HAZEL PARK (WWJ) - A junior high school teacher in Hazel Park who admitted to leaving behind a threatening note to get a day off at school is getting more time off than he bargained for after a judge sentenced him to 14 days in prison.
In addition to two weeks behind bars, Paul T. Jacobs, 40, of Livonia, was also sentenced to two years of probation on Tuesday, three months after he was arrested in connection to a bomb threat at Hazel Park Junior High School.
In the Thursday, Feb. 2 incident, Hazel Park Police Chief Brian Buchholz said multiple officers responded to the school after students had already gone home when a staff member found a threatening letter on the hallway floor and contacted authorities.
The note said the school would be blown up the next day, the chief added.
A full scale search from multiple police agencies failed to turn up anything, but police were able to trace the letter back to Jacobs, who claimed to have found it in a stack of homework papers that students had turned in.
But surveillance video from Jacobs' classroom shows a puzzling and suspicious series of events prior to the note being discovered.
According to Buchholz, the footage shows Jacobs placing the note on a desk near the doorway in his classroom. The chief suspects Jacobs did this so that "students coming in or going out would see it."
At one point in the video, Buchholz said a girl saw the note and read it, but she set it back on the desk, where it fell facedown on the hallway floor outside the classroom.
Jacobs then went into the hallway.
"He looks around then manipulates the note with his foot and flips it over so the writing can be seen," Buchholz said. Not long after students were let out for the day, the note was discovered by another staff member and reported.
He later confessed to the crime and admitted to police that he wanted to have the following day, a Friday, off from work.
"He didn't have a reason for not reporting the note," Buchholz said. "He made the admission that he displayed the note so a student would find it, report it, and he would have that Friday off of school."
According to police, Jacobs had only been teaching at the school for two years when the incident occurred.
