The Columbus Dispatch
A man who stockpiled weapons and ammunition at a northwestern Ohio shopping mall was sentenced to nearly six years in prison yesterday. Prosecutors had contended that Richard Schmidt wanted to carry out a race war and was planning to assassinate black and Jewish leaders, but a federal judge who handed down the sentence said there wasn’t enough evidence to support that theory. Schmidt amassed the guns and other survival gear such as freeze-dried food and bottled water because he was preparing for a potential doomsday calamity, not some sinister plan, his attorney said. Federal agents discovered rifles, shotguns and 40,000 rounds of ammunition inside the mall where Schmidt ran a sports store and sold counterfeit NFL jerseys in Bowling Green, about 20 miles south of Toledo. The FBI also found a list that included the names of black and Jewish leaders in Ohio and Michigan. Schmidt, who earlier had served time for a 1990 manslaughter conviction for killing a man in Toledo in what he said was self-defense, kept weapons, ammunition, body armor, writings about white supremacist groups and a cot inside a storage room at the back of an empty store in the mall, prosecutors said.
