A Westfield woman is charged with making a bomb threat to Boston Children’s Hospital as the institution was hit with with threats over its transgender healthcare unit last month, the feds say.
Catherine Leavy, 37, was behind bars Thursday pending a detainment hearing Friday on a charge of calling in a false bomb threat on Aug. 30.
The phone exchange, the FBI said in documents, was a quick one: An operator answering the phone with a standard greeting, and then Leavy telling them: “There is a bomb on the way to the hospital, you better evacuate everybody you sickos.”
She used her personal 413-area-code cell phone to make the call, feds say, which made it quick for the FBI to track her down. By Sept. 1, they had a warrant for the phone records, and by Sept. 15, they were interviewing Leavy at her home in Westfield.
“During the interview, LEAVY expressed disapproval of BCH on multiple occasions,” the FBI wrote in an affidavit. “When agents further questioned her based on those beliefs, LEAVY admitted that she called BC on August 30, 2022, and made the threat. LEAVY stated that she had no plan or intention to actually bomb BCH.”
Agents then found the phone in her bedroom, FBI Special Agent Brian Gutierrez wrote in the affidavit made public on Thursday.
Authorities didn’t detail much on the specifics of her motive, but they noted that this was when a transgender-focused unit at Boston Children’s was getting national attention, and more than a dozen threats, including two of bombs, came in.
The transgender-focused unit, which Children’s says was the first of its kind in the country, began making the news last month after conservative social media accounts began to criticize it.
One of the primary critics of the hospital, Libs of TikTok, tweeted on Thursday after the announcement of charges, “This is great news. Threats of violence should always be taken seriously.”
The far-right critics of the hospital had been accusing Children’s of performing sex-change surgery on minors. The hospital said the Gender Multispecialty Service, the unit in question, does not do that, and the hospital requires anyone getting such surgery to be 18 or over.
The U.S. Attorney’s office said this charge can carry up to 10 years in federal prison.
“This alleged conduct is disturbing to say the least,” U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins said in a press conference announcing the charges. “Bomb hoaxes costs cause fear, panic and a diversion of resources that have real impact on our communities … It seems that this is happening all too often that hoaxes are used to promote personal hateful beliefs and ideologies.”
FBI Boston Special Agent in Charge Joseph Bonavolonta said, “Making threats of violence is not a prank — It’s a federal crime.”
“Law enforcement must work all threats of violence as a top priority, because we never know if the subjects behind them are going to follow through with their actions,” he continued. “These threats with innocent people at risk divert law enforcement from responding to actual emergencies are costly to taxpayers, and cause undue stress to victims and the community.”
