New York State Police on Tuesday arrested Patrick Dai, a 21-year-old Cornell University junior who is alleged to have posted threats against Jewish classmates on an anonymous online message board.
The posts, which appeared on the GreekRank forum — a discussion page centered around fraternity and sorority life — included threats of murder and rape against Jewish students at Cornell and specifically named the address of Cornell’s Center for Jewish living, which houses Jewish students and sits next to the university’s kosher dining hall.
Federal investigators determined Dai’s identity by locating the IP address from which he allegedly posted the messages. According to a federal complaint, Dai admitted in an interview with FBI agents that he published the threats, which featured such statements as “if i see another synagogue another rally for the zionist globalist genocidal apartheid dictatorial entity known as ‘israel’, i will bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pic jews” and “if you see a jewish ‘person’ on campus follow them home and slit their throats. rats need to be exterminated from cornell.”
According to Dai’s LinkedIn page, he served as a Cornell “winter orientation leader” during early 2021 and an “orientation supervisor” from March 2021 to February 2022. Dai’s parents told the New York Post that, though they do not believe their son posted the messages, he has been in such a deep depressive state since 2021 that he is incapable of controlling himself, a depression that began one year into his university studies.
Dai entered Cornell as a National Merit Scholar and was an officer with the university’s Science Olympiad organization before taking off two semesters to address his mental-health issues on the advice of a doctor. His parents said he stopped communicating with them days before his arrest, prompting his mother to visit Cornell’s campus, where she saw police cars outside Dai’s residence.
Late Sunday night, hours after the initial messages appeared online, an anonymous GreekRank user posted what reads like a follow-up on the website. The author apologized for the previous messages — though there is no proof Dai wrote the subsequent post — writing that he or she “should not have pressed send on a comment on a conflict I had no standing to talk about, but I did.” The writer continued, saying “no amount of depression or loneliness or isolation is an excuse for terror or terroristic threats” before signing off as “a depressed suicidal person.”
Dai was charged with posting threats to kill or injure another using interstate communications and faces a $250,000 fine and a maximum prison sentence of five years.