Inmate is accused of sending second threat note to judge

New letter dated on anniversary of Okla. bombing

A Texas prison inmate has been charged for the second time with threatening to kill U.S. District Judge David Hittner, who dismissed the inmate’s civil rights lawsuit against the prison system more than 10 years ago.

George Yarbrough — who pleaded guilty in 2014 to sending a threatening note to Hittner — sent another death threat in April to the Houston-based judge, according to the federal indictment.

The latest letter was dated April 19, the anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The contents of the note were not disclosed.

Hittner, who has been a federal judge since 1986, declined to comment about the case.

The handwritten note sent in September 2014 also arrived by U.S. mail.

“I’m going to kill you whenever I make parole,” it said. “You have ruined my whole life. I have lost all my loved ones.”

The note also threatened to “get” Hittner’s relatives.

Yarbrough, now 45, had faced up to 10 years in prison for the threatening communication but was sentenced instead to 21 months. The order from U.S. District Judge Nancy F. Atlas allowed him to serve the sentence in state prison alongside a 25-year sentence for burglary and a 15-year sentence for theft from Denton County on 1999 convictions.

Yarbrough was ordered to undergo mental health treatment in prison, but a federal appeals court concluded he was not given a proper chance to challenge the requirement and it was

later dropped.

In a letter he sent in September 2016 to Atlas, Yarbrough accused Hittner of using “the power of his position to influence the Texas Prison System” to put him into an administrative segregation unit.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has restricted his mail since 2014. The latest threat was mailed while Yarbrough was being transferred between units, spokesman Robert Hurst said Friday.

“His outgoing mail is closely monitored,” Hurst said. “We are investigating how this happened.”

Yarbrough is currently housed in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Coffield Unit in Tennessee Colony in East Texas.

He was first sent to state prison in October 1991 on a five-year sentence for cocaine possession in Dallas County.

He was released in 1996 but sentenced again in 1999 on the Denton County charges.