Woodstock man charged with making false bomb threat over the phone to national real estate company

A 75-year-old Woodstock man is being held in the McHenry County jail on $50,000 bond charged with making a false bomb threat by phone to a national real estate company, court records show.

Patrick Bangeman, of the 300 block of Railroad Street, is accused of making a false threat to Realtor.com and Move Inc. on March 28 that a bomb would go off in the building in 25 minutes knowing there was no “reasonable ground to believe a bomb was concealed at the business,” according to the criminal complaint.

Realtor.com and Move Inc. are real estate listing companies, according to their websites.

Though no explosives were found and no one was physically injured, Woodstock Police Chief John Leib said what Bangeman is accused of “was serious.” The phone call he made resulted in the evacuation of more than 1,000 employees from nine call center locations in five states, Leib said.

“The company he called is nationwide,” Leib said. “They don’t know which facility that this could have been in,” Leib said. “Think of the more than one thousand lives he affected. You are doing work in your building [and a bomb threat is made]. Think of the toll that it took emotionally, psychologically on all of those individuals.”

The charge is a Class 3 felony, which if convicted, Bangeman could be sentenced to between two and five years in prison.

Assistant Public Defender Rick Behof, who is representing Bangeman, filed a request seeking to have his bond reduced, stating that he is not a flight risk nor a danger to society.

Bond currently is set at $50,000, which means Bangeman would need to post $5,000 in order to secure his release.

A hearing on the request is scheduled for Friday, but Behof, who declined to comment on the case, said that may not happen as Bangeman is under COVID-19 quarantine in the McHenry County Jail.