Hispanic people “are what is wrong with this country,” a man who allegedly threatened to shoot up a Walmart in the Orlando area told a police officer just days after the El Paso shooting massacre left 22 people dead, according to newly surfaced documents on his arrest and online postings.
Richard Dean Clayton, 26, allegedly threatened to pee in his arresting officer’s car until the officer told him he wasn’t Hispanic, according to newly revealed police reports.
Clayton was “very uncooperative and belligerent” while in custody, Winter Park Police Officer Greg Gerardi noted in his report.
Clayton said he “prayed” the Gerardi would get “blown away and killed” on his next call, according to the report. Then, he allegedly threatened to pee in the patrol car.
“Your name is Officer Gerardi? That sounds Hispanic,” Clayton allegedly said. “They come in and are ruining everything,” he added, according to the report.
“While en-route to the jail, Clayton put his handcuffs in the front and began taking his penis out stating, ‘Officer I am going to pee in your car!'” Gerardi wrote. Only after the officer told Clayton “I am not Hispanic” did the threats stop.
“Ok well then I guess I won’t pee in your car then,” Clayton allegedly said.
According to the reports, first surfaced by the journalist Nick Martin on Tuesday, Clayton’s affinity for Nazism and desire to create a white ethnostate had long been evident online.
The police report cites Clayton’s Facebook posts, revealing what’s become a common thread among certain mass shooters and those who threaten mass violence: ultranationalism, racism, and an obsession with guns and violence.
For example, in one picture posted on a Facebook page allegedly controlled by Clayton, as described in a police report, a white male is seen wearing a stars and stripes bandana is holding an AR-15 style rifle and a bottle labeled Knob Creek. There’s a Trump banner on the wall.
Another post, the report says, displays a swastika. Another asks readers to “imagine for a moment that we’ve established out [sic] enthostate, physically removed all the commies and degenerates, and white birthrates are back in the positives. Who would there be left to make fun of?”
“Just packin pistols and beatin monkeys,” one post reads, per the police report. A comment underneath the post reads, “fuck the kyk3s that make the laws these gunmen gotta enforce.” And another post, from February: “Fuck the internet. I’m committing a hate crime irl tonight.”
Clayton, who was living in Winter Park at the time of his arrest, used multiple accounts under assumed names, police alleged. He posted about having “8 levels of alts going on” — a reference to alternate accounts, typically used to anonymously skirt Facebook’s content rules.
Upon Clayton’s arrest Friday on a charge of written threats to kill, do bodily injury, or conduct a mass shooting or an act of terrorism, law enforcement quoted Clayton’s alleged threat in a press release, posted a day after the shooting massacre in El Paso that allegedly targeted Mexicans.
“3 more days of probation left then I get my AR-15 back,” he allegedly wrote on Facebook. “Don’t go to Walmart next week.”
“The close proximity” of Clayton’s alleged threat and the Walmart shooting in El Paso, the previous day, had led law enforcement to conclude Clayton threat “is considered to be credible,” according to the police report.
Previously charged for marijuana possession and traffic violations, Clayton now sits in Orange County Jail on his first felony charge, the Miami Herald reported. He pleaded not guilty.
According to an affidavit for an arrest warrant from a special agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, police traced the account used by Clayton to post the threat, which purported to belong to a different person, by matching the phone number associated with it to Clayton’s own.
The special agent, Brett Houghland, told the court that a Seminole County Sheriff investigator had been in touch with Clayton’s girlfriend on Aug. 8, and that his girlfriend had advised that Clayton owns a pistol, rifle and shotgun. She didn’t know where exactly the guns were located, Houghland wrote.
