Jul 6, 2019 3 min read

Charges were filed against a Vestaburg man accused of calling in a bomb threat to the Greene County Courthouse last month.

Gene Michael Luff, 33, of 428 Second St., was charged by Waynesburg police Friday with falsely reporting weapons of mass destruction, a third-degree felony, and terroristic threats causing evacuation, a first-degree misdemeanor.

The entire courthouse was evacuated before 9 a.m. June 20 after a bomb threat was called into the public defender’s office. Borough police Officer Tom Ankrom wrote in the criminal complaint that a secretary in that office had answered the phone about 8:35 a.m. According to the complaint, the caller told her, “I want you to be aware there is a bomb in the courthouse.”

The secretary told police it was a muffled male voice. She gave police a phone number listed on the caller identification. Police said they traced it back to an app “TextNow,” which assigned the phone number that morning at 8:33 a.m. to a user name “geneluff85” and email address, geneluff@msn.com.

Police asked Public Defender Harry Cancelmi if anything strange had happened with his office recently. According to the complaint, Cancelmi told them Luff had been in his office the day before with Cancelmi’s client Danny McElroy and Danny’s older brother, Justin McElroy.

Danny McElroy was there for a pretrial meeting, as his jury trial was scheduled at 8:30 a.m. June 20. He’s facing two felony firearms charges.

Cancelmi told police that during the pretrial meeting, Luff allegedly demanded that the trial be continued so that Danny McElroy could find a witness, the complaint said. Cancelmi told police that the conversation became “slightly heated,” and he asked Luff to leave his office, the complaint said.

When police asked Luff about the incident, he allegedly told them that Danny was the one who asked him to leave, the complaint said. Luff allegedly told police that when he left the courthouse that afternoon, he had no further contact or involvement with Danny McElroy’s case.

But on Monday, police said they discovered that to be false. The same secretary found a voicemail on the public defender’s office phone from 7:02 a.m. June 20. It was Luff, calling from his cellphone, asking if Danny’s trial had been continued, police said.

The bomb threat, called in an hour later, had the courthouse evacuated from 8:45 a.m. to about 11:30 a.m. Three bomb-sniffing K9 officers from Pittsburgh were brought in to investigate the threat and eventually cleared the courthouse for resumed occupancy.

Nearby streets, including South Washington and Church streets, were blocked off during the investigation. Law enforcement officers from the Greene County Sheriff’s Office, Greene County Prison and state police also assisted at the scene.