Kayla-Simone McKelvey will serve 90 days in jail, five years of probation and 100 hours of community service for her role in a racially charged hoax threat issued to Kean University students.
McKelvey, who is black and the former president of the New Jersey college’s Pan-African Student Union, used a fake Twitter account to send a message threatening to kill a group of black students at an on-campus rally in November.
The Twitter account, @Keanuagainstblk, claimed that the anonymous user would “kill all male and female black students” at Kean and issued a bomb threat against the school. The account was quickly suspended from Twitter, but not before causing an uproar on social media.
Supporters of #BlackLivesMatter across the country called on the university to take action to protect protesting students, and demanded that Kean President Dawood Farahi resign. They tried to use the threat to demonstrate that Farahi had not done enough to diffuse racial tension on campus.
The university’s campus law enforcement took swift action, but quickly discovered that the threat was a hoax. McKelvey was charged with “third degree creating a public alarm.” McKelvey was convicted and received the maximum sentence possible after turning down a plea agreement. In addition to the jail time and community service, she will undergo treatment for anger management. She will also have to pay $82,000 in restitution for the university for resources it wasted in investigating, neutralizing and providing security against her threat.
McKelvey told the court she was sorry she issued the threat, and that she still believes her actions helped expose racism on campus. Her judge, obviously, did not agree with that her intent was as altruistic.
But if McKelvey’s excuse sounds a bit strange, she’s not alone, even at Kean, in thinking that her clearly illegal actions “helped” fellow social justice warriors to bring Kean’s “systemic racism” to light. Some Kean students said that the threat’s author didn’t matter that the threat was still evidence of strong racial bias on campus.
According to Campus Reform, which covered the incident when it happened, one student leader even told a gathered group of concerned students that “it does not matter that it was a black person who did this. It was all in the context of racism.”
