The former deputy mayor of LOS AN

A former senior member of the staff of the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was sentenced to a year of probation and 50 hours of community service to call a false threat to the bomb he declared to a judge from “mental health problems”.

During his sentence of conviction on Monday afternoon, Brian Williams, a long-standing official of the supervision of the security forces who was a long-standing mayor of public security, admitted that last October, he told the police that he had appealed on his mobile phone issued by the city of a stranger who said he had placed a bomb at the town hall. The threat was charged to the anti-Israeli feeling.

Williams told the American district judge R. Gary Klausner that the 18 months preceding this call were “perhaps the most difficult period of my life”. During this period, said his lawyer, the mother and nephew of Williams died and his brother received a cancer diagnosis.

Williams lawyer Dmitry Gorin cited “unmatched mental health challenges”, for which his client had undergone 10 months of treatment.

“It was a call for action to get the right mental health treatment,” said Gorin.

Williams agreed in May to plead guilty to a single threat leader concerning fires and explosives.

The prosecutors said in a presentation note that Williams had called in the threat, “after being overwhelmed by stress and anxiety and desperate to get out of an in progress meeting.”

“It was motivated not by a political program or an extremist violent ideology, but rather by the acute stress and anxiety of the defendant due to many factors,” wrote David Ryan, a federal prosecutor who has since returned to private practice. “These unresolved mental health challenges led the defendant to transmit the false threat as an excuse to get out of an in progress meeting. This decision was wrong and dangerous, but it was also an aberration. ”

Prosecutors noted that Williams had no criminal arrest or previous conviction and “had spent many years serving the community with distinction”.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers both agreed that Williams should receive a probation sentence.

“There is no doubt that your conduct was aberrational,” Klausner told Williams. “It’s you where you are going here.”

Williams was in a virtual meeting at the Town Hall on October 3, 2024, when he used the Google Voice application on his personal phone to make a call to his mobile phone issued by the city, according to his advocacy.

He admitted to having left the meeting, calling a high -level assistant to the head of the Los Angeles police department and wrongly declaring that he had just received a call on his mobile phone issued by the city of an unknown man who made a threat of bomb against the town hall.

At no time, Williams intended to carry out the threat, prosecutors said.

About 10 minutes after calling the LAPD, according to the plea, Williams sent a text from the bass and several other senior officials from the town hall a message that said: “Bomb threatens: I received a telephone call on my city cell at 10:48 am this morning. The male caller said that he was tired of the city of Israel, and he decided to place a bomb in the town hall. I immediately contacted the LAPD chief of staff, they will send a number of officers to excavate from the building and determine if someone else received a threat. »»

When the LAPD officers searched the building, they did not locate any suspicious package or devices. Williams showed officers his telephone files, who included a call for a blocked number on his phone issued by the city. According to the advocacy agreement, this call was the one Williams had made by Google Voice.

Williams followed the mayor and other senior officials a little later with several other texts, saying that it was not necessary to evacuate the town hall.

“I meet threat management agents in the next 10 minutes. In the light of Jewish holidays, we take this thread, a little more seriously. I will keep you posted,” said the text, according to the federal authorities.

Federal authorities revealed that they were looking for Williams in December, when FBI agents made a descent into his house in Pasadena. He sent shock waves to the town hall and to the police service, where many expressed disbelief that a government official respected a threat of bomb.

The prosecutors said that when he was questioned by FBI agents at his home, Williams “initially denied having placed the alleged appeal threatening himself, and he continued to deny him to the agents even after having informed him that the appeal data files showed that the appeal came from a Google Voice number which was awarded to him.”

Bass appointed a former FBI official to replace Williams in early April. The manager, Robert Clark, directed anti-gang efforts in Los Angeles during his stay with the office before retiring in 2016, and was a consultant in application of the law and director of public security for the city of Columbus, Ohio, among other roles.

Williams has held a variety of government positions covering more than three decades. He had spent almost two years as deputy mayor at the Bass office, working on issues such as police hiring, public security spending and the search for a new police chief.

Previously, Williams was an assistant mayor of the mayor’s administration James K. Hahn, who held his duties from 2001 to 2005. Before that, he spent several years as deputy prosecutor of the city in Los Angeles.

“He betrayed the trust who was a civil servant who was responsible for working with the police to ensure public security,” said Ryan in the memo of determining the sentence. “False threats like this have placed public security undermined both by diverting police resources and creating a scary and potentially dangerous environment in which the police responds to an alleged urgency in a crowded building.”