SANTA ANA (CNS) - A 22-year-old Santa Ana man with an apparent fascination with executed serial killer Ted Bundy was convicted by a jury today in federal court in Miami of cyberstalking and sending a kidnapping threat to families of victims of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Prosecutors said Brandon Michael Fleury used 13 Instagram accounts and aliases that included Nikolas Cruz, the alleged Parkland, Florida, shooter, and mass murderer Bundy “to target families and friends of Parkland shooting victims with messages over the course of three weeks between Dec. 22, 2018 and Jan. 11, 2019.”
“Many of the messages, including ones written under user names referring to Cruz and containing Cruz's profile picture, taunted the message recipients about the deaths of loved ones in the Parkland shooting,” according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida. “On Dec. 25, 2018 Fleury, sent a message stating, `I am your abductor I'm kidnapping you fool.”
The harassment, intimidation and threats -- including references to taking loved ones using his AR-15 rifle -- continued in January, officials said.
“After examining Fleury's tablets, law enforcement found thousands of saved images of Ted Bundy, images of the targeted victims and saved screen shots of the messages that he had sent the victims,” according to federal prosecutors.
Fleury was convicted of interstate transmission of a kidnapping threat and interstate cyberstalking and faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison at his scheduled sentencing on Dec. 2.
Seventeen people were killed and another 17 wounded in the February 14, 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
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