Threat to shoot postman probed
Conway resident indicted in case
A Conway man was indicted this week by a federal grand jury, three weeks after, postal inspectors say, he threatened on Facebook to kill his mailman and then was found with a loaded shotgun near his front door.
The indictment charges Frederick Noel Taylor Jr. with threatening a federal official and making interstate communications of a threat to injure someone.
Taylor was arrested June 21 at his McNutt Road apartment after three U.S. postal inspectors and four uniformed Conway police officers went there in response to a report about a June 20 Facebook post by “Rick Taylor.” Someone had reported the post to Little Rock police, who forwarded a screen-shot to the postal inspectors.
According to court documents, the post said, “The mother-f ****** postman is going to die. He stole my package from the VA and claims it was delivered. So I’m laying in wait for the piece of s*** tomorrow and I’m going to shoot the
b **** in the f ****** head.”
According to a postal inspector’s affidavit, the Facebook page was traced to Frederick Taylor at the McNutt Road complex. It said agents first talked to Taylor’s regular letter carrier, who said “he had not heard a complaint about any missing packages at the apartment complex.”
The carrier, however, recognized Taylor from a photograph on his Facebook profile, and told the inspectors that “every contact he has had with the man was positive.”
The inspectors, accompanied by Conway police, then went to Taylor’s upstairs apartment and knocked. The affidavit said Taylor answered, and as soon as the officers identified themselves, he said “he knew why we were there and it was because of a Facebook post he had made.”
The officers showed Taylor the screen-shot of the Facebook post and he admitted he had made it, the affidavit said. It said he was then arrested on state charges of terroristic threatening and “asked if we could get his pants and eyeglasses from his bedroom.”
The affidavit noted that during a “protective sweep” of the apartment before retrieving the items, two
postal inspectors “saw a loaded shotgun by the door and a computer in the living room.”
While Taylor was being interviewed at the Conway Police Department, police obtained a search warrant for the apartment, where a Stevens Savage .12-gauge shotgun, five .12-gauge shotgun shells and a Dell computer were seized, according to the affidavit, which was sworn in support of a federal criminal complaint. The complaint allows suspects to be detained in federal custody until their case can be reviewed by a federal grand jury.
Meanwhile, Taylor appeared briefly in court June 28, where at the joint request of defense attorney Blake Hendrix and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Pat Harris, U.S. Magistrate Judge Joe Volpe ordered Taylor to undergo a mental examination before the case proceeds further. Hendrix said Taylor is bipolar and diabetic.
The affidavit noted that according to a Conway police detective, someone else had previously reported that Taylor posted a threat on Facebook to kill a U.S. congressman.
The detective told the postal inspector that from what he could remember, “the threat was vague and the Police Department just sent out an intelligence memo to Conway police officers.”