A 21-year-old Homestead man is behind bars after detectives say he spent weeks bombarding a woman he had never met with racist and homophobic death threats over Instagram, then dared anyone who objected to come to his house. Paul Vincent Critti was arrested Wednesday and now faces a felony charge tied to the messages, which investigators say targeted Black people and the LGBTQ community.
According to the Miami Herald, Critti began sending the disturbing messages on Oct. 7 under the Instagram username @Saltorfresh, and the woman who received them did not know him. The sheriff's office says the messages escalated into explicit threats of violence, with Critti allegedly writing that “every single [n word] and [f word] and sympathizer shall be killed,” according to the arrest report. In another message cited in the report, he allegedly wrote that “certain people should be raped and hung.”
Investigators say Critti went further, daring someone to confront him in person by telling the woman to come “paint my driveway with [n word] blood,” per the arrest report. The woman reported the messages to the FBI, which in turn contacted the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office, setting off the investigation that led detectives to Critti's door.
How Detectives Tracked Him Down
Critti allegedly made the job easier for investigators by sending the woman his own address and broadcasting his location through Instagram Live, the Herald reports. Detectives staked out his home in the 100 block of Southeast 33rd Terrace in Homestead and spotted a black Chevrolet parked outside registered to Critti, bearing a Connecticut tag. They moved in and arrested him the moment he climbed into the vehicle.
Critti was booked on a charge of written threats to kill or do bodily harm and is being held at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on a $15,000 bond. An attorney with the Miami-Dade Public Defender's Office entered a written not-guilty plea on his behalf; the office declined to comment to the Herald. A Miami-Dade court search listing for the case lists the charge as “threats/extortion,” a discrepancy with the Herald's reporting that has not been resolved.
Hate-Crime Reporting in Miami-Dade
The Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office says on its website that it thoroughly investigates all reported hate crime incidents to protect rights guaranteed under state law and the U.S. Constitution. Nationally, the FBI tracks bias-motivated crimes tied to race, gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation and ethnicity through its hate crime data program, while the Justice Department maintains its own set of high-level hate crime statistics and points researchers toward the FBI's Crime Data Explorer for deeper detail.
It remains unclear whether prosecutors will seek any additional hate-crime designation in Critti's case, and the full details of the arrest affidavit beyond what has been publicly reported have not been independently verified. For now, Critti remains in custody as the case moves through Miami-Dade's court system.
