A proposal to lower the voting age to 16 leads to threatening calls and a criminal investigation.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect information obtained after the Weekly's print deadline in the Oct. 25 issue.

Visitors to the offices of Monterey County Supervisors Simon Salinas and Luis Alejo on Monday were greeted with locked doors. Staffers were still inside, taking phone calls from constituents, and dealing with the daily tasks of managing the offices, but after both men received phone calls branding them as traitors and suggesting they should be lined up against a wall and shot, locking the doors for a time seemed a matter of common sense.

Nothing like trying to expand the pool of eligible voters in Monterey County to include 16-year-olds to bring out the worst in some people.

That was the bizarre lesson learned by Salinas and Alejo, who Oct. 18 announced they are pushing for Monterey County to be the first in the country to lower the voting age. They proposed the Monterey County Elections Office began researching the issue and conducting community outreach to prepare a ballot measure for the 2020 election.

Then on Oct. 22, both arrived to their offices to find a caller who has since been identified as Carmel resident Peter Channing Wells, aka Peter Murray , had left them vulgarity-laced voicemail saying their proposal is part of their attempt for Mexico to reclaim California and suggesting they should be shot.

“It’s all Mexicans you want voting to take over our state,” Wells says in one message. “You like Mexico so much, go the fuck back there. Whatever millions I have I’m going to make sure you never make it to national politics.”

Unlike most threatening messages people leave for politicians, this caller left his name and phone number. And while the Monterey County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday announced it was declining to pursue a case against Wells—and, according to Alejo, instead suggested the two supervisors sit down with Wells and try to reach rapproachment—the county requested and received a temporary restraining order against Wells that the supervisors hope a judge will make permanent.

It's also led to a breathtaking public fracture in Alejo's relationship with Sheriff Steve Bernal, who left him a voicemail message Tuesday morning asking him to quit communicating with the press while the sheriff's office was still investigating the calls.

Alejo released that voicemail to the press along with a message, via Twitter: "After not getting a call from the Sheriff or anyone in his Dept yesterday after reporting the hate crime & death threats, I got this mssg from the Sheriff yesterday AM lecturing me about a statement I didn’t make & I didn’t release the audio to any media. I simply it posted here!"

He also tweeted: "I never criticized our Sheriffs Dept, I only told KSBW 'I hope the Sheriff's Office takes action on this.' 2nd, I didn’t release any audio to the media, I simply posted it here. But what law enforcement agency says this after reporting a hate crime that is clearly caught on tape!"

Alejo says he and Salinas didn’t think expanding the legal voting age for county elections would be a topic that would set people off the way it did.

“This type of reaction was unexpected," Alejo says. "Both Simon and I were born in the U.S., my father is a Vietnam-era veteran, and these hateful comments display ignorance that shows the caller doesn’t know our backgrounds.”

Wells has a lengthy history in the Monterey County court system under two separate names, both as Peter Channing Wells and as Peter Murray Sherwin, Jr. Cases include a defamation suit filed against him by The Cypress Inn disparaging social media posts he made about their food and the inn's management; the Inn has since dropped the suit.

Wells also has a restraining order against him secured by a Carmel real estate broker after Wells left him harassing voicemails, and a 2012 case in which he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and a civil rights violation. In that case, he pleaded guilty to interfering with the victim’s rights; the victim was a Latino gardener working in Carmel and Wells apparently threw a rock at him and told him to go back to Mexico.

The real estate broker, who asked that his name be withheld from print, says he first got to know Wells in the early 1990s when Wells was a customer at Nielsen's Market, where the broker once worked. He described Wells as having a bad attitude that eventually got him banned from the market.

"I'd had no contact with him for 25 years when one night he left me a nasty voicemail. I was kind of surprised, and I called back and left a message and then I realized who it was," the broker says.

Then one night, Wells called him 19 times in a span of just a few hours. The broker went to the police, and the police told him to seek a restraining order. The court granted one.

"I still have the voicemails," the broker says. "He really knew a lot about me—the cars I drove, where I lived, and about my mom's illness," he says. Wells, he says, left one voicemail asking him, "Did your mom really have cancer when she got her titties cut off?"

Under his previous name, Peter Sherwin, he was charged in a misdemeanor case in 1990 and two felonies in 1993. Records on those cases were not immediately available. Alejo says he received an email today, Oct. 25, claiming Wells had been caught firing a weapon described as an assault rifle in the email, into the air on St. Patrick's Day in 1994. After he was arrested in that case, the emailer says, Wells changed his name.