A Twentynine Palms man was sentenced last week to a year and a day in prison for making more than 10,000 harassing phone calls to government offices and threatening to injure staffers and interns who answered the calls. Robert Stahlnecker, 48, was convicted in February of one count of making threats by interstate commerce and five counts of anonymous telecommunications harassment. He was acquitted of two counts of threatening federal employees. Stahlnecker made more than 10,000 calls between January and November 2019, including eight telephone calls within a seven-minute span to Senator Sherrod Brown’s Washington, D.C. office. During the calls, Stahlnecker berated the intern who answered the call, insulted the intern by using vulgar language and finally, threatened to come to the senator’s office to kill her. Robert Stahlnecker could have been sentenced to up to five years in federal prison.
