FAYETTEVILLE — A federal jury took less than half an hour Monday to find a Springdale man guilty of making an interstate threat via email.
Phillip Donald, 57, was charged with sending the email last summer to a woman at Spartan College, an aviation school in Tulsa, Okla.
Dustin Roberts, a deputy U.S. attorney, told jurors there was no doubt Donald sent the cryptic email to Linda Jared. The message indicated the woman was going to be raped and killed by having her throat cut from ear to ear.
Jared helps graduates at the college find jobs and didn't recognize Donald as a graduate of the college.
Donald told FBI agents he sent the email and a copy was found on a computer at his home.
Roberts said Donald was angry because he couldn't find a job.
Tim Snively, Donald’s court-appointed defense attorney, told jurors his client was angry but the email wasn't an actual threat aimed at Jared or the school. The email started as an online posting on Craigslist.
“When taken as a whole, this isn’t a threat. It’s a diatribe, ranting and raving,” Snively said. “He copied his rant and rave and sent it over to Spartan College and she was just the person who happened to get it.”
Jared told jurors the email left her shaken and looking over her shoulder with no sense of security.
“I opened an email that was very strange and frightened me. I read through it several more times and each time it scared me more,” Jared said. “I obviously thought it was a threat to me, but I wanted to try to understand it.”
Donald told jurors he believed someone at Spartan was preventing him from getting jobs by releasing his medical records to potential employers. The revelation came in a psychic vision, Donald said.
Jared said she has no access to student medical records.
Donald said he was trained in remote viewing while in the military and he used that training to see why he wasn't getting job offers. Donald said he saw a form of Karma and was warning people at Spartan a woman there was acting maliciously and something malicious was going to happen to her as a result.
“I was trying to describe an event that was forming,” Donald said. “I didn’t mean anything to any individual. I wasn’t expecting it to be taken the way it has been taken.”
Donald said the only email address he had for anyone at Spartan College was Jared’s, which came from an email she sent him several months earlier containing possible jobs.
Donald will be sentenced at a later date.