Washington — Abigail Shry’s verbal threats against public officials have been racist, violent and detailed. Her targets have included a federal judge in Washington, a Democrat in the House and the Texas Capitol. She allegedly once said she would “annihilate” the Texas government in an “armed attack” that would be more violent than the Jan. 6 insurrection.
At one point, a federal prosecutor said Shry was “unmoored” and posed a danger.
Now there’s a new concern: The feds can’t find her.
Shry was supposed to report to prison Tuesday in Florida, but she failed to show up and has gone on the lam. A judge has issued a bench warrant for federal agents to find and arrest her.
Shry was due to begin serving a 27-month federal prison sentence in her most recent threat case. She pleaded guilty in November 2024 to a federal charge in Texas for a phone message she left in the Washington, D.C., chambers of Judge Tanya Chutkan.
The threat came hours after Chutkan was assigned to oversee President Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy case in August 2023. According to the Justice Department, Shry called Chutkan a “stupid slave [epithet]” and said, “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we’re coming to kill you. So tread lightly.”
Shry, who has lived in Alvin, Texas, south of Houston, was also accused of threatening then-Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat. Court documents said Shry left a phone message saying she wanted to kill Lee and would target her “personally, publicly, your family, all of it.” Lee died by natural causes 11 months later.
Shry had been seeking to delay her federal prison term in a series of motions in court this year. But a judge denied those requests.
CBS News has learned Shry was scheduled to self-surrender to the federal correctional facility in Tallahassee, Florida, on Tuesday, but did not show. A federal judge in Houston has ordered a warrant for her arrest.
A CBS News review of Texas state court records found Shry was also under investigation for threats against Texas legislators in 2023, during impeachment proceedings against Trump ally and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Shry pleaded no contest to making the threats and reached a plea agreement to serve a 90-day jail term, according to court filings.
State police in Texas alleged Shry left a phone threat in July 2023 on the voicemail systems of two Houston-area state senators. Police said the messages warned that there would be “war on the Texas Capitol” if Paxton was impeached.
“Shry specifically states that there would be an armed attack and it would not be non-violent like the January 6th protests at the U.S. Capitol,” police said. They said Shry also warned that “we will take weapons, come to Austin and annihilate the government.”
According to Texas police, Shry had also made a separate set of threats against members of Congress in 2023. A police report reviewed by CBS News said Shry “contacted several U.S. elected officials in Congress and has made similar threats towards them pertaining to if Donald Trump is not reelected as president, they will also see an attack of the U.S. Capitol.”
Shry’s failure to report to federal prison will further complicate her freedom and expose her to greater legal jeopardy. Greg Rosen, a former federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., told CBS News that Shry risks facing further criminal proceedings.
“Failing to self-surrender or appear undermines the trust judges place in defendants when granting them release in the first instance,” Rosen said. “It also creates additional criminal exposure under Title 18 of the federal code — something prosecutors may pursue both to deter future flight and to account for the resources required to apprehend them.”
At a detention hearing for Shry in August 2023, in the days after Shry’s threat against Chutkan, a federal prosecutor expressed concern that Shry’s threats would escalate.
“Judge, my greatest concern in this case is that she starts watching Fox News again, gets herself spun up, she goes out, she gets a case of beer, continues to get herself spun up,” the prosecutor said, according to a transcript of the hearing. “There’s no way to gauge what’s going to happen here, except to look at what she’s done in the past six months.”
“In this particular instance,” the prosecutor then told the judge, “I don’t want to be that FBI agent that didn’t go check on Lee Harvey Oswald two days before John Kennedy was assassinated. That happened. And that’s the footnote in history. And I’m standing here before you today because this defendant is unmoored and I believe that there’s going to be more.”
Shry’s defense attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment. One of those attorneys filed a motion Wednesday to withdraw from the case, after Shry failed to surrender.
