Former St. Thomas student Ray Ghansham Persaud pleaded guilty to phoning a hoax bomb threat against St. Thomas’ St. Paul campus on Sept. 17, 2019, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced Tuesday.

Persaud’s guilty plea, entered Thursday, and court documents indicated that on three separate occasions, Persaud called the university and “falsely stated that there was a bomb on the St. Paul campus,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s statement.

“The three bomb threats caused substantial disruption to the University, including the evacuation of campus buildings and a child care center, re-routing of traffic on nearby streets, and a full response by the University’s Public Safety personnel,” the statement said.

According to Persaud’s plea, he admitted he was unprepared for class and did not do his homework on the dates that he called in the bomb threats: April 17, Aug. 20 and Sept. 17, 2019.

During the April bomb threat, Persaud called the campus switchboard twice: first at 9:37 a.m., when he claimed to have placed a bomb on campus, and again at 10:10 a.m., when he named McNeely Hall as the bomb location. The university closed its St. Paul campus for the day about two hours after the first call was made.

Four months later, in August 2019, Persaud called the university claiming to have placed a bomb in the John Roach Center. Normal operations continued on campus, and classes in JRC were relocated for the rest of that day.

In September 2019, Persaud called the Public Safety switchboard at 7:45 a.m., where it received several calls in a row, with different information in each call. The Facilities Design Center, John Roach Center, Anderson Student Center and O’Shaughnessy Science Center were all evacuated, but campus operations resumed at 1:30 p.m.

A week after the third threat, Persaud was arrested and charged with “using an instrumentality of interstate commerce to make a threat to kill, injure or intimidate any individual, and to damage or destroy any building, by means of fire and explosive.”

Persaud pleaded guilty to count three of the indictment, which charged him with the September bomb threat. The U.S. Attorney’s office will ask the court to dismiss the April and August charges, the statement said. The maximum sentence for the remaining charge is 10 years imprisonment and/or a $250,000 fine. In court documents, prosecutors said they “will not seek a sentence longer than 18 months.”

Justin Amaker can be reached at justin.amaker@stthomas.edu.
Joey Swanson can be reached at swan5350@stthomas.edu.