A retired Florida urologist was sentenced to three years of probation Thursday for threatening to kill the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO after the organization stripped cycling legend Lance Armstrong of his Tour de France titles.
Gerrit Keats, a 72-year-old Clearwater Beach, Fla., doctor, pleaded guilty to making a threat through interstate commerce on Oct. 7. He must serve 540 hours of community service and pay a $5,000 fine.
His plea agreement indicates he believed Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, should be skinned alive.
“Travis Tygart is a … pig who should be nailed to a tree and skinned while he watches his toady staff and filthy children being castrated. … The greatest service I could do to mankind is kill” Tygart, Keats wrote to Tygart in an e-mail.
Tygart testified at the sentencing hearing, saying Keats’ threats not only victimized himself and his three grade school-aged children but his agency’s employees. He said Armstrong “shamelessly lit the match” that drove Keats and others to make threats.
Armstrong eventually released a statement on Aug. 23 saying he wouldn’t challenge the anti-doping agency’s findings.
Tygart said his kids would run inside their house when they saw a strange car in the neighborhood and he had to explain why a new security system was needed in his home to his young boy.
“I’m sorry for all the despicable things I said and did,” Keats said at the hearing.
A federal prosecutor recommended that Keats get probation, pointing out that he doesn’t have a criminal record.
District Judge R. Brooke Jackson said he considered sending Keats to a federal prison for disgusting, racist e-mails laced with the “n-word,” noting that the maximum penalty for Keats’ crime is five years in prison.
“Can you imagine a doctor saying such things?” Jackson said. Instead Jackson gave Keats the community service sentence.
Another man, Robert Hutchins, 60, of Sandy, Utah, after writing Tygart saying, “I hope you have body guards and a bullet-proof vest. You are a dead man.”
He, too, has an agreement to get probation.
