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    • Man accused of shooting at Tempe campaign office stole 2022 election signs
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    Man accused of shooting at Tempe campaign office stole 2022 election signs

    Umito Posted on

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    Two years before an Ahwatukee Foothills man was charged with terrorism for posting homemade political signs with bags of white powder falsely labeled as poison attached, community members said they knew that it had the potential for political violence.

    Jeffrey Kelly was arrested Wednesday and accused of shooting up a Democratic Party campaign office in Tempe and displaying the signs with sharp blades attached and white power bags tied to the back. Federal agents discovered an arsenal of weapons inside his home.

    Officers said Kelly showed a pattern of escalation. When he was arrested, according to court documents, he had weapons in his car and was potentially about to commit another politically motivated act.

    Residents of the Ahwatukee Foothills community spoke out during a meeting with the Phoenix Police Department, criticizing officers for not taking their concerns more seriously in 2022. That year, Kelly was surprised stealing political signs for a Democratic candidate for a state legislative seat.

    Wednesday’s meeting, a regular meeting between police and residents, was dominated by concerns about Kelly’s actions in 2022.

    “It’s not about boys being boys and weirdos being kind of weirdos,” said Paul Weich, a Phoenix lawyer who is running for a seat in the House of Representatives in 2022.

    Weich hired a private investigator who discovered that Kelly was the culprit in destroying and stealing his campaign signs.

    Phoenix Police Cmdr. Rick Leyvas, who said he was not the officer on the case at the time of the 2022 incident, said the department was monitoring Kelly: “I won’t tell you how they monitored him,” Leyvas said during the meeting, “but I will tell you that follow-up has been done.”

    Weich was running for State Representative on a Democratic ticket in Legislative District 12 in 2022. After finding shredded pieces of his campaign signs at the entrance to his district following a systematic theft of his campaign signs, Weich hired an investigator to arrest the culprit.

    According to Weich, the investigator found surveillance video showing Kelly in the act. Weich then alerted Phoenix police about the incident.

    Police filed misdemeanor charges for one count of theft and one count of tampering with a political sign, but a Phoenix prosecutor opted to dismiss the case.

    Kelly was accused of shooting three times at the Democratic Party campaign office in Tempe. The first shooting used BB guns to break a window and a door, authorities said. The next two shootings, spaced several weeks apart, used real bullets. It all happened around midnight, when the office was empty.

    Tempe police released a photo of a silver SUV captured from surveillance video and asked the public for tips.

    Tempe Police Chief Ken McCoy said the department received tips from people who recognized the SUV as similar to the one Kelly drove in 2022. Officers then began monitoring Kelly, McCoy said during of a press conference on Wednesday.

    Detectives saw Kelly leave his home around 11 a.m. Tuesday night and begin posting political signs around the Ahwatukee Foothills area, according to court documents.

    After Kelly returned home, detectives inspected the panels and found that some had blades used in a utility knife stuck to the edges, according to court documents. Some also had bags of white powder taped to their backs and a crude message indicating the substance was poison, documents show.

    Police and federal agents arrested Kelly the next afternoon as he left his home. In his vehicle, he had several weapons, according to documents, and did not take his cell phone. Authorities said this could indicate he did not want his position tracked.

    A prosecutor said at his arraignment that Kelly may have been about to “do something” and that the cache of 120 guns found at his home suggested he was preparing for a mass casualty event.

    A lawyer for Kelly denied the accusations at his arraignment and said Kelly picked up the guns as a “sportsman.”

    Weich said Kelly’s acts of vandalism should have been addressed in 2022.

    “The handling of this matter in 2022, or the mishandling of it, is what led us to the incidents this week,” he said.

    Cliff Mager, another community member, said residents continued to monitor Kelly through her social media accounts. What they saw, Mager said, made it clear he would commit more crimes against Democrats if given the chance.

    “He was getting more and more aggressive,” Mager said. “He made himself known and that information was handed to the police on a silver platter.”

    Most participants declined to speak publicly to The Republic, citing fear of inviting retaliation from Kelly or like-minded people, but they seemed united in their description of what they saw as the Kelly’s political extremism.

    He has been described as calm and intense. Some neighbors said they knew he owned guns but considered him an amateur.

    Weich said if anything positive came out of this, it was the opportunity to recognize that acts such as vandalizing political signs should not be ignored.

    “The threat to our democracy and our elections is real,” he said. “I hope this has awakened some people to the fact that these kinds of things need to be taken seriously.”

    Umito
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