Judge: Accused Chabad UF vandal still unfit to stand trial

A judge ruled Thursday that the man accused of vandalizing the Chabad UF Jewish Student Center remains mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Judge David P. Kreider made the decision during a forensic hearing at the Judge Stephan P. Mickle, Sr. Criminal Court Building in Gainesville. The defendant, Geoffrey Lush, is expected to continue receiving treatment while at Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, according to Holly Stacy, his public defender.

On Nov. 24, 2023, Rabbi Pessi Notik found threats on a sign and banner near the front of the Chabad building. Gainesville police arrested Lush a week later and charged him with vandalizing Chabad with what the organization called “anti-Semitic graffiti and hateful slurs,” the Gainesville Sun reported. The day before the vandalism was discovered, religiously motivated threats with “overlapping themes” were sent via email and voicemail to UF Hillel and the George A. Smathers Library, court records show.

The vandalism at Chabad was not the first offense in Gainesville in the weeks and months following the October 7 Hamas attack in Gaza. A few weeks earlier, University of Florida police charged graduate student Simon Nicholas Lowry with vandalizing a pro-Israel sign at a Jewish fraternity. He was banned from campus for three years and charged with a misdemeanor. That case is also pending.

Because of the vandalism, Lush was charged with two serious crimes.

Court documents filed in March show that Lush was diagnosed with a mental illness and declared incompetent to stand trial.

A court-ordered psychiatric evaluation found that he suffered from unspecified schizophrenia and a psychotic disorder and used cannabis and other hallucinogens, court records show.

Since then, there have been six forensic hearings, all of which concluded that Lush was unfit to stand trial.

William Wall, a forensic peer specialist at Meridian Behavioral Healthcare Inc., attended Thursday's hearing.

He said when mental health and crime meet, final decisions are rarely made quickly. Wall visited Lush in prison many times and said: “He seemed like a nice guy.” And more importantly, he said he could understand him because he himself had been in a similar situation before.

He is himself recovering from mental illness and drug addiction and said his mission is to help people most others don't want to help.

Kreider has scheduled the next forensic hearing in the Lush case for September 11, 2025.