Man who threatened to hang fifth-graders while crashing Zoom class sentenced to prison

An eastern Kentucky man who pleaded guilty to making threats while “Zoom-bombing” a Louisiana elementary school’s fifth-grade virtual classroom was sentenced to one year and one day in prison, federal prosecutors said Monday.

According to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice, Brian Adams, 24, of Paintsville, pleaded guilty to one count of transmitting threatening communications. The court found that Adams’ actions were motivated by hate.

Adams’s sentence also includes one year of supervised release.

Prosecutors said that Adams made threats to students who were attending via Zoom video conference at the Laureate Academy Charter School in Harvey, Louisiana, “on or about” Oct. 14, 2020. Prosecutors said Adams uttered racial slurs at the students and threatened to “hang them by a tree.”

The school was conducting classes virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to prosecutors, Adams allegedly crashed the Zoom classroom, NOLA.com reported. The students covered their eyes and ears and some of them began crying, prosecutors said.

Adams was indicted on June 30, 2022, by a federal grand jury in New Orleans, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.

Prosecutors said that Adams entered the Zoom session under a name that the teacher, who is Black, believed “phonetically sounded like a racial epithet,” McClatchy News reported, citing court documents.

The teacher ended the class and sent out a new Zoom link, but Adams allegedly joined the classroom under a different name and allegedly directed racial slurs toward the students, according to the news organization.

As a result of the interruption, Laureate Academy canceled classes for 2 1/2 days, NOLA.com reported.

According to prosecutors, Adams posted a recording on YouTube the next day, showing him crashing the lesson in a video titled “Zoom Busted.”

NOLA.com reported that federal agents tracked Adams by using information from a Google email address associated with his Zoom account. The FBI executed a federal search warrant at Adams’ home in November 2021, according to court documents.

“I said a lot of mean and racist things,” Adams allegedly told agents.

“No child should ever have to endure racially motivated hatred like this in a classroom, a school or anywhere else,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.

Claude Kelly, the public defender assigned to represent Adams, told McClatchy News on Wednesday that “this is a very sad case.”

Kelly said that Adams was “invited” by two students to interrupt the class and that it was meant “as a joke.”

“Granted, what he said in those 25 seconds was unacceptable and extremely offensive,” Kelly told the news organization.

“Hate has no place in our country, especially in a fifth-grade classroom,” Lyonel Myrthil, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI New Orleans Field Office, said in a statement. “Protecting the rights of all Americans under the Constitution is the heart of the FBI’s mission.”

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