Spring man facing cyberstalking charges
A super fan in Spring is facing a rare federal cyberstalking prosecution in Florida on charges he repeatedly sent violent online threats to the girlfriend of pop singer Jake Miller.
A federal magistrate in Houston Tuesday called the conduct of 21-year- old Mario Francisco Perez “sophisticated,” “maniacal” and “obsessive” and ordered him into detention in Florida on charges of cyberstalking and transmitting interstate threats through Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. The accusations involve a flood of posts by Perez, intended as defamatory and threatening, that framed Miller’s girlfriend as a racist and a Trump supporter who brazenly violated her graduate school’s protocol by going on campus with COVID-19; later posts threatened her life at specific geographic locations.
Miller may be familiar to Houston audiences for the 2016 video for his song “Overnight” starringOlympic gymnast Simone Biles.
Miller and his girlfriend both lived in the Miami area but recently relocated to California, and the threats apparently followed as his girlfriend shared images online of places they were visiting.
Testimony also revealed Perez mailed a doctored image to the victim that depicted her having sex with her own stepfather and posted an image of someone who looked like her on her college campus.
Perez, a Lone Star College student who lives with his parents, has been photographed multiple times with Miller and was known to him as a super fan. Miller knew Perez well enough to be astonished when federal agents said they believed Perez was their primary suspect, an FBI agent said.
Carlos Morales, the FBI Special Agent on the case from the Miami field office, testified by video that Perez began targeting a woman named in court documents as B.B. and her mother after B.B. posted a photograph of herself with the Florida-bred singer and songwriter on Instagram in July 2019. On Instagram, Brandi Burrows identifies herself as Miller’s girlfriend and Miller has also posted publicly about their relationship.
Morales outlined in an Oct. 2 affidavit how Perez used 20 or 30 handles, including some that combined the girlfriend’s full name with words such as “loves trump,” “kulxklan,” “horse,” “yeast.infection,” and “racist.”
Using those handles, Perez posted online threats on the woman’s social media accounts with increasing frequency, severity and specificity between June 2019 and September 2020, according to court documents.
The agent said he posted that B.B. was a Trump supporter and a racist and stated, “WE CANT WAIT TO MAKE YOUR LIFE MISERABLE.”
One direct message to the woman’s mother on Instagram mentioned the author knew where her daughter’s new home was in Los Angeles.
“I hope (B.B.) dies we knowwhere the newhouse is! we will hurt her!!” Another post echoed those threats in all caps, “WE WILLGET YOUWHENYOU LEAST EXPECT IT.”
When the woman traveled back to Florida the threats warned her not to return to LA or her life would “become hell.”
“These threats caused substantial emotional distress for both the victim and her family,” the agent said, with words that expressed “a desire to inflict death or bodily harm on the victim” as well as “a meant to carry out these threats specifically, by tracking the victim’s movements online and traveling to the victim’s location.”
Officials narrowed in on Perez as the suspect when they linked the phone number associated with the online threats to that of fan who registered on Eventbrite for an online Jake Miller “meet and greet” in August.
Perez, a Houston native, comes from a closeknit family. His father is a longhaul trucker. His mother has a clothing boutique where he sometimes helps out as a cashier, said his lawyer, Gary Tabakman.
Perez waived a probable cause hearing, where he would have had the right to challenge the allegations. Tabakman told the court his client has no criminal history. Prior to the hearing, he said Perez feels a great deal of remorse.
Tabakman told the judge that people become “emboldened and they’re making really bad decisions online,” but said he didn’t think Perez had any intention of following up on the threats.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Melissa Annis said although Perez clearly had a supportive and loving family, they had no idea he had been stalking B.B. from afar.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter Bray, a former federal public defender, said itwas one of the most targeted internet threats he’d ever seen, saying Perez was it was “unmitigatedly obsessed” and the attacks were “lengthy, sophisticated.. almost maniacal” involving “many, many accounts, it’s many, many threats.”