Joseph Anthony Pacini, 52, of Clifton Heights, who posted bizarre Youtube videos threatening police officers and FBI agents, was killed in Delaware County during a confrontation with police officers on Tuesday night.
Pacini, who was apparently mentally ill, was fatally shot by police officers after driving his vehicle and slamming it into a police cruiser in Drexel Hill on Tuesday evening, the Inquirer reported.
Pacini nearly hit a Clifton Heights police department officer with his vehicle before the officers opened fire, killing him around 4:30 p.m. Tuesday near the intersection of Shadeland Avenue and Garrett Road.
Pacini was not armed, but was using his car as a weapon, Upper Darby Superintendent Michael Chitwood told the Inquirer.
Three officers fired on Pacini, two from Upper Darby and one from Clifton Heights, but authorities would not name the officers or say who fired the fatal shot.
Pacini had taped three rambling and nearly incoherent videos Youtube videos in the days before he died, claiming that federal authorities wanted him dead.
On one video, Pacini also played a tape directed at a Havertown Police Department detective — who was calling Pacini about reports that a man was acting “irrationally” at an L.A. Fitness gym in Havertown, according to the Inquirer.
“You wanna try to bring me down? I will f—ing kill you and your whole family. So go ahead and f— with me. Go ahead and try,” Pacini says to the detective after playing a recording of the voicemail in one Youtube video.
That message is played in a video which is directed at pop singer Sara Bareilles, whom Pacini calls his “twin flame soul mate.”
“Save me Sara,” Pacini says later in the video. ‘I’m gonna be dead or in prison within the next 12 hours. Twenty-four tops.”
Pacini posted his last videoat 4 p.m. on Tuesday, in it he tells the detective he is going to the gym, shortly before his final confrontation with officers, and urging the detective to watch his Youtube videos.
In the videos, Pacini voices extreme paranoia, both in general and related to the gym and the detective who called him.
Pacini says he is constantly followed by FBI agents due to his family’s connection with the South Philadelphia Mafia, and states, “I can’t even take a piss in the gym without three of them following me in there.”
He also addresses the detective who called him regarding the gym incident, at times threatening him and at other times pleading for mercy.
“Matt I’m giving you the opportunity to come clean,” Pacini says in another video.
“If you choose not to do this now, cannot, will not, or whatever, then there are three options there — basically a declaration of war from you to me,” Pacini says. “Your side controls 100 percent of my life. I control zero percent of it. Your people destroyed me tortured me and continue to destroy me every day, every second, every single second of every day relentlessly. believe it. It stops now.”
Pacini goes on in the video to demand that he be “compensated monetarily for my losses over the last 15 years.”
In messages he posted directed at musician Sara Bareilles, he claims, “I am the male version of Sara Bareilles. … I happen to love Sara with all my heart, all my soul.”
“The reason I’m coming out with this today is because the CIA and FBI has stepped up their efforts to kill me,” he says in that video. “This is prophecy unfolding in real time.”Police are still investigating the nature of Pacini’s mental illness and the circumstances of his death.
