Monday, November 8, 2010

Dad phones in bomb threat to evade child support hearing; gets 3 years in prison (Calhoun County, Texas)

Great story from the Houston Press Blog. Well, at least the mother doesn't have to deal with child visitation with this idiot for a while. At least we hope not.

http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2010/11/aaron_c_robinson_bomb_threat.php

Aaron C. Robinson: Bomb Threat To Evade Child-Support Hearing Gets Three Years In Prison
By Richard Connelly, Mon., Nov. 8 2010 @ 3:01PM

​Even second-graders have learned that, in a post-9/11 world, the ol' "bomb threat to get out of a test" doesn't work. Well, it works, in that school officials will indeed close school, but chances are pretty good you're going to be tracked down by some very unhappy federal law-enforcement officials.

Aaron C. Robertson of Angleton has learned that basic lesson. Facing a child-support hearing that he desperately wanted to avoid (because he's such a great father already, we're guessing), Robertson did what appeared to him to be the sensible thing: He called in a bomb threat to the courthouse.

He called one in to the actual Calhoun County courthouse and then, "would be taken more seriously if it were made to a 911 call center," he called HPD.

Robertson said in each call a bomb was scheduled to go off between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. (It was only through an uncharacteristic stroke of genius that he didn't say the bomb was scheduled to go off "during the Aaron C. Robertson child-support hearing.")

FBI agents tracked the June 30, 2009 call to a cell phone that had been purchased at a Port Lavaca Walmart (it might be the Port Lavaca Walmart for all we know.) They soon had surveillance pictures of two juveniles buying the phone the night before the threat was made.

"Through interviews of the [no doubt scared shitless] juveniles, investigating agents learned Robinson had directed the juveniles to purchase the cellular telephone for him and Robinson was in possession of the Tracfone from which the bomb threats had been made," the FBI says, except for that part in brackets.

As it turns out, Robertson was by then in a Louisiana jail on charges having nothing to do with bomb threats. He confessed.

He was sentenced last week to 41 months in federal prison. And he has to pay back the $10,000 or so that Calhoun County spent responding to the threat, although we don't think the county should be holding its breath.