“Entire Family on My Hit List.” The FBI Unseals an Antisemitism Case Against Eight University of Michigan Activists. Now Come the Charges.

On June 10, 2026, federal prosecutors in Detroit unsealed a grand-jury indictment charging eight people tied to the University of Michigan with running what the Justice Department called a coordinated campaign of threats, vandalism, and intimidation — aimed at forcing the university to cut its financial ties to Israel. The FBI arrested seven of the eight in pre-dawn operations across Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin; one remained at large as of the unsealing.

The detail that put the case on front pages came from the defendants’ own alleged messages. According to the indictment, one defendant wrote that a target’s “entire family” was on his “hit list,” that people “gotta die”; another allegedly proposed they “get” the children of two targets. Prosecutors say masked figures threw glass jars of butyric acid through the windows of officials’ homes — some with children inside — and marked victims with red inverted triangles and red handprints, symbols the indictment ties to Hamas.

A critical caveat sits over every line of this story: an indictment is an accusation, not a verdict. Each defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. What follows is what the government alleges — sourced to the unsealed charging documents and the prosecutors and agents who announced them.

• 8 indicted — current or former University of Michigan students, employees, and affiliates, ages 21 to 28 — seven arrested across MI, IL, and WI · Source: U.S. Attorney's Office, E.D. Mich.
• 20 years — statutory maximum for conspiracy to tamper with a witness, the most serious count; threat and property counts each carry up to 5 years · Source: DOJ indictment
• Oct. 7, 2024 — first anniversary of the Hamas attack — the date the Jewish Federation of Detroit building was allegedly vandalized with inverted-triangle graffiti · Source: DOJ, CBS News Detroit
• ~Mar. 2024–Apr. 2025 — the span of the alleged conspiracy; the FBI executed home search warrants in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Canton in April 2025 · Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, Michigan Daily

U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr.announced the indictment on June 10, naming eight defendants: Zainab Aliasgar Hakim, 23, of Canton; Amatullah Aliasgar Hakim, 21, of Ann Arbor; Paige Elizabeth Feyock, 26, of Ann Arbor; Ahmet Kerem Korkaya, 28, of Milwaukee; Jonathan Hongru Zou, 22, of Ann Arbor; Alexander Matthew Sepulveda, 23, of Chicago; Mariam Muhammed Odeh, 24, of Dearborn; and Colin Hunter Weger, 24, of Ann Arbor. According to the charging documents, six are directly tied to the university — five as current or former students and one as a researcher.

All eight are charged with conspiracy to transmit a threat through interstate commerce. The indictment adds counts of destruction of property to prevent seizure, and it charges Zainab Hakim and Feyock with conspiracy to tamper with a witness — alleging the two planned in July and August 2024 to confront a University of Michigan student they believed was cooperating with federal authorities. “These alleged threats and attempts to terrorize government officials, businesses, and the Jewish Federation are anti-American,” Gorgon said.

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The conspiracy, prosecutors say, took shape after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. On October 20, 2023, the group allegedly posted a list of demands at university leaders, insisting that Michigan make a “full and complete divestment” from Israel and from any business supporting it — and that the conspirators “must escalate, mobilize, and organize to demand divestment by any means necessary.” From roughly March 2024 through April 2025, according to the indictment, the “any means necessary” became literal.

Prosecutors describe masked, hooded figures arriving at officials’ homes in the dead of night: spray-painting threats, shattering windows, caulking doors shut, bike-locking entryways, and hurling glass jars filled with butyric acid and dye into family homes. The named targets, according to the charging documents, included the university’s former president Santa Ono, its chief investment officer and provost, members of the Board of Regents and their businesses, and a campus police officer. The indictment alleges some defendants placed fake bloody corpses in an elected regent’s yard and posted photos of the damage online beside warnings like “you cannot hide” and “we only come back stronger.”

On October 7, 2024 — the first anniversary of the Hamas attack — four of the defendants allegedly vandalized the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, painting over its security cameras and scrawling inverted triangles and slogans including “Intifada” and “Free Palestine.” FBI Special Agent Jennifer Runyanframed the conduct in stark terms: “In the dead of night, masked and hooded defendants allegedly threw noxious chemicals through the windows of families’ homes and taped demand letters to their front doors.”

