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Former Northeastern University Employee Sentenced to Prison for Bomb Hoax

Former Northeastern University Employee Sentenced to Prison for Bomb Hoax

“Bomb hoaxes are not a harmless act, they inflict fear, divert resources and put both first responders and the public at real risk as they race to the scene”

We’ve been following this story since 2022. The prison sentence is only a year but still sends a message.

The Associated Press reports:

Bomb hoax sends former Northeastern University employee to prison for a year

A former Northeastern University employee who lied to the FBI about a package blowing up in his arms at the Boston campus has been sentenced to just over a year in prison for the hoax.

Jason Duhaime, 47, from San Antonio, Texas, was convicted on the federal charges in June of intentionally conveying false and misleading information related to an explosive device and two counts of making materially false statements to a federal law enforcement agent. He was sentenced Monday.

“Bomb hoaxes are not a harmless act, they inflict fear, divert resources and put both first responders and the public at real risk as they race to the scene,” United States Attorney Joshua Levy said in a statement. “One phone call may land you in jail.”

Duhaime worked as the university’s new technology manager and director of the Immersive Media Lab. In September 2022, he called the university police to say he’d collected several packages from a mail area, including two Pelican hard plastic cases, and that when he opened one of the cases, it exploded and sharp objects flew out and injured his arms.

Duhaime’s 911 call sparked a major response from law enforcement, who evacuated the area and called in the bomb squad.

He showed police a letter he told them he’d found inside the case, which claimed the lab was trying to get people to live inside a virtual reality world and was secretly working with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the U.S. government.

“In the case you got today we could have planted explosives but not this time!!!” the note read, court documents show. “Take notice!!! You have 2 months to take operations down or else!!!!!”

But Duhaime’s story quickly unraveled, according to the FBI. They didn’t find anything in the cases and noted the letter appeared to be in pristine condition. The FBI said Duhaime had superficial injuries to his arms, but no damage to his shirt sleeves. And when agents searched Duhaime’s computer, they found a copy of the letter in a backup folder that he’d written a few hours before calling 911.

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Comments

Report #470 at fakehatecrimes.org .
There have been 38 since.
What progress America is making towards racial and social harmony.

    Milhouse in reply to henrybowman. | January 16, 2025 at 7:52 am

    This wasn’t a fake hate crime. The supposed bombers were not supposedly motivated by hatred for any category of people, but by a paranoid conspiracy theory about Zuckerberg and the government.

    Unless someone is one of those nut cases who think every attack on a person who happens to be Jewish is motivated by antisemitism, and therefore that a fake attack against a Jew is a fake antisemitic incident. (You know, the ones who denounce every attack on George Soros as “antisemitic”.)

      henrybowman in reply to Milhouse. | January 16, 2025 at 7:19 pm

      That’s an interesting question — whose motives define a fake hate crime? The motives of the person who really committed it, or the motives of the imaginary people who were claimed to have committed it… whose motives are therefore also imaginary?

      The motive of the actual criminal in this case was to have VR research disbanded in his university’s lab. Was hate at the root of this? Was the director of VR research a black or a Jew? Deponent sayeth not.

      If his motive had been to have the DEI department disbanded, would that have been adjudged a hate crime? I suspect my guess would be confirmed.

      Hate crimes are whatever the left wants to claim they are. So if our side takes a turn now and then, I’m not going to get all bent about it.

He claimed a bomb was set off in his arms injuring them but the shirt he had on was fine? This guy was hired as the Tech Mgr?

    henrybowman in reply to diver64. | January 16, 2025 at 7:21 pm

    The phony terrorists were emphasizing the dangers of virtual reality by peppering him with virtual shrapnel.

The best thing to come out of this is students at Northwestern will no longer be taught by an imbecile. The technology manager and director of the Immersive Media Lab left a copy of the letter on his pc hard drive? Seriously?

I’m actually rather surprised. Usually they get a slap on the wrist.
What is our democracy coming to when people actually get punished for crimes?