An emergency room patient at LewisGale Medical Center in Salem was arrested last week after claiming there was a bomb in the facility, authorities said.
Brandon L. Moore, 37, was charged Nov. 21 with one felony count of making a bomb threat.
Moore was in an emergency room at the hospital on Electric Road when he became “unruly” and “was asked to leave,” Salem communications director Mike Stevens said in an email.
“Instead, he then made a threat that there was a bomb in a trash can,” Stevens said. “The 911 call came to dispatch at 5:18 p.m. No explosive devices were found, and [Moore] was arrested and charged.”
Moore has a criminal record that dates from 2012 and includes assault and battery charges, probation violations and one other bomb threat charge, according to Virginia’s online court case information system.
People are also reading…
In 2013 in Salem Circuit Court, Moore pleaded guilty to a bomb threat charge and was sentenced to one year in prison with four years of supervised probation to begin upon release.
Five years later, in 2018, Moore was charged with misdemeanor battery of emergency health care personnel. That case was prosecuted in Salem, too. He was found guilty and sentenced to a 10-day jail term.
Most recently, in April, Moore was sentenced in Roanoke County Circuit Court to a year and a half in prison for assaulting a law enforcement officer, a felony, in October 2020. That sentence was to run consecutively with another, and he was to be placed on supervised probation for two years once released.
Moore is scheduled to appear in Salem General District Court on Dec. 16 for a preliminary hearing related to last week’s charge. He is being held at the Western Virginia Regional Jail, according to the jail’s online inmate lookup system.
Moore
Emma Coleman
Emma Coleman covers public safety and courts in the Roanoke Valley. She can be reached at (540) 981-3198 or emma.coleman@roanoke.com.
