for more than a year because it ended up in her spam folder.
The woman told Mendez to never mention the victim’s name again and that she would file a police report.
Then, on Sunday, the woman received a response from Mendez with the threat that would apparently land him in jail, according to the report.
“I know where (redacted) lives. I’ve been inside her neighborhood... You saw what happened with that kid who killed 17 people at Stoneman Douglas? That’s gonna be you, (redacted), (redacted) and her daughter (redacted) because of everything she did,” police said Mendez wrote.
The report states that Mendez claimed to have almost had “a Karen of a politician killed” because of “her loose connections to the whole thing.”
Elmore wrote that said politician was believed to be Broward-based U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
“When I see (redacted) again, and I will, she will be a blood smear based on the things she has done and there’s nothing you or her can do,” Mendez allegedly told the woman’s friend.
After receiving the report, Davie police said they met with Mendez at his workplace in Coral Springs, where he “acknowledged he sent the (threatening) comments to kill the victims using his Facebook Messenger and stated he was getting back at her for things she did in the past.”
Mendez was taken to jail and faced three charges of written threats to kill or do bodily injury.
Jail records show he was being held on a $300,000 bond.