‘I’m going to kill so many people’: Valley City man charged in mass shooting plot at Lorain County mosque
CLEVELAND, Ohio — A Valley City man who authorities say idolized Nazis and a mass shooter and hated Muslims is charged in connection with a plot to carry out a mass shooting at a Columbia Station mosque. Wyatt Brzoska, 20, surveilled the Ummah Center mosque and school, “assembled an arsenal” and planned to kill more people than the 51 people his idol — Christchurch, New Zealand, mass shooter Brenton Tarrant — killed at two mosques in 2019, federal prosecutors say. Prosecutors say the FBI thwarted the attack by arresting Brzoska in March, shortly before a planned event at the center during the holy month of Ramadan. The FBI learned of Brzoska’s plot after he posted a series of increasingly violent videos on social media, including one that showed him outside the center with a caption that read: “You will feel it,” according to prosecutors. Prosecutors on Wednesday charged Brzoska in federal court in Cleveland with three counts of threatening communications.