FRUITLAND PARK — Jenette Phillips, 72, is confused and angry, though not as angry as her son, who was arrested last week and charged with threatening members of Congress in loud, profane phone calls.

“I just can’t get any answers,” she said. “He must have made the calls when I was outside.”

Richard Mel Phillips, 36, was arrested on Sept. 19 at the apartment they share.

That wasn’t the end of her troubles, however.

After expressing irritation with the two Fruitland Park police officers that accompanied the FBI agents, she was handcuffed and taken to LifeStream Behavioral Center, and then to Leesburg Regional Medical Center with stress-related heart arrhythmia.

FBI agents had grilled Richard Phillips at the apartment on Aug. 23, and he said “he made phone calls to politicians because they made him angry,” according to the federal criminal complaint. He blamed one politician for his inability to get a job.

“He’s a big talker,” she said.

Included in the big talk, however, were alleged threats to “slaughter” any FBI agent that came to arrest him.

Richard Phillips told the agents he had no plans to travel out of state to threaten members of the Congress, including Rep. Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California. He blamed her for his inability to get a job. He told the agents he had no means to carry out any threat.

Jenette Phillips said the two FBI agents who questioned him that day assured him that he was not going to be arrested for “blowing off steam,” shook his hand and left. But on Sept. 19, the agents returned banging on the windows and doors.

She said she cooperated with authorities, including telling them about a .38-caliber handgun that belonged to her late husband, a Korean War veteran, former police officer and a master locksmith who did some work for federal authorities.

The gun has been locked up in a gun safe in her room since he died in 2001. She said Monday that her son never knew it existed.

When she was released from LRMC on Thursday, she went back to LifeStream to pick up her purse and apartment keys.

“Mrs. Phillilps you can’t leave,” they told her, and held her overnight.

“Mrs. Phillips, you don’t belong here,” a nurse told her, and she was released the next day. She said she repeatedly told counselors that she had no plans to harm herself.

The Phillips have no car. Parked in the corner of the living room is a grocery cart that they push to Wal-Mart for groceries.

“He’s my pusher,” she said of the cart.

He likes to help others, she said. He’s always asking people if he can help put groceries in their car. “The older women call him ‘my teddy bear.’”

She said he also likes to walk to the library.

“He loves the president,” she said of Donald Trump, and all the news stories about “the resistance” to his presidency have upset both of them, she said.

“The Democrats are against him. They want to investigate him out,” she said. “They want to elect communists.”

He has tried to get a job in the past few months but he can only go to places within walking distance, she said.

“He’s tired of people hating the president.” He should not have made the threats, she said. However, she is worried about him.

“He’s my only baby,” she said, tearing up.

She has not been able to talk to him since his arrest, but she has a message. “I love him. I’ll stick by him. We’ll work it out,” she said.

Phillips could be sentenced up to five years in prison on the charge of transmitting threatening communication, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

He is being held without bond at the Marion County Jail on a federal hold.

He has been assigned a federal assistant public defender.