Naval Academy dropout charged with posting threat that led to accidental shooting

A midshipman who dropped out of the U.S. Naval Academy in 2024 was charged last week with threatening a ‘mass execution’ of his former classmates on a social app. The threat caused a school-wide lockdown that nearly ended in tragedy when a responding police officer shot a current student during a chaotic scuffle.

Jackson Fleming, 23, of Chesterton, Indiana, was charged in federal court October 8 with one count of “interstate communications with a threat to injure” against the Annapolis, Maryland school, which he left midway through his junior year, according to local media coverage. Fleming posted on September 11 on the social app that he would be “carrying out the mass execution of my peers in a couple.”

Fleming entered the school with the class of 2025 and left as a junior, which the school calls a midshipman second class.

The federal charges against Fleming were first reported by the Baltimore Banner and Annapolis Capital Gazette. Task & Purpose reviewed the two-page indictment against Fleming on a database of federal court documents.

School officials confirmed in the days after the lockdown that the threat had included a plan to dress as a police officer.

Though Fleming was in Indiana when he alledgedly posted the threat last month, his location and identity were not clear to school leaders, who ordered a lockdown across campus.

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The lockdown, in turn, led to chaotic scene in which a police officer shot a student in self defense after the two mistook each other as an active threat. The nearly tragic mishap occured after the midshipman — following lockdown procedure — barricaded himself in his dorm room inside the school’s Bancroft Hall, the massive dorm in which all 4,400 of the school’s students live for all four years at the school.

As police began to sweep through Bancroft’s hallways shouting instructions, the detail in Fleming’s alleged threat to dress like a police officer was on the mind of at least one student. As the police neared the student’s room, he attacked the pair, swinging his school-issued parade rifle, a non-functioning but authentic and heavy M-14.

When the student struck one officer in the head with the rifle, the second officer shot the student in the shoulder, according to a Navy release. The midshipman was treated at a local hospital and released the next day. The police officer suffered minor injuries.