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Federal jurors in Camden convicted Joseph Brodie, 40, of Millville, last year of making threats to U.S. government officials, officers and employees through a phone call and emails.
Brodie, a veteran of both the U.S. Army and U.S. Maine Corps, will have to serve just about all of his sentence because there’s no parole in the federal prison system.
Federal prosecutors said Brodie intended to carry out the threats.
He was angry, they said, when he didn’t get the results he wanted from LoBiondo’s office after complaining in spring 2017 about the medical care and treatment he was receiving from the U.S. Veterans Administration.
Refused a meeting with LoBiondo, Brodie threatened the congressman’s chief of staff on the phone, calling him a “dead man,” U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Craig Carpenito said.
An hour and a half later, Brodie “sent an email to the congressman’s veterans’ affairs liaison as well as the caseworker, threatening their lives as well as the lives of the congressman and his staff in the Mays Landing Office,” Carpenito said.
Brodie wrote that he wanted to meet LoBiondo “face to face” and emphasized “how easy” it was to find the congressman’s Mays Landing Office, the U.S. attorney said.
He attached a terrain map of the area -- with the area around the congressman’s office enlarged for detail and a red pinpoint location marker on the office – to the email, Carpenito said.
It “even shows the environment and surrounding terrain, parking lots, wooded areas, etc., (like the kind a highly trained Combat Infantryman would use),” he said the email continued.
The same day that he made the threats, Brodie texted his fancée: “I threaten the life of a Congressman’s Chief of Staff. I’m pretty sure the Secret Service are going to investigate,” Carpenito said.
He also wrote that he was “prepared” for any law enforcement officers who might respond to his home, the U.S. attorney said.
“I’ll give them a chance to leave,” Carpenito said Brodie texted. “If not, it’ll be First Blood Part II Type Sh*t (if you never saw that Rambo movie).”
“I wanna die in a gunfight," federal authorities said Brodie texted. “I won’t surrender. It’s not in me.”
Brodie also “spoke to his fiancée on the phone and told her that he was going to travel to an address in New Jersey, that he had GPS coordinates in his car, that he was going to kill LoBiondo’s chief of staff, and that there was going to be a ‘blood bath’,” Carpenito said.
NJ State Police chased down Brodie after going to his trailer home on Sept. 20, 2018. They said he was carrying an unloaded assault rifle – the barrel of which he put in his mouth while pulling the trigger in what they said appeared to be an attempt to kill himself.
Back at the trailer, investigators said they found three rifles, two handguns and three 30-round high-capacity magazines.
Jurors in U.S. District Court in Camden reached their verdict in October after roughly six hours of deliberations following the week-long trial.
Carpenito credited special agents of the FBI’s Atlantic City Resident Agency, special agents of the U.S. Capitol Police, New Jersey State Police and the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office.
Handling the case for the government are Assistant U.S. Attorneys Sara A. Aliabadi and Jason Richardson of Carpenito’s Camden office.
LoBiondo, a Republican from Ventnor, said he was retiring after serving 12 terms in the 2nd District, which covers all or parts of eight counties: Atlantic, Cumberland, Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, Cape May, Ocean and Salem.
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