BOULDER, Colo. (KDVR) — An 802-page document believed to be the violent manifesto that led police to arrest a man in Boulder Tuesday uses the N-word more than 10,000 times among thousands of other racial slurs and derogatory terms.
References to Boulder occurred seven times.
Matthew C. Harris, a former instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles, is accused of sending the manifesto and making threats to university employees, causing the campus to close for in-person learning on Tuesday.
Police arrested him in Boulder after a standoff.
Rambling document calls for violence
Some references to the City of Boulder included violent comments in the massive document. Some of these comments are reproduced below in the same format that they appeared in the document.
“Set fire in woods near mansions or gated communities,” the document said. “Do it in Boulder colorado.”
In another reference, the author wrote, “Burn and attack Boulder outside by the university.”
And a third violent reference said, “kill the fathers of Boulder high school.”
Among the references to Boulder, the author also mentioned a person named Sandra.
“Sandra pretended to be my soulmate and bounced. Even though I moved to her backyard of boulder Colorado she never commuted. She could’ve been my jon benet Ramsey,” the document said.
The author made a second reference to Ramsey, a child beauty queen who was mysteriously killed in Boulder in 1996. The document said, “if jon benet Ramsey wasn’t murdered I probably would’ve seen her on bumble now that I live in Boulder.”
Another section of the document referred to a restaurant: “‘What’s your favorite pizza in Boulder – if it isn’t enzo’s then we are done here” ‘only frozen. At home.””
And a final Boulder comment said, “here in Boulder, theres a star on the side of the mountain her name is Kate.”
Former mentor remembers Harris
Richard Miller, a retired philosophy professor from Cornell University, mentored Harris while Harris was a visiting graduate student from Duke University.
Miller said Harris was particularly interested in the subject of personal identity and how it relates to group identities, like racial identities. He said Harris seemed particularly troubled and frustrated by experiences with racism and people who displayed Confederate flags in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, while he attended Duke University.
A Duke University spokesperson confirmed Harris pursued his Ph.D. at Duke between 2012 and 2019.