Pittsburgh man charged with threatening to behead Tampa General Hospital CEO

A 63-year-old former official who worked under Tampa General Hospital CEO John Couris at a different medical center has been arrested and charged with threatening his life —including calling for the top executive's beheading.

The U.S. Department of Justice says Lawrence Brunn of Oakmont, Pennsylvania in suburban Pittsburgh, was charged with cyber harassment. If convicted, he faces up to five years in federal prison.

The Justice Department doesn’t name Couris in a statement announcing the arrest and charges Tuesday or in court papers, only referring to the alleged victim as J.C. The statement does, however, identify him as the chief executive officer of Tampa General, a role Couris has held since 2017.

“This is an ongoing investigation,” a spokesperson for Tampa General says in an emailed statement. “We have full faith in the U.S. Attorney General’s office, and we will continue to cooperate. We want to thank local and federal law enforcement authorities for their intervention.”

According to the criminal complaint filed by the FBI special agent in charge of the investigation, Palm Beach County civil court records and the Justice Department, here is what happened:

Before coming to Tampa General, Couris was the president and CEO of  Jupiter Medical Center on Florida's east coast. Brunn was working there at the time, first as a budget manager and then as interim controller.

Brunn was fired Oct. 22, 2014 after he falsely accused JMC’s CFO of embezzling $6 million in funds from the center, court records show. 

After the firing, Brunn began harassing the center — which eventually filed a defamation lawsuit against him in Palm Beach County in 2014.

According the lawsuit, during Brunn’s time at the hospital he used what he called the “Forever Cash to Net AR” process to audit the center’s finances, a process he made up himself and that was “not consistent with generally accepted auditing standards.”

Brunn, the lawsuit alleges, called this process “magical, compared to the process that JMC uses.”

“In reality, Brunn’s process combined confidential and proprietary financial information in a way that was nonsensical to the experienced financial professionals at JMC, and to the experienced financial professionals at Crowe Horwath, JMC’s independent external auditors,” the lawsuit contends.

Using that method, Brunn, the lawsuit alleges, reported he found about $6 million unaccounted for in an audit. JMC immediately began its own audit and investigation, which turned up nothing, according to the lawsuit. 

Brunn, however, told company officials he would not accept the findings, threatened to publicize his own report and told another employee that he’d bought a recorder to secretly tape conversations.

Ten days after reporting the $6 million missing, on Oct. 22, JMC decided to fire him because, according to the lawsuit, “they had lost trust in his ability to adequately perform his job” as well as the other concerns.

According to the complaint written by the FBI agent, the lawsuit was closed in 2020 with a finding in the medical center’s favor.

Once that happened, Brunn’s focus turned to Couris.

According to the Justice Department, the threats have included calling for his execution and “frequently referring to J.C.’s beheading utilizing a guillotine.”

Among the most lurid:

• On April 17, Brunn allegedly posted a message that read: “We the people say these MFers deserve the guillotine because they embezzled $152 million from us…you all need to have your heads taken off. You need to donate your heads, OK? It’s called a guillotine, OK? You should be scared, not of me, but of we the people. OK?”
• On May 19, he posted: “I hope you guys at TGH really appreciate me taking you all down…You guys need to bend over and the person pulls your lottery ticket gets to trip the guillotine. One bucket for heads, a bigger bucket for bodies....you deserve this.”

These particular threats come less than six months after UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated on the streets of New York City. The complaint against Brunn also includes several more similar threats of violence, many made on Brunn’s website, icanfundtheusa.com. (The site, which the FBI says was started in 2023, only had six entries Tuesday evening and a search for John Couris netted zero results.) 

But prosecutors and the FBI say the threats were not only online. They were mailed to Couris’ neighbors and members of the Board of Trustees for Tampa General Hospital.

According to court papers, Couris has hired private security to monitor his home, drive him to and from work and no longer feels safe going out with family without security.

Assistant United States Attorney Candace Garcia Rich will prosecute the case.