Mayfair man charged with threatening Va. congressman

Authorities have charged a Mayfair man who claimed to be "son of the god of Enoch" with threatening to kill the No. 2 Republican in the U.S. House, Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., and his wife.

Norman Leboon, 38, of Benner Street near Lardner, appeared in federal court yesterday and was ordered by a magistrate to be held without bail pending a psychiatric evaluation.

Federal defender Rossman Thompson, appointed by U.S. Magistrate Carol Sandra Moore Wells to represent Leboon, declined to comment.

Leboon, a tall, husky man, nodded at his live-in partner, John Hopkins, who was seated in the courtroom. Hopkins said "no comment" when approached by a reporter.

An arrest affidavit said that FBI agents in San Francisco received on March 26 a copy of a video that Leboon had posted on YouTube.

Authorities said the video, which was taken down and turned over to the FBI, was made using Leboon's cell phone. He then used his computer to upload the video to YouTube.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Reed said the face of a white male stared straight into the camera and made a statement threatening to kill Cantor and his wife.

Reed said the man, subsequently identified as Leboon, had a history of mental illness. He also had been arrested in June 2009 for allegedly making terroristic threats, simple assault and recklessly endangering another person, but he was considered a fugitive after neither he nor the complainant showed up in court, Reed said.

In the video, Leboon warns Cantor the "final Yom Kippur has been given" and refers to the congressman as "a Lucifer . . . a greedy f---ing pig . . . an abomination, you receive my bullets in your office."

Authorities compared the state arrest photograph with the unidentified man in the YouTube video and determined it was Leboon.

He was subsequently arrested and gave a statement to the FBI.

Leboon claimed to authorities that the video was one of more than 2,000 YouTube videos in which he made threats. He told the feds that he was the "son of the god of Enoch," that his father speaks through him and that Cantor is "pure evil."

Reed said there was no evidence that Leboon was connected to recent threats made against Democratic congressmen over their votes on health-care reform or a stray bullet that landed in Cantor's Richmond campaign office last Tuesday. (Cops described the incident as an act of random gunfire.)

Cantor's spokesman in a statement yesterday said that Cantor had been told of the arrest and would have no comment on the threat or the investigation.