Woman arrested after repeated threatening calls to Detroit Jewish organization

A Michigan woman is being brought up on hate crime charges after making 40 threatening phone calls to a local Jewish group over a loan, The Detroit Free Press reported on Tuesday.

According to the report, 29-year-old April Marie Bennett was arrested for threatening employees of the Hebrew Free Loan of Metropolitan Detroit, part of the local Jewish Federation, after the group declined to give a loan to a non-Jewish man.

Bennett, who is being charged with ethnic intimidation, was said to have called repeatedly, issuing threats against the association’s African American employees.

“First she started dropping the N-bomb, and she made reference to Trump building the wall and wanting to send [the tellers] all back to Africa. She made all sorts of references, like picking cotton. She finally said something like, ‘I’m coming over there and blow your head off,’ and that was a very active threat,” Lieutenant Paul Schwab of the Bloomfield Township Police told the Free Press.

It took police several months after the incidents, which occurred in January, to track down Bennett through the use of phone records. She is currently in jail, having not made bail.

“A threat to our team members would never be acceptable but in this era, when you have things happening on college campuses and in houses of worship, it’s particularly worrisome,” the association’s director told The Detroit Free Press.

US synagogues have recently started conducting active shooter drills following deadly attacks on Jewish houses of worship in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Poway, California.