Ex

The feds say a former Middlesex Sheriff’s deputy wanted to take the law into his own hands with a violent plan to destroy the Plymouth courthouse and harm the people inside.

“I am calling on all able bodied (sic) officers my brothers in blue to suit up for a fight,” stated 12 emails sent to roughly 140 people, most of whom were law enforcement employees within Massachusetts, between 10:05 a.m. to 10:41 a.m. on March 3 from a newly created Yahoo email address. “Tomorrow we burn Plymouth County Court house (sic) to the ground.”

The emails were all allegedly signed “Joshua P. Ford Middlesex Deputy Sheriff,” a once-true title for Ford, 42, of Kingston, but outdated as he left the force after nearly eight years in 2017.

The emails included a link to a video posted at video sharing website BitChute, uploaded March 13, in which Ford lays out his alleged plan and states his reasoning for it: that the court had taken away his daughter and given custody over to his either ex- or estranged wife, who he names in the video despite also saying that she has a restraining order against him and he’s not allowed to say her name.

“We got no law anymore, so what are we going to do? We’re going to (expletive)ing fight. They want to fight for this country. I’m going to fight. I’m going to (expletive) them all up beyond measure of means. I’m going to put their (expletive)ing heads, their (expletive)ing skulls on my (expletive)ing dining room table — it’s a decorative (expletive) fruit bowl,” he says in the emotional climax of the video reviewed by the Herald, which depicts him sitting in what appears to be a kitchen and speaking directly into a webcam.

The rant gets more expletive-laden as it continues, but he encourages anyone listening to “lock and load,” specifically to assemble a SWAT team and “grab” armored personnel carriers, explosives and gasoline.

“I’m going to level the (expletive)ing Plymouth Courthouse and you are going to do it with me. I don’t care if I’m going alone. I’m going to roar in there at a hundred (expletive)ing miles per hour in my Shelby GT 500 and I am going to (expletive)ing burn that (expletive)ing place to the ground, and I’m going to get justice.”

The plan was to do this the next day, March 14, when he was scheduled to appear in court. In the video, he insults his lawyers, who he said had done nothing to help him, the prosecutor, the judge and court officers, the latter group he described uncharitably, and once again in a rant hard to quote in a newspaper, including the terms “idiot,” “fat” and “lazy.” He rounded it out with saying “I’m (expletive)ing coming to kill you. That is what I’m (expletive)ing coming to do.”

He didn’t get his chance, as the feds arrested him that day — possibly because in the description of a video he uploaded the day before, his only other upload, he decried the death of former Middlesex Sheriff James DiPaola due to “corrupt officials” and said he sent the video and a his “500 page book” to federal law enforcement may have put him on their radar.

Ford was indicted by a federal grand jury sitting in Boston on Wednesday on three counts of interstate transmission of a threatening communication and is in state custody ahead of an unscheduled arraignment in federal court.

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