Grandson of Vermont judge, nephew of NY guv candidate and Bernie Sanders “surrogate”

A Middlesex man attending St. Olaf College, a private college in Minnesota, has been arrested on multiple charges in Northfield, Minnesota.

Waylon Kurts, 20, was arrested on April 5, following charges filed by Rice County Attorney’s Office. He has been charged with plotting to cause violence at the college.

Police found knives, ammunition, propane canisters, fireworks, a lock-pick set, and notes detailing public safety radio frequencies in his dorm room.

Kurts was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit threats of violence, conspiracy to commit second-degree assault, and making terroristic threats.

Minnesota prosecutors asked the Kurts family to turn over all their guns to police in Vermont. St. Olaf College has suspended Kurts.

Kurts is currently in custody with Minnesota authorities and the Vermont State Police say they are coordinating with Minnesota law enforcement in the event Kurts is released.

The Vermont State Police and the Vermont Department of Corrections say they will continue to monitor Kurts’ case and custody status in Minnesota.

Kurts is familiar with firearms because his family does trap-shooting with shotguns, his lawyer reportedly said. 

It is unknown whether Kurts’ motives for the alleged crime were based in politics. However, it is known that Kurts belongs to a prominent Vermont judicial and political family. According to a 2019 Times Argus report, His mother, Woden Teachout, is an author of two books on politics, Slow Democracy (co-authored with Susan Clark) and Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism. His grandmother is Mary Miles Teachout, a former Washington County Superior Court judge who retired in 2022.

His aunt is Zephyr Teachout, a progressive Democrat who finished second to Andrew Cuomo in a New York gubernatorial primary and participated in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration. A strong Bernie Sanders supporter, she got into hot water when in January, 2020 she said Joe Biden has “a big corruption problem.” Sanders apologized publicly to Biden for what CBS news called his “surrogate’s” remark.

According to Minnesota media reports, Kurts was a member of the school’s cross-country team. The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus reports that Kurts was a star runner and cross-country skier for Montpelier High School. (Zephyr Teachout also was a championship cross-country runner in college.)

The Times Argus reported in 2018 that “Kurts grew up in a running family and traveled to Central Asia when he was a seventh-grader to spend a year in Kyrgyzstan,” a former Soviet republic.