Dennis Markuze, a.k.a. David Mabus, is being investigated by the Montreal police following a petition on change.org for them to take his thousands of death threats seriously. An arrest was made today: we can safely assume Markuze was the one taken into custody (this is further confirmed by Tim Farley’s excellent blog post on the matter.)
I was Mabus’d precisely twice; both times were on Twitter, with a charming poem about James Randi (viz. something resembling a corrupted text file of Nostradamus predictions with the vowels missing.) Neither time particularly unsettled me. In many ways, it was pleasing to know that he’d noticed me (finally, after some three years active in the skeptical “sphere” on the Web.)
The alarming thing is that he had been going at his spamming, obsessively, for over a decade. In the case of PZ Myers of Pharyngula, it was at the stage where the first thing he did every morning on turning on the computer was to bulk-delete Mabus spam.
There is a stage where one has to say that enough is enough. This man clearly had some kind of mental deficiency, and the fact he had, on more than one occasion, turned up in person to harass his targets was a cause for alarm bells.
I can only hope that now he is in custody, this man gets the psychiatric help he clearly needs.
