Oklahoma City Man Sentenced to 42 Months for Falsely Reporting an Imminent Mass Shooting

OKLAHOMA CITY – DAVID AARON JACOBS, 43, of Oklahoma City, has been sentenced to 42 months in prison for intentionally conveying false and misleading information by making a hoax threat of a mass shooting announced U.S. Attorney Timothy J. Downing.

A superseding criminal information was filed in January 2020 against Jacobs that charged him with a single count of making a hoax threat on March 30, 2017.  According to the information, Jacobs emailed the El Reno Police Department and a local news station stating:  "[t]wo boys that [the defendant] know[s] are planning to do something awful.  They have been meeting at the house of a Palestinian man name[d] [Individual 1] who lives in Oklahoma city and [Individual 1] has given them guns and helped them to plan to shoot people at the big academic testing event at Redlands Community College tomorrow afternoon."

At the time he made the hoax threat, Jacobs was on federal supervised release after serving the term of imprisonment for his previous federal convictions for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.  Based on his new crime, Jacobs’s term of supervised release was revoked on August 17, 2017, and he was sentenced to an additional term of 36 months’ imprisonment. 

This afternoon, Senior U.S. District Judge David L. Russell sentenced Jacobs to serve 42 months in prison, to run partially concurrent with 18 months of his revocation.  Judge Russell also ordered Jacobs to pay $22,996.39 in restitution to law enforcement for the costs of responding to the hoax and imposed three years of supervised release upon his release from prison.

This case is the result of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation—Oklahoma City Field Office’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, with assistance from the El Reno Police Department and the U.S. Marshals Service.   Assistant U.S. Attorneys Matt Dillon and Mark Stoneman prosecuted the case.

Reference is made to court filings for further information.  To download a photo of U.S. Attorney Downing, click here.