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The Indiana Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s decision Wednesday, ruling that a private Snapchat message that included “dark humor” about a preschool shooting was insufficient to convict the sender of felony intimidation.
Judges Robert Altice, Rudolph Pyle and Mary DeBoer determined that the state’s case against Zachary Lester did not provide clear evidence that Lester communicated a message in a way that indicated an intent to reach a target, if indeed there was one.
Attorneys for Lester did not immediately respond to The Indiana Lawyer’s request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Indiana Attorney General’s office said it would review the ruling to determine whether it should be appealed.
According to court documents, in the early morning of Sep. 13, 2024, Lester sent a Snapchat direct message to a group chat of about 20 people with whom he had exchanged “dark humor.”
The message at the foundation of the case is what appeared to be a selfie of Lester from the chest up with a bathroom shower behind him. Across the image was a caption stating, “Now that I’ve showered and washed my sins away I can go and shoot up a preschool.”
Soon after, Snapchat flagged the message and notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which contacted local law enforcement in Montpelier, Indiana, where Lester lived.
There was no preschool in Montpelier. The nearest one was about four miles away in Wells County, on the campus of Southern Wells Community Schools. So, the decision was made to place Southern Wells on heightened security status, and extra officers were placed on the school’s campus to monitor visitors and keep a lookout for Lester.
Lester was later picked up by law enforcement in Hartford City, in Blackford County, where he was working, and in interviews that same day, Lester admitted to sending the message, but he said it was a joke.
Lester told the officers that “he and his group of friends on Snapchat make these dark humor jokes and they step it up levels to see who can make the more – in his words ‘messed up joke,'” according to court documents.
After a forensic search of his phone, which was admitted at trial later on, it was revealed that Lester had sent emails to the FBI on Sep. 13, apologizing for his message, saying, “I’m very sorry for what I said,” and, “It was not funny and not okay I truly am sorry I hope you see this thank you.”
A few days later, on Sep. 16, the state charged Lester with felony intimidation, alleging that he “communicate[d] a threat with the intent that another person be placed in fear that the threat to unlawfully injure another person will be carried out, and the threat was to commit a forcible felony.”
A bench trial was held in November 2024, in which the trial court found Lester guilty and sentenced him to 545 days at the Indiana Department of Correction.
Upon appeal, Lester argued that the state did not present sufficient evidence that he had an intent to cause fear in another person, and that the words he used did not contemplate a threat under Indiana’s intimidation statute.
“Even if the words are found to constitute a threat or a threat to commit a forcible felony, the evidence did not demonstrate that Lester communicated it in such a way to know or have reason to believe that his words would reach the ‘preschool,'” according to the appellant’s brief.
The state pushed back, arguing in its appellee brief that Lester intended to put his targets in fear for their safety and that he had good reason to know his threats could reach the victims, or the adults responsible for their care and protection, because he made the post online “in a public forum.”
The appeals court did not agree with the state’s conclusion, though, saying the post was not made in a public forum—rather, it was sent directly to a private group chat—and that there was no evidence presented to show that Lester “intended his communication to put his target in fear for his safety,” which is one of the two requirements the state supreme court has deemed necessary to be considered a “true threat.”
“While Lester’s Snapchat message was inappropriate and disturbing, we cannot say on the record before us that the State presented sufficient evidence to support a conviction for Level 6 felony intimidation,” Altice wrote in the opinion.
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