A St. Louis County man has been charged with threatening several local Jewish institutions.
St. Louis County police arrested 50-year-old Dennis Klopfenstein on Tuesday. He faces a single charge of aggravated harassment, accused of making multiple unwanted visits and disturbing calls to Congregation Shaare Emeth, Temple Emmanuel, Temple Israel and the Jewish Federation of St. Louis.
Although all the organizations are Jewish, the prosecutor’s office said the current evidence in the case did not meet the threshold for enhanced penalties for hate-motivated crimes under Missouri law.
Klopfenstein has a violent past and a history of mental illness. He pleaded guilty in March 1998 to murdering his father and spent 10 years in prison. In 2014, he pleaded guilty to stalking and a drug charge and received another 10-year sentence. The victim in that case belonged to Shaare Emeth.
Four years later, in 2018, federal prosecutors charged Klopfenstein with mailing threats to victims of his previous stalking case. In a motion filed to keep him behind bars before trial, the U.S. attorney noted that Klopfenstein had threatened to kill Missouri prison staff and had an order of protection filed against him by an ex-girlfriend.
He pleaded guilty to the federal charge in August 2019 and received a 2 ½-year sentence followed by three years' supervised release. Court documents show he violated the terms of his release multiple times; the judge ultimately sent him back to prison for eight months in May 2024, to be followed by another 18 months of supervision. He was on that second term of supervised release when he's accused of the current harassment.
Just days before his arrest, Chaminade College Preparatory School had sought an injunction to keep Klopfenstein from coming onto its Creve Coeur campus. A news article from 1997 indicates that Klopfenstein graduated from the school in 1992.
