SANTA CRUZ — Police are investigating a 16-year-old Watsonville teen’s alleged role in threatening the life of Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley last week.
Santa Cruz Police Department detectives interviewed the male teenager after a car stop Tuesday afternoon, Keeley told the Sentinel. While not arresting the teen, the department forwarded its findings to the Santa Cruz County District Attorney’s Office “for filing considerations.”
The death threat, left as a Jan. 10 voicemail on Keeley’s City Hall phone line, made specific reference to a Santa Cruz City Council vote made just hours earlier.
“Your life’s going to be miserable from now on. You went against the cease-fire. … You are going to die, you are going to die. You are going to die,” the voice on the recording, which Keeley shared with the Sentinel, says in part.
The caller in the voicemail also threatened to stab Keeley and said that Santa Cruz hated him now.
The tumultuous meeting concluded in the early morning after some 10 hours of public testimony. The individual’s voice message included threats to kill Keeley because he had voted for a substitute resolution calling for broad peace in the Middle East, and not a cease-fire resolution authored by Councilmembers Sandy Brown and Sonja Brunner.
“Several dozen people who had been there for quite a while and had taken the pro-cease-fire position charged the dais and assaulted every member of the City Council by throwing objects at us, breaking windows in the City Council chambers, assaulting and battering a police officer and shouting threats at the City Council members,” Keeley said Wednesday.
Sometime between 2:30 and 3 a.m. Jan. 10, city personnel discovered that two separate windows to the council chamber had been broken. Limited seating inside the council chamber kept numerous speakers and protesters outside the room, left to look in through the windows.
Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Jon Bush said that investigators were analyzing the body-worn camera footage from officers assigned to the meeting that night, as well as City Hall video footage. He confirmed that one of the department’s officers was subject to minor pushing and hitting during the melee, but said there were no injuries.
“We have some images and we’re looking to try to identify a couple people that were responsible for breaking the windows,” Bush said.
The five council members voting “yes” on the peace resolution have received a flood of emails and have had their home addresses posted to the internet, alongside calls for direct action at their homes, Keeley said.
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“Some of that is in-bounds because I take responsibility for my votes,” Keeley said of public feedback. “And some of that is out-of-bounds. The dividing line is threats of violence — or actual violence — is not something I’m going to stand idly by and allow to happen in the city of Santa Cruz.”
Keeley said that, regardless of the district attorney’s decision to file charges, he believed that the teenager and his parents owed the office of the mayor, at a minimum, a “serious and very straightforward apology” for the threat.
During his decades of public service in local and state government, Keeley said he has received significant amounts of public input — not always polite — on his votes. Only one other occasion rose to the level of a threat to his life, he said. During his tenure as a Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors chairman, Soquel resident Michael Duffy, a regularly outspoken board critic, approached the dais during a 1996 meeting and pointed what turned out to be a toy pistol in the board’s direction. When Duffy eventually pulled the trigger, a flag with the word “BANG” popped out, a stunt earning the man a criminal trial and a short jail sentence.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct information related to Michael Duffy’s sentence.
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