The 2022 election sign-stealing incident was an indicator of violence, Phoenix police said

Two years before an Ahwatukee Foothills man was charged with terrorism for putting up homemade political signs with bags of white powder mislabeled as poison, community members said they knew he had the potential for political violence.

Jeffrey Kelly was Arrested Wednesday and accused of shooting into a Democratic Party campaign office in Tempe and placing the signs with sharp blades on them and bags of white power on the back. Federal agents found an arsenal of weapons in his home.

Officers said Kelly showed a pattern of escalation. When he was apprehended, court documents show, he had weapons in his car and may have been on his way to commit another politically motivated act.

Residents of the Ahwatukee Foothills community spoke at a meeting with Phoenix police, criticizing officers for not taking their concerns more seriously in 2022. That year, Kelly was caught stealing political signs for a Democratic candidate for a state legislative seat.

Wednesday’s meeting, a regularly scheduled meeting between police and residents, focused on concerns about Kelly’s actions in 2022.

“It shouldn’t just be that boys will be boys and crazy things will be crazy things,” said Paul Weich, a Phoenix attorney who sought a state House seat in 2022.

Weich hired a private investigator who discovered that Kelly was the perpetrator who vandalized and stole his campaign signs.

Phoenix Police Chief Rick Leyvas, who said he was not the case officer at the time of the 2022 drawing incident, said the department was monitoring Kelly: “I won’t tell you how they were monitoring him,” Leyvas said during the meeting, ‘but I will tell you that follow-up research has been done.”

Weich ran for state representative in 2022 on a Democratic ticket in Legislative District 12. After finding shredded pieces of his campaign signs near the entrance to his neighborhood following consistent thefts of his campaign signs, Weich hired an investigator to catch the perpetrator.

According to Weich, the investigator found surveillance video that caught Kelly in the act. Weich alerted Phoenix police to that incident at the time.

Police filed charges on one count of theft and one count of tampering with political signs, but a Phoenix prosecutor decided to dismiss the case.

Kelly was accused of shooting three times at the Democratic Party campaign office in Tempe. In the first shooting, BB guns were used to shatter a glass window and door, authorities said. The next two shootings, weeks apart, used real bullets. It all happened around midnight, when the office was empty.

Tempe police released a photo of a silver SUV captured on surveillance video and asked the public for tips.

Tempe Police Chief Ken McCoy said the department received tips from people who recognized the SUV as similar to the one Kelly was driving in 2022. Officers then began surveilling Kelly, McCoy said during a news conference on Wednesday.

Detectives observed Kelly leave his home around 11 a.m. Tuesday and begin placing political signs around the Ahwatukee Foothills area, according to court documents.

After Kelly returned home, detectives inspected the plates and discovered that some had the blades of a knife stuck to the edges, according to court documents. Some also had small bags of white powder taped to the back and a crude message indicating the substance was poison, the documents said.

Police and federal agents arrested Kelly the next afternoon as he left his home. He had several weapons in his vehicle, the documents said, and did not bring his cell phone. Authorities said this could indicate he did not want his location tracked.

A prosecutor said at his arraignment that Kelly may have been on his way to possibly “do something” and that the cache of 120 weapons found at his home indicated he was preparing for an event with a large number of victims.

An attorney for Kelly denied the charges during his arraignment, saying Kelly collected the weapons as a “sportsman.”

Weich said Kelly’s vandalism should have been addressed as early as 2022.

“The handling of it in 2022, or the mishandling of it, has led us to this week’s incidents,” he said.

Cliff Mager, another community member, said residents continued to follow Kelly through his social media accounts. What they saw, Mager said, made it clear that he would commit further crimes against Democrats if given the chance.

“He became more and more aggressive,” Mager said. “He became known and that information was handed to the police on a silver platter.”

Most attendees declined to identify The Republic for fear of provoking retaliation from Kelly or like-minded individuals, but they seemed united in describing what they saw as Kelly’s political extremism.

He was described as quiet and intense. Some neighbors said they knew he owned guns but understood he was a hobbyist.

Weich said if anything positive came out of this, it could be a recognition that actions such as vandalizing political signals should not be ignored.

“The threat to our democracy and elections is real,” he said. “Hopefully it has woken some people up to the fact that these things need to be taken seriously.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Man accused of shooting up Tempe campaign office stole 2022 election signs