The “suicidal” Cornell University engineering student who was arrested for threatening to kill Jews on campus pleaded guilty Wednesday after his recent autism diagnosis, his lawyer told The Post.
Patrick Dai, 21, copped to one charge in Syracuse federal court Wednesday afternoon where his lawyer, Lisa Peebles, told a judge her client posted the awful things online in a misguided attempt to reveal the atrocities of Hamas.
“He did it knowingly, but his motivation was really not meant to scare Jewish people,” Peebles told The Post by phone after the plea hearing.
“It was more try to to do the opposite of that which was to garner sympathy for them and make people think twice about supporting Hamas.”
Peebles claimed things reached a boiling point for Dai — a former junior at the Ivy League school — after he heard comments by a Cornell professor saying he found the Hamas attack “exhilarating.“
That came around the time of a Gaza hospital bombing Hamas falsely tried to pin on Israel.
“He was going through a very difficult time,” Peebles said.
“He was depressed, he struggled with autism, he had not been diagnosed yet, and he had a breakdown and came up with this idea to do these posts.”
When Dai realized his plan had backfired in the following days he posted an apology and said nobody should advocate for violence, Peebles said.
“It was a bad decision and he knows it and feels remorse and regrets it and feels terrible for his mother and putting shame on his family and he clearly learned a valuable lesson from this,” the lawyer added.
Dai — who has been behind bars since his arrest in October — is slated to be sentenced on Aug. 12 on one charge of posting threats to kill or injure another person using interstate communication.
He faces up to five years behind bars and up to a $250,000 fine.
Peebles said that federal prosecutors plan to get the guideline sentence for Dai increased to between 15 to 21 months, on the grounds Dai committed the acts as a hate crime.
But Peebles said she plans to fight this since she believes her client’s intent wasn’t there.
Peebles is hoping to get the guideline sentence down to between 10 to 16 months and will ask for time served as her client will have been behind bars for roughly 10 months by the time he’s sentenced.
Day, a Pittsford, New York Native, posted a series of disturbing messages on Oct. 28 and 29 including “the genocidal fascist zionist regime will be destroyed” and “rape and kill all the jew women before they brith more Jewish hitlers.”
He also posted, “gonna shoot up 104 West” — a school dining hall that caters to kosher diets — and added he’d “slit the throat” of any Jewish men he encountered on campus.
Dai’s comments came on the heels of a slew of antisemitic graffiti popping up at the Ithaca campus.
Dai’s mom Bing Liu said after the incident she “worried about [her son’s] mental health” and said she things were actually made worse by an anti-depressant he took at the time.
“This defendant is being held accountable for vile, abhorrent, antisemitic threats of violence levied against members of the Cornell University Jewish community,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
“At institutions of higher learning, people should feel safe to pursue educational opportunities.”
