DETROIT – Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist said his family is safe after what police called a credible bomb threat targeted his Detroit home on Thursday.
“My family is unharmed. My family is hanging in there,” Gilchrist told Local 4. “Law enforcement acted really swiftly to deal with this bomb threat in their home.”
Gilchrist said neither he, his wife, nor their children were inside at the time of the threat.
“We were informed in the afternoon yesterday … they let us know it was credible immediately,” he said. “My wife was at work. I was at work. My kids were at school. None of us were home, but we live in a building, and so our neighbors were in the building.”
Gilchrist said authorities from Detroit Police, Michigan State Police and the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office all responded to the threat – and cleared neighbors in the Corktown building where the family lives and swept the area.
“I just really appreciate law enforcement again, acting quickly, acting decisively and making sure that everything was going to be cleared and a threat could be averted,” Gilchrist said. “I respect and admire how they did it with really technical excellence. I think the Detroit Police Department Chief Bettison, and I think the Michigan State Police and Colonel Grady, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department and Sheriff Washington and their team really did step up.”
The lieutenant governor noted the emotional toll on his children, two in middle school and one in elementary school. “We have to talk our kids through it,” he said. “They understand on some level the world that we live in. But it’s our job as parents to make sure that we can help them understand it in the healthiest possible way, even when it’s hard.”
Gilchrist called the threat part of a troubling pattern of political violence. “Political violence is not acceptable and is intolerable,” he said. “The act of threatening my family as a public official is a political act, and it’s problematic, and we shouldn’t tolerate it. We shouldn’t normalize it and we shouldn’t excuse it.”
Gilchrist also addressed the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.
“A man got murdered in broad daylight in the middle of a crowd of people. It’s terrible. And there’s no other way to describe that,” he said. “We cannot accept, tolerate, normalize or allow to fester and escalate this kind of political violence. And so there must be no place for this.”
Gilchrist, who is running for governor in 2026, said his priority remains protecting his family. “We just have to make sure that we are mindful in and taking care of how they feel and answering their questions,” he said.