Man threatened to hang 5th graders while crashing Zoom class, feds say. He gets prison
A Kentucky man will serve prison time after federal prosecutors said he committed a hate crime when he crashed a Louisiana school’s online class and threatened to hang fifth-grade students nearly four years ago.
In October 2020, Brian Adams first joined the Laureate Academy Charter School’s class hosted on Zoom under a name that the teacher, who is Black, believed “phonetically sounded like a racial epithet,” court documents say.
The teacher ended the class upon noticing Adams, who was there without permission, and sent out a new Zoom link so her students could rejoin the lesson, according to court documents.
That’s when Adams joined the class under a different name and spoke out, directing racial slurs toward the students, who were mostly Black, and the teacher, court documents say.
He repeatedly threatened to hang the class “by a tree,” according to prosecutors.
The threats caused the students to cry and place their hands over their ears, The Lexington-Herald Leader previously reported. Nearly two years later, in 2022, he was indicted on one count of transmitting threatening communications.
Now Adams, 24, of Paintsville, has been sentenced to one year and one day in prison after pleading guilty to the charge, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana announced in a June 25 news release.
“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.
Federal public defender Claude Kelly, who was appointed to represent Adams, told McClatchy News on June 26 that “this is a very sad case.”
According to Kelly, Adams was “invited” to interrupt the class “by two students” attending it.
He said doing so was “a very popular trend with students” at the time during the COVID-19 pandemic and that “(Adams) meant it as a joke.”
“Granted, what he said in those 25 seconds was unacceptable and extremely offensive,” Kelly said.
Following the class, Adams posted a recording of him crashing the lesson to YouTube in a video he titled “Zoom Busted,” according to prosecutors.
In November 2021, the FBI executed a federal search warrant at Adam’s home in Paintsville, about a 120-mile drive southeast from Lexington, according to court documents.
That’s when Adams told FBI agents he crashed the Zoom classroom, saying “I said a lot of mean and racist things,” court documents say.
Kelly acknowledged his client’s YouTube video, and said “the more outrageous the zoom bombing, the more attention it received.”
“Brian did not mean to hurt those kids and is sorry if he did,” Kelly said, adding that Adams “immediately accepted responsibility.”
“I don’t understand how locking him in prison for twelve months benefits anyone,” he added.
Meanwhile, the court determined Adams was driven by hatred when he threatened the fifth-grade class, according to prosecutors.
“This prosecution should make clear that perpetrators of hate crimes hiding behind computer screens, hacking into teleconferences and disrupting virtual meetings will be held accountable,” Clarke said in the release.
This story was originally published June 26, 2024 at 1:06 PM with the headline "Man threatened to hang 5th graders while crashing Zoom class, feds say. He gets prison."
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