Former boxer planned mass shooting at Miami gym after membership was revoked

Bloody Elbow 2.0 | Anton Tabuena

A former Olympic boxer planned to commit a mass shooting at a gym in Miami, Florida, after the business revoked his membership.

Azea Augustama, 39, was arrested last week and is facing two counts of making written threats to commit a mass shooting and one count of making a written threat to kill or cause bodily injury.

The charges stem from threats that Augustama made on Instagram, which include posting a picture of the Parkland school mass shooter along with a caption that suggested he planned to commit a similar crime at the gym that revoked his membership.

Augustama also posted a deposit receipt for an AK-47 firearm and tagged the gym on Instagram. He was eventually arrested at the pawn shop where he placed the deposit.

“Police automatically, they saw what was going on, because he was tagging the gym and stuff, so they immediately jumped on it quickly,” gym owner Mateo Attalla told NBC.

Augustama represented Haiti at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China—the same year he won a gold medal at the National Golden Gloves tournament. He holds a 18-2 professional record but had not fought since late 2014.

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About the author

Karim Zidan

Karim Zidan is a investigative reporter and feature writer focusing on the intersection of sports and politics. He has written for BloodyElbow since 2014 and has served as an associate editor since 2016. He also writes for The New York Times and The Guardian. Karim has been invited to speak about his work at numerous universities, including Princeton, and was a panelist at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival and the Oslo Freedom Forum. He also participated in the United Nations counter-terrorism conference in 2021. His reporting on Ramzan Kadyrov’s involvement in MMA, much of which was done for Bloody Elbow, has led to numerous award nominations, and was the basis of an award-winning HBO Real Sports documentary.