MIAMI – A former Hampden man who authorities said was keeping weapons and military-style gear in his hotel room and car appeared in court Thursday on charges he threatened to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Raymond Hunter Geisel, 22, was arrested by the Secret Service on Saturday in Miami and was ordered held at Miami’s downtown detention center without bail Thursday by a federal magistrate.

A Secret Service affidavit charges that Geisel made the threat during a training class for bail bondsmen in Miami in late July. According to someone else in the 48-member class, Geisel allegedly referred to Obama with a racial epithet and continued, “If he gets elected, I’ll assassinate him myself.”

Obama was most recently in Florida on Aug. 1-2 but did not visit the South Florida area.

Another person in the bail bondsmen class quoted Geisel as saying that “he hated George W. Bush and that he wanted to put a bullet in the president’s head,” according to the Secret Service.

Geisel denied in a written statement to a Secret Service agent that he ever made those threats, and the documents don’t indicate that he ever took steps to carry out any assassination. He was charged only with threatening Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, but not for any threat against President Bush.

Geisel’s court-appointed attorney declined comment. The charge of threatening a candidate for president or vice president carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.

The Obama campaign declined comment Thursday on the alleged threat.

“We’ve dealt with him multiple times over the years,” Sgt. Scott Webber of the Hampden Police Department told the Bangor Daily News on Thursday evening. “In October ’07 we charged him with threatening his brother with a knife” and terrorizing.

Through a plea agreement with the Penobscot County District Attorney’s Office, Geisel agreed to plead guilty to the criminal threatening charge in exchange for dropping the terrorizing charge, Webber said.

Geisel spent 48 hours in Penobscot County Jail and paid a $250 fine for the crime.

Hampden police also “arrested him on a warrant in 2005 for theft by receiving stolen property” from a case based out of Washington County, Webber said.

“Every agency in the general area has dealt with him for one thing or another – for minor things,” the sergeant said.

In his recent interview with a Secret Service agent in Florida, Geisel said that “if he wanted to kill Senator Obama he simply would shoot him with a sniper rifle, but then he claimed that he was just joking,” according to court documents.

A search of Geisel’s 1998 Ford Explorer and hotel room in Miami uncovered a loaded 9 mm handgun, knives, dozens of rounds of ammunition including armor-piercing types, body armor, military-style fatigues and a machete. The SUV, which has Maine license plates, was wired with flashing red and yellow emergency lights.

Geisel told the Secret Service he was originally from Bangor and had been living recently in a houseboat in the Florida Keys town of Marathon, according to court documents. He said he used the handgun for training for the bail bondsman class, had the knives for protection and used the machete to cut brush in Maine.

Geisel may have told the Secret Service that he lived in Bangor, but according to local police reports, he “most recently has lived in Hampden on Marion Drive,” Webber said.

Geisel is originally from Winterport and went to Hampden Academy, where he earned honor roll status as a freshman and as a sophomore, according to previously published listings and articles in the Bangor Daily News.

His mother, Linda Geisel, was one of the outspoken parents who voiced opposition in 1993 to a timeout area called “The Box” at the Leroy H. Smith School in Winterport after his older brother, Carsten, was placed in the box for fighting with another pupil.

Linda Geisel’s issues with the SAD 22 school system continued for several years to the point where she pulled both Carsten and Raymond out of school and had to be forced by the state in October 1997 to return them. During a weeklong hearing conducted that fall by the Maine Department of Education, Linda Geisel asked that past and future medical bills for both boys, specifically psychological exams, be paid for by the district, which was denied.

The Secret Service affidavit said Geisel told agents that he suffered from psychiatric problems including post-traumatic stress disorder, but he couldn’t provide the names of any facilities where he sought treatment.

BDN writer Nok-Noi Ricker of the Bangor Daily News contributed to this report.