Lynn man pleads innocent to making threatening calls

LYNN – Alfred Messenger was scheduled to complete a probation stint on Feb. 20 but telephone threats he called into Gov. Deval Patrick’s office and Lynn District Court Tuesday landed him in a Boston psychiatric facility.Messenger, 41, pleaded innocent Wednesday in Somerville District Court to a charge of falsely reporting a crime, two charges of threatening to use a deadly device and two charges of threatening to commit a crime. He lives in Somerville but court records list a Lynn address for him in 2008.Judge Sabita Singh assigned Messenger $50,000 bail and ordered him sent to the Solomon Carter Fuller Mental Health Center for psychiatric evaluation.According to the Attorney General’s office, a governor’s employee answered a call Tuesday morning from an individual threatening to harm Patrick. The caller provided a name and claimed to be from Lynn.The governor’s aides passed the call on to the State Police who contacted Lynn police and were told they were investigating a bomb threat call to District Court. The name given in the threat call to court employees matched the one used in the call to Patrick’s office.Police determined the calls were not made from Lynn and their investigation of the threats led to Messenger, who, they claim, also called Lynn police and gave them a false name by way of claiming that individual made the bomb threat.Messenger was arrested at the Medford State Police barracks after voluntarily going there to answer investigators’ questions.Authorities could not verify Messenger was the same person who called The Daily Item Tuesday afternoon and, claiming to be a Shiite Muslim, made a threat against the governor and wanted it printed in the paper. Item employees forwarded the call to Lynn police.Messenger has an extensive court record that includes jail time served in the Essex County House of Correction for a 2007 assault and battery conviction and threat charges dating back almost 20 years.The owners of Chestnut Gardens apartments in Lynn tried twice in 2008 to ban Messenger from visiting his mother in the building. He pleaded guilty to the trespass charge stemming from an April 8 incident and was assigned administrative probation, a fairly unrestrictive form of supervision.