Somebody threatened Michael Schiavo.
03/26/2005
Associated Press
A North Carolina man was charged by the FBI on Friday with offering a $250,000 bounty for the murder of Michael Schiavo, the husband of a brain-damaged Florida woman dying in a hospice after years of legal wrangling with her parents.
Richard Alan Meywes was arrested without incident at his home in Fairview, the FBI said. Tim Stutheit, an FBI spokesman in Charlotte, declined to give Meywes' age.
Meywes was charged in Tampa, Fla., with murder for hire and with the transmission of interstate threatening communications. He was being held in the Buncombe County Detention Center and faces a U.S. Magistrate's hearing Monday in Asheville. He will eventually be brought to Tampa to face the charges against him, the FBI said.
Meywes is accused of sending an e-mail putting a $250,000 bounty "on the head of Michael Schiavo" and another $50,000 to eliminate a judge who denied a request to intervene in the Schiavo case, the FBI said in a prepared statement. The FBI did not identify the judge.
"The e-mail also made reference to the recent death of a judge in Atlanta and the death of (a) judge's family members in Illinois," the FBI said.
Sara Oates, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Tampa, said the e-mail was sent to news organizations in Florida.
"We take any threat of murder over the Internet seriously," Oates said. "It doesn't matter who they are threatening. We take it seriously."
Cpl. Todd Ernst of the Buncombe County Sheriff's Office said Meywes had no prior criminal record in the county where the arrest took place.
Michael Schiavo's wife, Terri, suffered brain damage in 1990 when her heart stopped briefly from a chemical imbalance believed to have been brought on by an eating disorder. She left no living will.
She's been kept alive but in a persistent vegetative state as her husband and her parents fought in court about whether she should be allowed to die.
Last week, Congress and President Bush entered the battle to force the case to be heard by federal courts. Since then, all courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have refused to intervene to order Terri Schiavo's feeding tubes restored.