State says Miami father’s threat to ‘burn’ school over mask rules wasn’t literal, drops case

Prosecutors won’t press charges against a father who had been accused of wanting to “burn” down a Northeast Miami-Dade Jewish school on an anti-mask group text.

The state announced Wednesday it dropped the case against Mark Polyakov, who’d been arrested last year on a felony charge of issuing a written threat against the Scheck Hillel Community School.

According to Miami-Dade police, he was angry because his 4-year-old son was forced to wear a mask on an athletic field. In a group chat with parents called “No more masks Hillel,” he allegedly wrote: “I want to burn this school to the ... ground! This is what they are doing outside forcing ... masks 80 degrees. You can’t be nice gets you nowhere.”

He later wrote: “I just got kicked out of Hillel. I will burn this school down.”

His son, Samuel, was expelled from the school and he was banned from school property.

But according to Polyakov and his attorneys, he meant he wanted to go after the school in a legal sense — as in file a lawsuit against the school, which billed itself as mask-optional. Mask mandates to protect against COVID-19 in schools have been a hot button issue in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has even chided high school students about wearing them.

Polyakov’s defense was backed up by other messages in the text thread, Assistant State Attorney Sophiea Bailey wrote in a final memo on the case. “The defendant clarified later in the thread that he meant to legally burn down the school,” she wrote.

His defense attorney, Mark Eiglarsh, said Polyakov’s arrest had been “unwarranted.”

“By reading all of my client’s messages in context, it is clear that his sole intent was ‘burn down the school’ by taking legal action and not by committing an act of arson,” Eiglarsh said.

This story was originally published March 16, 2022 at 10:05 AM.