Federal officials charged a Chicago engineering student Monday with making the online threat that shut down the University of Chicago for a day, saying his threat to kill U. of C. students and staff was in response to the police shooting of Laquan McDonald.
Jabari R. Dean, 21, a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was charged with transmitting a threat in interstate commerce.
He appeared in federal court Monday afternoon wearing a red UIC hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and kept his arms at his sides as he quietly confirmed that he understood the proceedings. He will be held in jail until Tuesday, when he is expected to be released to the custody of his mother.
In an online post Saturday night, Dean allegedly threatened to shoot and kill 16 students or staff, and then the police, on the U. of C.’s Hyde Park campus at 10 a.m. Monday, and then kill himself. He cited as a motive the fatal shooting last year of 17-year-old McDonald by a Chicago police officer, which has sparked protests around the city.
The officer, who shot McDonald 16 times, was charged last week with first-degree murder.
In response to the threat, U. of C. President Robert Zimmer canceled all classes and other activities planned for Monday on campus.
Zimmer called Monday a “challenging day” but said classes and other operations will resume Tuesday.
The FBI does not consider Dean a threat, and he did not have the weapons to carry out the threat, federal prosecutors said in court. If convicted, he faces a maximum of five years in prison. Dean was a student at Chicago State University from 2013 until summer 2015 before transferring to UIC this fall to study electrical engineering, according to records from both schools.
In court documents, federal agents said the threat was spotted by a New York teenager who provided agents with a screenshot after they could not find it. The teen told the Tribune he saw it just after it was posted, and Dean told the FBI that he took it down almost immediately.
It was posted using the initials “JRD” and a Chicago Bulls logo.
After tracking down Dean through an Internet service provider, agents confronted him at the home in the Grand Crossing neighborhood that he lives in with his mother. Dean, according to court documents, acknowledged posting the threat from a cellphone. The threat was on the website www.worldstarhiphop.com, according to authorities.
“This is my only warning. At 10 a.m. on Monday mourning, I am going to the campus quad of the University of Chicago. I will be armed with an M-4 Carbine and 2 Desert Eagles all fully loaded. I will execute approximately 16 white male students and or staff, which is the same number of time McDonald was killed,” Dean wrote, according to court records. “I then will die killing any number of white policemen in the process. This is not a joke. I am to do my part to rid the world of the white devils. I expect you to do the same.”
An FBI agent contacted the U. of C. Police Department and, after daylong discussions, Zimmer alerted the campus community Sunday night that Monday classes and other activities would be canceled. Zimmer asked staff and faculty members who did not have emergency duties or patient care responsibilities to stay away from campus, and students who live on campus were asked “to remain indoors as much as possible.”
The caller to the FBI, who is not identified in the court records, said the comment was posted in response to a video clip from the 1995 movie “Panther.” The clip showed a group of African-Americans carrying weapons and “racist police officers” hitting them, according to the police report. The FBI agent in New York could not find the posting on the website “but found it credible enough” to alert the Chicago FBI office and university police, according to records.
“Based on the FBI’s assessment of this threat and recent tragic events at other campuses across the country, we have decided in consultation with federal and local law enforcement officials, to exercise caution by canceling all classes and activities on the Hyde Park campus through midnight on Monday,” Zimmer said in the email sent to the campus.
The teen from New York, a 16-year-old high school student, told the Tribune that he called the FBI after seeing the online threat about 11 p.m. Saturday night.
“I basically saw it and got scared for a minute and thought this is serious. I took screenshots of it,” he said.
He said he spoke to several FBI agents during the past few days as they attempted to locate the post. He provided the screenshot to the FBI and to the Tribune.
As Dean was being led out of a federal courtroom Monday by deputy U.S. marshals, his uncle, Phillip Rutherford, yelled out to him to “keep cool.” In the hallway outside the courtroom, Rutherford said Dean was a “just a stupid kid” who had too much time on his hands.
He later described Dean as a “nerd” who spends too much time online. He said agents asked Dean’s mother if he was upset by the McDonald shooting; Rutherford said Dean believed the shooting was unjustified but did not seem angry about it in any especially noticeable way.
“So if he expressed it online … he did it in a stupid way,” Rutherford said. “That’s what’s got him in trouble.”
Dean’s court-appointed lawyer, Damon Cheronis, said no weapons were found at Dean’s home and he is not a threat to anyone.
While law enforcement officials agreed Monday that Dean was not dangerous, his online threat upended life at U. of C. The quad, typically a hub of activity, was eerily quiet. University and Chicago police patrolled the campus, some in SWAT gear and others parked at the corners of major intersections. Zimmer visited students in their dorms to reinforce that they were safe, a university spokeswoman said.
The U. of C. threat came as colleges and universities have been on heightened alert after several campus shootings in recent years, including when a gunman at an Oregon community college killed nine people in October. Colleges in Maryland and Kentucky have shut down for days this fall in the face of threats, while Philadelphia colleges and universities recently decided to stay open after an unspecified threat.
“This fall, there has just been an inundation of these kinds of events and actual activity as well that have caused concern,” said William Taylor, a campus police chief in Texas and president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. “Most institutions are going to err on the side of caution. That is what the University of Chicago did.”
U. of C. English professor Julie Orlemanski said Monday that she understood the university’s decision to shut down for the day and was frustrated by the broader implications of the threat.
“It’s too bad that guns are so readily accessible that if somebody posts a threat, it seems very likely that he or she can be able to obtain a gun and follow through with it,” Orlemanski said. “We have to take it seriously. Whatever inconvenience results, it’s mitigated by everyone being taken care of. I hope my students aren’t freaked out. I just hope they are OK.”
The university will move beyond the incident, Orlemanski said as she read in a local coffee shop. But she worried about how it would proceed as a community.
“Our undergraduate students, a lot of them were just with their families and they come back to school to this. That can be a little emotionally hard for them,” she said. “I’m sure we will resume and classes will be made up and it will be fine.
Instead of going to class Monday, Kevin Zen said he was going to use the day to work more hours at his part-time job. The 20-year-old student from Albany, N.Y., said he wasn’t sure how serious the threat was, but he supported university officials’ caution.
“There is certainly an anxiety where you don’t know what’s going on and there has been a threat made and it stays in the back of your mind,” he said. “But I place trust in the university and the local police and the surrounding community. I’ll attend class tomorrow and so will most students.”
Chicago Tribune’s Tony Briscoe contributed.
