A Kentucky man has been sentenced to prison for threatening students in Louisiana, federal authorities said.
A Kentucky man will serve prison time after federal prosecutors said he committed a hate crime when he crashed a Louisiana school’s online classroom nearly four years ago and threatened to hang fifth-graders.
In October 2020, Brian Adams first joined the Laureate Academy Charter School class hosted on Zoom under a name that the teacher, who is Black, believed “sounded phonetically like a racist nickname,” court documents say .
The teacher ended the class when she noticed Adams, who was there without permission, and sent a new Zoom link so her students could rejoin the class, court documents show.
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That’s when Adams joined the class under a different name and spoke out, making racist comments toward the students, who were mostly black, and the teacher, court documents show.
He repeatedly threatened to hang the class “from a tree,” prosecutors said.
The threats caused the students to cry and put their hands over their ears, The Lexington-Herald Leader previously reported. Nearly two years later, in 2022, he was charged with sending threatening communications.
Now, Adams, 24, of Paintsville, has been sentenced to a year and a 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, at 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” who were participating.
He said this was “a very popular trend among 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.
After the class, Adams posted a recording of himself crashing the class on YouTube in a video titled “Zoom Busted,” prosecutors said.
According to court documents, in November 2021, the FBI executed a federal search warrant at Adam’s home in Paintsville, about a 120-mile drive southeast of Lexington.
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, saying “the more outrageous the Zoom bombing, the more attention it received.”
“Brian did not intend to hurt those children and he is sorry if he did,” Kelly said, adding that Adams “immediately accepted responsibility.”
“I don’t understand how anyone benefits from putting him in jail for 12 months,” he added.
Meanwhile, the court ruled that Adams was motivated by hatred when he threatened the fifth-grade class, prosecutors said.
“This prosecution should make it clear that hate crime perpetrators who hide behind computer screens, hack teleconferences and disrupt virtual meetings will be held accountable,” Clarke said in the press release.
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Julia Marnin is a McClatchy National Real-Time reporter covering the Southeast and Northeast while living in New York. She is an alumna of The College of New Jersey and joined McClatchy in 2021. She previously wrote for Newsweek, Modern Luxury, Gannett and more.
