A Canadian teenager who for the last two years has repeatedly made threats to kill Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his family was sentenced by Canadian courts to six months supervised probation.
Lionel Makokis, age 17, of Edmonton, Canada, faced a judge on August 14, 2014 and was pronounced guilty of six counts for threatening and violating previous court orders to stop threatening the Sheriff.
“Considering the viciousness with which this suspect continually threatened to murder me and all my family, including my grandchildren, and in the most heinous of ways, this was far to light a sentence,” said Sheriff Arpaio.
Makokis sent seven emails to the Sheriff beginning in early 2013 stating his intention to kill Arpaio with gunfire, bombs, knives, beheading. Arpaio did what he could he could to encourage the Canadian justice system to deal with the situation with urgency, even offering to travel to testify to in court against the teen, as has Arpaio has previously done when yet another Canadian threatened the Sheriff.
The Edmonton courts did not act on Arpaio’s offer.
“Obviously they deal with dangerous teens differently in Canada than we do here,” said Arpaio. “Mark my words, authorities there and here will have a run-in with this suspect and next time, the outcome may well be violence of some kind. He should have been locked up in jail or at least sent to an appropriate medical facility for extensive treatment.”
It is unknown what affect Arpaio’s repeatedly bringing attention to the teen and his antics might have had on the youth.