A California woman was sentenced to 15 months and 13 days for threatening to bomb the Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, D.C., according to a Friday announcement by the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Sonia Tabizada, 36, left several voice messages on May 15, 2019, threatening to burn and bomb the church and stating that she would kill school officials and students, the report said.
California Woman Sentenced to 15 Months for Threatening to Bomb Catholic Prep Schoolhttps://t.co/uCUHUu6RSY
— DOJ Civil Rights (@CivilRights) March 26, 2021
Tabizada reportedly warned the oldest Catholic school for girls in the country she would “commit terrorism” in response to the school’s May 2019 decision to start publishing alumnae’s same-sex marriage announcements in its alumni magazine. (RELATED: Man Charged With Terrorism After Allegedly Making Death Threats Against Biden, Pelosi, Whitmer)
“The citizens of the District of Columbia and our country are entitled to freely exercise their religious beliefs and to be free from threats of violence based on bias—be it against religion, race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and other protected characteristics,” Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Channing Phillips said.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia is committed to protecting the civil rights of all our citizens and will do so by vigorously enforcing both federal and local hate crime laws,” Phillips continued.
In May of 2019, Sister Mary Berchmans, the school’s president emerita, wrote a letter announcing that “news of alumnae’s same-sex unions” would be allowed to be published in the school’s magazine. “The Church is clear in its teaching on same-sex marriages. But, it is equally clear in its teaching that we are all children of God, that we each have dignity and are worthy of respect and love,” she wrote at the time.