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June 16, 2020
On June 15, 2020, a federal grand jury indicted Matthew Patrick Slatzer of Canton, Ohio, on weapons charges. Slatzer, a known neo-Nazi, was arrested in February after bringing a gun into a Canton bar, and was charged with possession of a firearm by a person with a domestic violence conviction.
The investigation began after Slatzer -- who, according to police reports, was wearing a sword and hatchet on his belt -- entered a business in Stow, Ohio, on May 3, 2020. He allegedly stated that he was in the Aryan Brotherhood and that he was going to Kent State to “look for Jews.”
ADL’s Center on Extremism (COE) has been aware of Slatzer since June 2019, and assisted the Stow Police in their investigation.
In April 2020, ADL identified Slatzer as the person holding an antisemitic poster depicting a caricature of a Jew as a rat and a star of David, with the words, “The Real Plague,” at an April 18, 2020 protest against stay-at-home-orders outside the Ohio statehouse in Columbus.
Slatzer first came to the attention of the ADL when he participated in a June 2019 protest of a gay pride event in Detroit, Michigan, where Slatzer and nine other individuals associated with Nationalist Socialist Movement (NSM) shouted obscenities, homophobic and antisemitic slurs at festival attendees.
In July 2019, the COE identified Slatzer as one of the attendees at a white supremacist unity event held on private property in Tazewell, Tennessee. The event was attended by people associated with the United Federation of Klans of America, American Christian Dixie Knights and the NSM, and signaled the start of an alliance which has since fallen apart.
In the evening hours of the gathering, Klan members burned a cross while Slatzer and two other NSM members burned a swastika.
NSM members posing with Slatzer (Center) at the Tazewell event and Slatzer later that evening giving a Hitler salute in front of the burning swastika.
During a November 9, 2019 regional NSM meeting hosted by regional leader Daniel Burnside at his home in Ulysses, Pennsylvania, Slater and two other individuals received NSM patches during a membership ceremony.
Meeting participants in Burnside’s garage, including Slatzer (third from left)
One of the individuals who received a patch along with Slatzer appears to be Timothy R. Wilson. In March 2020, Wilson died during a shootout with law enforcement in Belton, Missouri. According to an FBI statement, Wilson allegedly planned to use a car bomb to blow up a local hospital currently coping with the coronavirus outbreak in “an attempt to cause severe harm and mass casualties.”
Screen shots of Tim Wilson and Slatzer during the membership ceremony.