Computer use leads to new trouble for New Kent man who threatened school violence as a youth

Thomas M. Garner

As a 14-year-old eighth grader at New Kent Middle School, Thomas Moody Garner ran afoul of the law via computer. In April 2007, just a few days after the massacre at Virginia Tech, he sent a message to another student threatening violence at NKMS that would exceed the tragedy at Tech.

In juvenile court, he pleaded no contest to one count of making a terrorist threat by electronic means and spent the next four years in and out of juvenile custody before being released on April 11, 2011. Supervision by the juvenile justice system ended shortly afterward on April 24, a day after he became an adult. On that date, he was handed a 12-month jail sentence, all suspended for five years, by circuit court Judge Thomas B. Hoover and ordered by the judge to refrain from using computers, electronic devices, and social media for illegal purposes or to harass others.

Three days later, New Kent sheriff’s deputies arrested Garner for probation violation. Several days earlier while using a computer, he had begun harassing a woman who turned out to be a cousin of sheriff’s detective Joey McLaughlin.

Garner returned to court that July where Hoover blasted the defendant for setting “the record for the quickest probation violation in my 30 years.” The judge revoked six months of the suspended sentence from April. Garner’s attorney, meanwhile, told the court the latest incident had taught his client a lesson.

That lesson appears to have worn thin. Garner, now 21 and still residing in New Kent, faces a new set of charges, seven in all, involving alleged contact with a 14-year-old girl. McLaughlin said authorities arrested Garner on March 3 at the suspect’s home in the 8000 block of New Kent Highway where he was taken into custody without incident.

The suspect, according to McLaughlin, is charged with one felony count each of soliciting a child using an electronic device, taking indecent liberties with a minor, harassment by computer, and distributing obscene material via an electronic device. He is also charged with two counts of misdemeanor preparing an obscene photo and one count of misdemeanor contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

The offenses allegedly occurred earlier this year, McLaughlin said. No physical contact took place, the detective said, but the alleged victim received pornographic images and texts, allegedly sent by the suspect.

Garner, meanwhile, was being held without bond. He was due to appear in county juvenile court today (March 11).