BLACKSTONE, Mass. (AP) - A man who served prison time in the 1990s for threatening to kill President Bill Clinton and who was wanted over the death of his 83-year-old father at their home has been arrested, authorities said.
Initial reports indicate Glenn Armstrong, who lived in Blackstone with his father, was driving a 1995 Chevrolet pickup truck registered to his father when it ran out of gas in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, prosecutors said. Police took Armstrong into custody without incident on Thursday in a hotel parking lot, they said.
Armstrong was arrested on a Massachusetts warrant accusing him of failing to submit DNA, they said.
Police making a well-being check found Armstrong’s father, Walter Armstrong, dead in his bedroom at their Blackstone home on Wednesday. The father’s 1995 Chevrolet pickup truck was missing.
An autopsy was planned to determine the cause of Walter Armstrong’s death, but Worcester District Attorney Joseph Early Jr. deemed the death a homicide.
Glenn Armstrong, who was well known to Blackstone police and had served multiple jail or prison sentences, was identified as a person of interest in his father’s death and was sought.
“He has served several sentences in the past, one of those in 1994, for threatening to kill President Bill Clinton,” Early said.
The prosecutor said Armstrong was sentenced in 2015 to about nine months in jail for assault and battery and was released in about the last year and a half.
Armstrong couldn’t be reached for comment while in custody in New Jersey late Thursday. Prosecutors were seeking to get him returned to Massachusetts.
Armstrong was sentenced to 21 months in prison for threatening Clinton, a Democrat, in 1994 and was credited with time served, the Telegram & Gazette reported. A federal judge ordered him to serve three years of supervised release and to undergo psychiatric therapy, it said. The newspaper reported that Armstrong was arrested at a ferry terminal that serves Martha’s Vineyard after telling a ticket agent that he was going to kill the president. Clinton was vacationing with his family on the island at the time.
The threat against Clinton came only a few weeks after Secret Service agents detained Armstrong outside President George H.W. Bush’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine, the Telegram & Gazette reported.
According to the newspaper, friends said Armstrong blamed both of the presidents for taking away his children.
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