A 24-year-old Amherst man pleaded guilty this week to sending a barrage of violent threats over Instagram, including vows to bomb the FBI's Boston field office, carry out a mass stabbing at a local Big Y grocery store, and kill two police officers in Tennessee. Luke Brissie entered his plea in federal court in Springfield on September 21, admitting to one count of interstate transmission of threatening communications.
According to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts, court filings laid out the exact language Brissie used in his April 5, 2025 Instagram messages to a Metropolitan Nashville Police Department officer: “I will put a bomb in your police car or better yet your house,” followed by “I'm going to commit mass stabbing at a grocery store called big [] y…” and “…then I'll bomb an fbi building.” As BNO News reported, the threats named two Nashville officers along with the Massachusetts locations Brissie later admitted targeting.
Prosecutors said investigators determined Brissie's real aim went beyond frightening the officer over social media — he intended to lure the officer across state lines to Massachusetts specifically to carry out physical violence against him. The alleged plan was to draw an out-of-state officer into his home state.
How a Nashville Officer's Tip Cracked the Case
The investigation began after the Nashville officer who received the messages alerted federal law enforcement, triggering a joint effort between authorities in Tennessee and Massachusetts to identify and locate Brissie, per the U.S. Attorney's Office. That cross-country coordination eventually led investigators to Brissie's home in Amherst, a Hampshire County college town where UMass Amherst, Amherst College, and Hampshire College are all based and where the overall violent crime rate in 2026 ran roughly 52% below the national average, according to crime-data site DoorProfit.
Brissie was arrested at his Amherst residence in June 2025. He remained in federal custody without bail for more than 15 months before entering his guilty plea last week, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.
Big Y and the FBI's Chelsea Headquarters Were Named Targets
The grocery store Brissie threatened to attack was a Big Y location near his home. Big Y Foods is an 89-year-old, family-owned New England supermarket chain headquartered in Springfield that runs 79 stores across Massachusetts and Connecticut, according to background compiled from Wikipedia and the company's own store listings.
The FBI building named in Brissie's messages was identified as the bureau's Boston Field Office, an eight-story, 268,000-square-foot facility at 201 Maple Street in Chelsea that serves as the regional hub for federal investigations across Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, per the FBI. The Chelsea facility opened in 2016 as a consolidated home for the bureau's regional operations.
Judge Weighing Guidelines Ahead of January Sentencing
Brissie faces up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $250,000 under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), the federal statute that criminalizes transmitting threats to injure someone across state lines. That five-year ceiling is just a starting point — federal judges calculate actual prison terms using advisory sentencing guidelines and the factors laid out in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), weighing things like criminal history, offense severity, and acceptance of responsibility, according to The Federal Criminal Attorneys.
U.S. District Court Judge Mark G. Mastroianni, who accepted Brissie's plea in Springfield, will decide that sentence. Mastroianni was appointed to the federal bench by President Obama in 2014 after previously serving as the District Attorney of Hampden County, Massachusetts, according to background from Wikipedia. Sentencing is scheduled for January 5, 2027.
The case underscores how quickly a threat fired off on social media can cross state lines and land in federal court — Brissie's messages to a Tennessee officer ultimately triggered a joint law enforcement response spanning two states before he was taken into custody at his Massachusetts home.