“At every step they attempted to cover their tracks and delete evidence of their crimes.”

FBI Detroit, on the alleged conspiracy · June 10, 2026

The most alarming material in the indictment comes from the defendants’ alleged private communications, which prosecutors say moved across encrypted apps, social media, and overseas platforms. According to the charging documents, the group researched their targets’ home addresses and family details, and discussed methods that went far beyond protest — poison, explosives, and what one message allegedly called “psychological torture.” In a May 2024 exchange, prosecutors say, two defendants agreed to “kill,” “torment,” and “terrorize” their opponents and their families.

One defendant, the indictment alleges, wrote that a target’s “entire family” was on his “hit list,” adding that people “gotta die”; another allegedly urged the group to “get” the children of two targets. The Free Beacon, reviewing the unsealed filing, reported an alleged message reading, “I’m gonna … poison her a— slowly.” Whether those words amount to a chargeable conspiracy — rather than ugly but constitutionally protected speech — is precisely the question a jury will be asked to decide.

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The federal case did not arrive in a vacuum. The encampment and divestment fight at Michigan’s flagship campus had already produced a round of state charges — and a notable retreat. In 2024, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D)charged eleven people in connection with the pro-Palestinian Diag encampment. In May 2025, her office dropped every one of those cases. Nessel said she still believed “a reasonable jury would find the defendants guilty,” but cited a procedural conflict — a local nonprofit’s statement of support communicated directly to the court — and concluded the prosecutions were no longer “a prudent use of my department’s resources.”

That collapse of the state cases left the field to the federal government. Ann Arbor sits in Washtenaw County, governed by Democratic officials, in a state where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D)holds the executive office and Nessel the attorney general’s. The defendants now face a U.S. Attorney’s Office and an FBI field office — not the county prosecutor — and charges an order of magnitude more serious than the trespassing counts Nessel walked away from a year earlier. The political geography is part of the fact set: the conduct, the venue, and the on-and-off enforcement all unfolded in a Democratic-run city and state.

“We are grateful to law enforcement for pursuing this investigation with the seriousness it demands, and we look forward to seeing justice served.”

Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit · June 10, 2026

Outside the federal courthouse in Detroit, roughly forty demonstrators gathered the day the indictment was unsealed, and more returned for Friday’s bond hearings. Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), the campus group at the center of the divestment movement, called the prosecutions an “escalated targeting of Palestine solidarity activism” that “follows a national trend” of cracking down on campus protest. Several of the defendants requested court-appointed counsel; four were ordered held pending the Friday hearings, three were released.

The defense frame and the government’s frame describe the same set of events very differently. To supporters, this is the criminalization of protest — activists swept up for political speech. To the Justice Department, the line is not protest versus crime but speech versus a butyric-acid jar through a child’s window. That distinction — where heated, even hateful, advocacy ends and a federal threat conspiracy begins — is the case’s central legal question, and it is the jury’s to answer, not ours.

The defendants face arraignment and, in several cases, detention hearings; from there the case enters the familiar federal rhythm of discovery, suppression motions, and plea negotiations that may take many months to resolve. The most serious exposure — up to 20 years for the witness-tampering conspiracy charged against Zainab Hakim and Feyock — will turn on whether prosecutors can prove the alleged plan to confront a cooperating witness, and whether the threat messages clear the First Amendment’s “true threat” bar rather than landing on the protected side of political speech.

However it ends, the case has already drawn a hard line that the state prosecutions never reached: federal officials treating a campus divestment campaign that allegedly crossed into threats against families’ homes as a violent conspiracy, not a protest. For the Jewish community members named as targets, the unsealing was a measure of vindication after two years of fear. For the defendants and their supporters, it is the start of a fight they say is about the right to dissent. Both things are now headed for the same federal courtroom — and a jury, presuming the accused innocent, will decide which story the evidence supports.

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Last updated June 11, 2026