COLUMBUS, Ohio — An Ohio inmate has been sentenced on federal charges to nine more years in prison after he sent threatening letters with powder inside to multiple state officials, including Mike DeWine and a Painesville city official.

Sean Heisa, 39, sent at least 15 letters between July 2017 and July 2018, claiming the powder inside was anthrax or fentanyl, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio. He also threatened to use explosives.

Heisa wrote the letters while serving a 37-year sentence in a prison near Columbus, Ohio, after being convicted of multiple charges, including aggravated robbery, robbery, intimidation, inducing panic, and use of a hoax weapon of mass destruction, according to records from the Ohio Department of Correction & Rehabiliation.

In August 2017, he mailed a letter to the city manager of Painesville and claimed powder inside the envelope was anthrax, prosecutors say. In the letter, Heisa told the official: “#1 – You are going to have trouble breathing; #2- You are going to die; #3 – You are going to become a martyr for a cause and an organization far bigger than yourself.”

Prosecutors say he mailed a second letter that month to a magistrate judge in Whitehall, again claiming powder inside the envelope was anthrax. He also used letters to threaten officials within the Coshocton Municipal Courthouse, Franklin County Common Pleas Court and then-Ohio Attorney General DeWine.

Other letters were sent to the former Ohio prisons director, the Columbus Dispatch, the Circleville Herald and The Ohio State University, prosecutors say.

Heisa reportedly sent a letter to a Fairfield County Common Pleas Court judge who had presided over several hearings involving Heisa. In the letter, he wrote: “This is enough Fentanyl to kill you and multiple coworker [sic]. You deserve a more painful death but this will do.”

Authorities say Heisa had access in prison to what he believed was fentanyl. Although he believed he could send enough of the drug to kill someone, he chose to use it himself, prosecutors say.

Heisa was charged federally in December 2018 and pleaded guilty in October 2019 to making false information or hoaxes and mailing threatening communications.

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