A 79-year-old Troy man is facing multiple aggravated hate crime charges after he allegedly confronted four Muslim men outside the Troy Public Library, telling them he hated Muslims and threatening to kill them while claiming he was carrying a gun. When officers arrested him, police say they found a loaded pistol on him.
The confrontation happened on September 12, according to Oakland County officials, as reported by FOX 2 Detroit. The four men were not doing anything provocative — according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations Michigan chapter, they were set up at an outdoor table sharing English translations of the Quran and answering public questions about Islam when the confrontation escalated into explicit death threats, as detailed by CBS News. The four men called police, who arrested the suspect and say they recovered 19 firearms from him as part of the investigation.
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said the men were targeted simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. “Islamophobia is never acceptable,” McDonald said, according to the same FOX 2 report. Police say the suspect is a concealed pistol license holder who, according to officials, has 22 firearms registered in his name and a history of welfare checks related to declining mental health. Officials say he also claimed to have dementia.
Hate Crime Charges Carry Stiff Penalties
The charges the man faces fall under Michigan's revised hate crime statute. Public Act 259 of 2024, which took effect statewide on April 2, 2025, substantially rewrote the state's old ethnic intimidation law into an expanded hate crime offense, according to the State of Michigan. Under that law, the maximum penalty is up to 10 years in prison and a $15,000 fine, with sentencing depending on the circumstances and any prior hate-crime convictions.
Beyond the criminal case, Troy police filed an Extreme Risk Protection Order petition seeking to seize the man's weapons. McDonald said Troy police did the right thing by securing the defendant's guns, per the FOX 2 report. Michigan's Extreme Risk Protection Order Act, which took effect on February 13, 2024, authorizes civil courts to temporarily bar people in crisis from purchasing or possessing firearms and provides that firearms must be surrendered within 24 hours, or immediately if a judge orders it, according to the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention. Under the law's procedures, a restrained individual must surrender all firearms to designated law enforcement within 24 hours, or immediately if a judge orders it, and the firearms may be seized upon service of the order or noncompliance, with the order entered directly into the state's Law Enforcement Information Network, per the Michigan Municipal League.
How Often Courts Grant These Orders
The red flag law has been used with some regularity since it took effect. A report from the Michigan State Court Administrative Office found that 391 Extreme Risk Protection Order complaints were filed statewide during the law's first year of implementation, through February 2025, with judges denying 84 of them after reviewing the evidence, according to Everytown for Gun Safety. Statewide data for 2025 recorded 514 petitions filed across Michigan courts, resulting in 407 granted gun seizure orders, Hoodline previously reported.
Part of a Wider Pattern in Oakland County
This is not the first anti-Muslim hate crime case Oakland County prosecutors have brought in Troy this year. In May, a 53-year-old Northville man was arrested in Troy and charged with a hate crime after delivering a profane anti-Muslim tirade against shoppers at the Somerset Collection mall, Hoodline reported at the time. In June, police in nearby Madison Heights arrested a man after he left profanity-laced death threats on the voicemail of the American Islamic Community Center mosque, drawing condemnation from county officials and CAIR-MI, according to CBS News.
The trend reflects a broader rise in reported incidents. CAIR-MI reported in April 2024 that civil rights complaints and bias incidents targeting Muslims in Michigan surged by 340% following the outbreak of the Middle East conflict in late 2023, according to ClickOnDetroit. Metro Detroit is home to one of the largest Arab American and Muslim populations in the United States, with religious and cultural institutions in several Metro Detroit cities, according to research published by NMU Commons.
