Powder hoax suspect has ‘issues’
Beverly residents shocked neighbor tied to letters
Daniel Frisiello’s Facebook posts made no secret of his politics. The selfdescribed Democrat and Catholic Charities worker was pro-gun control and anti-President Trump.
But when FBI agents showed up early yesterday at the Hathaway Avenue home where he lives with his parents on a quiet culde-sac in Beverly, neighbors were stunned when they found out why.
Frisiello, 24, is accused of using powderlaced letters to terrorize the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and four other people before federal sleuths rummaged through his family’s garbage and connected him to the purchase of a practical-joke “glitter bomb.”
“It’s just every parent’s worst nightmare, because I have no doubt they knew nothing,” one neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous, said of Frisiello’s family. “He went to private schools. This is not like a terrorist kid.”
Frisiello made an initial appearance yesterday in U.S. District Court in Worcester, where he is charged with five counts of mailing threats and five counts of false information and hoaxes. He was held pending a detention hearing on Monday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Garland said that a family member had reported that the defendant was on medication for suicidal thoughts.
Frisiello’s lawyer, Scott Gleason, said his client has been on medication all his life, but he would not say for what.
Gleason described him as “very much an overwhelmed young man who has got some issues and some difficulties that he’s been dealing with through his life. But I am optimistic and confident that when all of the facts play out, there will be a very good understanding of what transpired, and I’m expecting the best to work out.”
The letter to Donald Trump Jr. was postmarked from Boston last month and opened by Trump’s wife, Vanessa, who was taken to the hospital after being exposed to white powder, which later was found to be nontoxic.
“You are an awful, awful person, I am surprised that your father lets you speak on TV. You make the family idiot, Eric, look smart,” the computer-written note said, according to the criminal complaint against Frisiello.
The defendant is also accused of sending threatening letters containing nontoxic white powder to U.S. Sen. Deborah Stabenow of Michigan; U.S. Attorney Nicola T. Hanna of the central district of California, Antonio Sabato Jr., a Republican congressional candidate in California, and Stanford law professor Michele Dauber, authorities said.