A San Antonio man who investigators say sympathizes with incel — or involuntary celibate — ideology was arrested on charges of threatening a conservative student conference and having child pornography on his phone, according to a federal criminal complaint.
The man, Alejandro Richard Velasquez Gomez, 19, wrote in a July 18 Instagram post that July 22 — the beginning of a three-day Turning Point USA conference in Tampa, Fla. — would be “the day of retribution,” according to a federal criminal complaint filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas on Aug. 11.
Mr. Velasquez, who went by the name LatinoZoomer on Instagram, described that day as when “I will have revenge against all of humanity, which all of you will pay for my suffering. SAS will be the turning point of the LatinoZoomer lore,” according to the criminal complaint.
Investigators said “SAS” was a reference to Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit, which this year featured remarks by former President Donald J. Trump and several other stars of right-wing politics.
The criminal complaint did not make clear why Mr. Velasquez was targeting Turning Point USA, a group founded in 2012 to promote activism among young conservatives that is known for its Professor Watchlist project, which sets out to “expose and document” what it describes as “leftist propaganda in the classroom.”
The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. A public defender for Mr. Velasquez, Molly Roth, did not immediately return phone and email messages late Saturday.
Investigators with the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that the post by Mr. Velasquez, which included an image of him sitting in a car, echoed a video by Elliot Rodger, whom they described as a central figure of the incel movement and who in May 2014 killed six people in a rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., before fatally shooting himself.
Mr. Rodger, who was a student at Santa Barbara City College, posted a video to YouTube the day before that attack in which he spoke of the women who rejected him and life as a 22-year-old virgin. He said, “Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day I will have my retribution against humanity. Against all of you.”
Federal investigators wrote in the complaint that incel ideology “has an extreme hatred towards, and endorses violence against, women and sexually active people.”
According to the complaint, which was reported by the San Antonio Express-News, users who saw Mr. Velasquez’s July 18 post took it seriously, with one commenting that the F.B.I. had been contacted. Investigators also learned that Mr. Velasquez had booked a flight to Tampa from Austin, Texas, on July 22, though the flight had been canceled the night before, the complaint said.
Federal investigators said the Tampa Police Department obtained a search warrant for Mr. Velasquez on July 21 and charged him with sending written or electronic threats to kill, injure or conduct a mass shooting or an act of terrorism, a second-degree felony.
According to the complaint, the local authorities arrested Mr. Velasquez on July 22 while the F.B.I. executed a search warrant and seized his phone, on which they found images of child pornography.
