A man accused earlier this year with plotting a mass shooting at a Black music festival has been released without criminal charges. The man, a white former police officer, was taken into custody after making disturbing comments of planning violence and traveling armed across state lines, but a grand jury decided that there was insufficient evidence to charge him in the alleged plot.
Accused plotter freed after arrest, extradition over alleged planned attack
The Associated Press reported that Christopher Gillum, a white 45-year-old former police officer from North Carolina, was quietly released from police custody in June after having been arrested in April on suspicion of planning to travel to New Orleans to conduct an attack against Black people. The arrest came after Gillum’s cousin reported that the former officer had made several disturbing comments to him during phone conversations. Gillum’s comments to relatives included telling them that he was going to “take care of business” and that he planned to “kill a Black person.” Gillum was also alleged to have told family members to “just wait and see what happens,” and he allegedly said in one conversation that he had retrieved a gun from a storage unit. The cousin, who claimed that Gillum often made racist statements when he was under the influence, also said that Gillum mentioned an intention to find a popular left-leaning Twitch streamer.
Gillum was arrested in April at a hotel in Destin, Florida, after authorities tracked him to the city using Flock cameras. At the time, authorities said that he planned to travel to New Orleans to conduct a mass shooting and then commit “suicide by cop.” At the time of Gillum’s arrest, authorities recovered a handgun and approximately 200 rounds of ammunition that he had with him. Although he hadn’t specified what festival he was allegedly targeting, the timing of his trip led authorities to believe he was likely planning an attack on the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, although the FBI stated that there was “no indication that [Gillum] ever made a direct threat to Jazz Fest in New Orleans.” He was charged in Orleans Parish with making terrorist threats and extradited from Florida to Louisiana.
Experts, authorities explain lack of charges
Gillum was extradited to Louisiana, where he was detained without bond. However, a grand jury declined to indict him on terrorizing charges, and he was released in June. His lawyer, Dylan Utley, confirmed that he was not wanted for criminal charges in any other state. Katherine Schweit, who has served as a prosecutor in Chicago and once ran the FBI’s active shooter program, explained to the Associated Press that making a case over an attack that did not occur can be challenging. “It’s very difficult to convince a jury, or to convince a grand jury, that something might have happened,” Schweit said. Gillum’s case was also plagued with jurisdictional issues; the alleged threats were made in North Carolina, his arrest was conducted in Florida, and he did not enter Louisiana until he was already in police custody.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement on the case “Though the Grand Jury declined charges based on these facts, I want to thank state and federal law enforcement officials who coordinated and successfully stopped this individual in Florida from carrying out whatever it was he was planning, wherever he might have been planning to carry it out.” Murrill also attributed the grand jury’s decision to actions taken by Gillum’s family to take him to an out-of-state treatment facility. Authorities in North Carolina, meanwhile, said that they were not informed of Gillum’s release. Byron Tucker, a representative of the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office, complained to the Associated Press “If we’ve got an individual that was accused of such an action, we would want to know if in fact he did return to Alamance County.”
Despite the threats allegedly made by Gillum in conversations with family members and his arrest while heavily armed, Gillum is free, facing no criminal charges over the attack he was accused of planning. While authorities may have stopped an act of racist violence, there will apparently be no long-term legal repercussions for the man accused of plotting a deadly attack.