Rochester Now ^ | October 22, 2010 | Gary Craig
GREECE, NEW YORK--A Greece man loaded his car with a shotgun, hunting knives, a flare gun, baseball bat and handcuffs and set off en route to Washington, D.C., with plans to engage law enforcement and possibly kill former Vice President Dick Cheney, according to the Secret Service.
The Secret Service detained the man, Ian Rotunno, on Oct. 7 and this week charged him with threats against a former president. Rotunno told Secret Service agents that, as well as planning to kill Cheney, he intended to go to the Texas ranch of former President George W. Bush and murder him also, according to a criminal complaint.
A psychiatrist who interviewed Rotunno Tuesday at the St. James Mercy Hospital in Hornell said Rotunno would likely follow up on his threats if released, according to the court papers.
The doctor said that “if left to his own accord Rotunno would fall into the category of ‘the next Oklahoma City bomber, and was an immediate danger to federal government employees,’ ” the court papers allege.
According to an affidavit by Secret Service Special Agent Joel Blackerby, Rotunno went to work on Oct. 7 at his job at a Gates machine company, where he asked a secretary whether Cheney was still alive. He left around 9:30 a.m. telling a co-worker, “I’m grabbing my shotgun and heading to Washington, D.C.,” the papers allege.
Alerted to the threat, the Secret Service and Greece police went to Rotunno’s apartment at Greenleaf Meadows, and learned from a neighbor that he’d driven off in his Mustang with a golf bag and other items.
Blackerby reached Rotunno on his cell phone, and Rotunno became “belligerent” and profane.
“I’m nowhere near my home,” he said. “I won’t stop until I reach my grandmother’s house then continue on to Washington and if anyone wants to stop me they will have to kill me.”
According to the criminal complaint, shortly after the telephone call Rotunno turned himself into the Owego police.
In Owego, a Secret Service agent interviewed Rotunno, who said he planned to go to Washington, D.C., to “discharge his shotgun into the reflecting pool in order to draw the attention of authorities and be arrested or killed by federal law enforcement or a local police department.”
On his Facebook page, Rotunno had written that he wanted to “spar” with the Secret Service.
Rotunno told the Secret Service that the federal government is corrupt and he planned to do “whatever is necessary to stop it, call attention to his views and will be more than happy to go down with it as well as take down anyone in his way,” the complaint states.
He said “I know where to find President Bush at his ranch in Texas, and I’m not going to stop.”
Federal authorities could not be reached this evening.
A woman who answered a telephone number once registered to Rotunno’s mother, Patricia Zalewski, at a home in Endicott, Broome County, identified herself as Rotunno’s grandmother but declined to give her name.
“He did not make threats. He told people he was going there to protest whatever the ex-president did wrong,” the woman said. “It’s very upsetting for us.”
She said Rotunno was “in the hospital … They figure it’s a mental issue.”
“This is killing me now,” she said.
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