A man who threatened to kill Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey’s in a voicemail left at his Springfield office’s phone has been charged with felony counts for threatening a public official, harassment by electronic communications, and telephone harassment, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday.
“I’m going to skin Darren Bailey alive, making sure he is still alive, and I’m going to feed his f***ing family to him as he is alive and screaming in f***ing… He is a piece of white a** racist s*** and honestly if he doesn’t kill himself, I will. You know what? I know where he lives. I know where he sleeps. I know where his kids sleep. And I know the f***ing school he works at,” prosecutors state Lennox said in the voicemail.
The Cook County presiding judge has barred Lennox from interacting with Baily or his family and ordered him to wear an “electronic monitoring” device. Bail has been set at $75,000, per the Sun-Times report.
Lennox allegedly sent the violent voicemail following a heated political discussion at the bar amongst his friends following the political ad’s airing. The 21-year old man reportedly stated that he felt little warmth for Bailey’s Democratic rival, Illinois’s incumbent governor J.B. Pritzker, though he disliked Bailey “even more.” Pritzker is one of the chief architects of Illinois’s widely unpopular SAFE-T Act which will make the state the first in American history to abolish cash bail without any backstops.
Coming on the heels of the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in San Francisco last week, many political leaders–including Pritzker–have used the occasion to condemn political violence of any sort.
“Hatred in any form has no home in Illinois,” Pritzker tweeted.
Illinois Speaker of the House Emanuel Welch also demanded that such violent threats must “stop.”
Polling currently shows Bailey to be the underdog in the race.