Texas man gets 15 months in prison for online COVID-19 hoax

On April 5, 2020, Christopher Charles Perez posted a message on Facebook about an H-E-B grocery store in San Antonio, federal prosecutors said.

“My homeboys cousin has covid19 and has licked everything for past two days cause we paid him too,” Perez wrote. “YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.”

The claim was not true and the post came down after 16 minutes, according to court documents.

But someone anonymously submitted a screenshot of the post to the Southwest Texas Fusion Center, a group of law enforcement agencies that investigates possible criminal and terrorist activity. When the FBI confronted Perez, he said he had been trying to scare people from going to public places “to stop them from spreading the virus,” according to a federal affidavit.

In June, Perez, 40, of San Antonio was found guilty of disseminating false information and hoaxes related to biological weapons. Monday, a federal judge sentenced him to 15 months in federal prison.

In a statement, federal prosecutors said that Perez had been trying to frighten people with threats of “spreading dangerous diseases.” His arrest in April 2020 came early in the pandemic when there was still uncertainty over how the coronavirus spread and as many people were wiping down their groceries and emptying stores of disinfectant.

“Perez’s actions were knowingly designed to spread fear and panic,” Christopher Combs, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Antonio field office, said in the statement. The sentence, he said, “illustrates the seriousness of this crime.”

Perez’s lawyer, Alfredo R. Villarreal, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Wednesday, Villarreal filed a notice with the court saying that he would be appealing Perez’s conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

The sentence fell at the lower end of federal sentencing guidelines that recommended a sentence of 15 to 21 months based on the offense and Perez’s criminal history, according to a federal court official. The official declined to detail Perez’s criminal record.

Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge in Boston, said that since federal sentencing guidelines went into effect in 1987, judges have sentenced defendants to prison time on charges that once led to probation.

“I’m sure the judge was intending to send a message to people who would be involved in like hoaxes, which is important,” said Gertner, now a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “The question is whether he needed to impose a sentence of this length to send that message.”