As I noted Sunday evening, Fox News's Megyn Kelly, on her Friday show, characterized the beheading of Colleen Hufford at the hands of Alton Nolen, if true, as "the first American beheading on American soil reportedly in the name of jihad."
It turns out that someone allegedly tried to beat Nolen out for that distinction, and failed. Take a look at what the Oklahoman's Nolan Clay described as a "bizarre coincidence" in a Friday report (HT Ed Driscoll; excerpted nearly in full because of the story's importance and the paper's subscription wall; bolds and numbered tags are mine):
Fired Oklahoma City nursing home worker threatened beheading, police say
Jacob Mugambi Muriithi, a native of Kenya, was arrested Friday in Oklahoma City on a terrorism complaint.In a bizarre coincidence, a fired Oklahoma City nursing home employee was arrested Friday after a co-worker reported he threatened to cut her head off.
Jacob Mugambi Muriithi, 30, is being held in the Oklahoma County jail on a terrorism complaint. His bail is set at $1 million.
“We take these threats very seriously,” Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater said. [1]
... Muriithi was identified as a native of Kenya who is living in Oklahoma City. He worked at Bellevue Nursing Home in northwest Oklahoma City, police reported.
The co-worker reported Muriithi threatened her while they were both working at the nursing home Sept. 19 [1], a police detective wrote in an arrest warrant affidavit.
... She said Muriithi identified himself as a Muslim [2] and said he “represented ISIS and that ISIS kills Christians,” the detective told a judge in the affidavit. The two had not worked together before.
The woman said she asked him why they kill Christians and he replied, “This is just what we do,” [3] the detective reported.
“The victim said Jacob asked her what time she got off work and she replied by asking him in a joking manner if he was going to kill her,’ the detective wrote. “Jacob told the victim, ‘Yes,’ he was going to cut her head off. The victim asked Jacob what he was going to cut her head off with and he said, ‘A blade,’ then told her after he did it he was going to post it on Facebook. [4]
“The victim said Jacob was serious when speaking and never made any statements that he was joking or playing around.”
The woman reported Muriithi repeated the threat as she left work, saying in front of another employee that he was going to use a blade, the detective reported.
The FBI said Friday about the tragedy in Moore that there is no current indication of any additional threat to residents of Oklahoma related to that incident. [5]
Notes:
[1] (tagged twice) — If the DA and law enforcement "take these threats very seriously," why did it take a week to arrest Muriithi? (Note: It seems possible that the woman did not come forward with her story until the news of the mayhem at Vaughan Foods came out, but the fact that the DA had to get a judge to sign off would seem to indicate that she reported it earlier, and that the process had previously been moving at the [very slow] speed of bureaucracy.)
Here's a tough question, if it turns out that the DA and law enforcement really kept this matter bottled up for several days: If Muriithi's threats had been more widely known, would Vaughan Foods have done more to ensure that Nolen would do no one any harm after his firing?
[2] — Now there's a "bizarre coincidence": Muriithi is a Muslim. Really, what are the odds that an actual beheader and one who attempts a beheading would both be Muslims?
[3] — Another "bizarre coincidence" — both Nolen and Muriithi expressed jihadist influences and sympathies. Gosh, that must be one in a million.
[4] — Both guys were Facebook users (what I believe was Muriithi's Facebook page appears to have been shut down, emptied, or made so private that no one can see anything). Nolen carried actual footage of a beheading on his Facebook page, while Muriithi planned to reveal his glorious deeds on his. The "bizarre coincidences" keep piling up, don't they?
[5] — But no one has anything to worry about, according to the FBI, which I would expect will bizarrely issue the same assurances should Muriithi's alleged beheading threats become more widely known.
In a totally expected occurrence, a 9:45 a.m. ET search on Murithi's first and last name at Google News (not in quotes; sorted by date) returned only 13 results, only two of which are considered national establishment press outlets. But the two are the New York Post and the Washington Times, which are considered the black sheep of national news publications by the intellectual elites.
Nolan Clay would obviously have been far better off simply reporting the facts without characterizing them at the very beginning of his report. He should have let readers decide how "bizarre" all of this is. Unfortunately, my verdict is: Not very.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
