Man pleads guilty to Ford F-150 factory bomb threat
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Imagine this: You’re hard at work assembling the Ford F-150 at the automaker’s Kansas City factory. You are in your zone when the manager comes over. They’re evacuating the plant, and this is not a drill. Everyone gathers in the meeting space outdoors and the rumors fly. A shooter’s barricaded himself in the bathroom with guns and bombs. He’s threatened to kill anyone who comes inside. But something doesn’t add up. You know your shift. And you know none of them would do this.
Zachariah Peterson pleads guilty to F-150 factory bomb threat
According to the Kansas City Star, 19-year-old Zachariah Peterson plead guilty to the bomb threat. He admitted he called Ford’s risk and safety management team to say he was in the F-150 factory bathroom with explosives, a rifle, and a handgun. The teenager also threatened to “start shooting” and forced the evacuation of about 2,200 employees.
Peterson’s from Independence, Missouri. That’s just 13 miles from Ford’s “Kansas City” plant (which is actually in Claycomo, Missouri. But he’s not one of the thousands of factory employees building the F-150 there. And he wasn’t even in the bathroom when he called.
Does Peterson have a bitter grudge with someone at the Ford Plant? Does he have a problem with the company itself? Nope. He admits he just wanted his buddy to get the night off work.
Peterson was charged with making a terrorist threat, which is a Class D felony. Prosecutors will recommend he be sentences to four years in prison after a jury trial. That may sound extreme, but his selfish call forced multiple police departments and the FBI to respond, as well as terrifying thousands. You can see the original coverage of Peterson’s arrest in the video embedded below:
