A man who threatened to turn a Colorado Springs-area Army base into “Fort Columbine” was sentenced Tuesday to 16 months in a federal prison.
U.S. District Judge Christine Arguello also sentenced Douglas Kunz, 55, a former butcher at Fort Carson’s commissary store, to three years of supervised release.
In September, Kunz pleaded guilty to a charge of disrupting interstate commerce with threats of explosions or fire.
In a subdued voice, Kunz, who was wearing green prison clothing, apologized for making the threats but added that they were hollow.
“Nothing I ever write I will ever do to anybody,” he said.
Federal prosecutor Kurt Bohn raised his voice as he asked Arguello to sentence Kunz to a level that is higher than the normal sentencing range and give him a two-year prison term.
“This is an incredibly dangerous tea pot of an individual,” Bohn said.
Bohn presented a series of witnesses, including three of Kunz’s former co-workers and supervisors. One said he asked a friend for a shotgun so he could protect his family. Another, who attended a middle school in Littleton during the Columbine rampage, refused to work with Kunz in a cooler filled with butcher knives.
Kunz had made the threats in after his pleas for a transfer to a base in New Mexico had gone unheeded, Bohn said.
Four days after the April 2014 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, where three people were killed and 16 injured, Kunz threatened a similar attack. He also threatened to turn Fort Carson into Fort Columbine.
“I am evil in every way. … I respect no lives or people,” Kunz wrote in one text.
In a Facebook post, Kunz threatened the lives of the wives and sister of four of his former co-workers. It had an attachment to a Mexican drug cartel video of four women being executed, which Bohn showed at the sentencing hearing.
The women, who were stripped, were kneeling on the ground facing the camera when men clinging to assault rifles kicked them from behind, face down onto the ground. Bohn turned the video off just as one of the men grabbed a woman by the hair, lifted her head up and reached down with a large knife under her throat. He said the rest of the video was too graphic to show.
“These were serious and horrific threats to people who didn’t even stand in his way,” Arguello said.
“I do think you have mental health problems. … To send that video link (she paused as she shook her head) … I don’t know what you were thinking.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, kmitchell@denverpost.com or twitter.com/kirkmitchell, denverpost.com/coldcases
