A federal judge in Texas sentenced Christopher Charles Perez to 15 months in prison for posting on Facebook that he had paid someone to spread COVID-19 in a San Antonio H-E-B supermarket, as part of a hoax in the jittery early days of the pandemic.
"My homeboys cousin has covid19 and has licked everything for past 2 days cause we paid him too," Perez wrote on April, 5, 2020, according to court documents. "Big difference is we told him not to be these [expletive] idiots who record and post online ... YOU'VE BEEN WARNED." That post stayed up only 16 minutes, but someone took a screenshot and sent it to a law enforcement network called the Southwest Texas Fusion Center. Perez then posted a link to a news article about a supermarket forced to close due to an infected employee. "Lol, I did try to warn y'all," his post said. "Nogalitos location next."
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"Perez's actions were knowingly designed to spread fear and panic and today's sentencing illustrates the seriousness of this crime," FBI special agent Christopher Combs said in a statement. U.S. Attorney Ashely Hoff added that "trying to scare people with the threat of spreading dangerous diseases is no joking matter." Villarreal argued in a court motion in June that Perez "either meant it purely as a joke or, at worst, intended that people take the pandemic more seriously."
"I'm sure the judge was intending to send a message to people who would be involved in like hoaxes, which is important," Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School lecturer and former federal judge, told the Times. "The question is whether he needed to impose a sentence of this length to send that message." She said before federal sentencing guidelines were introduced in 1987, crimes like Perez's would likely have earned probation.
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