Man ‘Obsessed’ With Cable News and ‘Pissed’ About Illegal Immigration Pleads Guilty to Shooting Two Latinos

Telemundo Washington

A man “obsessed” with cable news news pleaded guilty last week to shooting two Latino men after he became “pissed” over illegal immigration.

58-year-old Douglas Wayne Cornett pleaded guilty to “two federal hate crimes involving attempts to kill and to discharging a firearm during a federal crime of violence,” in relation to a February 2024 incident in Virginia which left two Latino men with gunshot wounds, according to a press release from the Department of Justice.

Cornett reportedly “followed a box truck driven by a victim with the initials O.G., an adult Latino male, into the Sheetz gas station along Interstate 95 in Spotsylvania County,” before asking the second victim, a friend of the first, “how long O.G. had been present in the United States.”

“Upon learning that O.G. had arrived within the last two years, Cornett drew a handgun and fired six rounds, striking O.G. three times,” and the man’s friend once, according to the Department of Justice.

Court documents stated that Cornett told a detective “he was ‘pissed’ about undocumented migrants receiving welfare funds, phones, and health insurance,” and had “fantasized about flying an Apache helicopter gunship to the border and firing on undocumented migrants traveling into the United States.”

Cornett’s housemates told detectives he was “a heavy consumer of cable television news” and was particularly “obsessed” with coverage about illegal immigration at the southern border.

In a statement, U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, said, “Hate crimes driven by bias against national origin or any other protected characteristic are a direct assault on the principles of equality and justice that define our nation.”

She concluded, “The Civil Rights Division is committed to vigorously prosecuting such acts of violence to secure a just outcome.”