A 32-year-old Web designer pleaded guilty Wednesday to making a hoax threat of bloodshed at San Diego State University in April, a day after a student's deadly shooting spree left 33 people dead at Virginia Tech.
Cristobal Fernando Gonzalez faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on a single federal count of making a threatening communication via the Internet when he is sentenced in September.
According to court documents, Gonzalez told FBI investigators he wrote a hoax message claiming that 50 SDSU students would be killed and then posted it anonymously to his own Web page. He then alerted a local television station in an attempt to generate publicity for the site.
FBI investigators traced Gonzalez via his post to a Web design company in Bonita, an unincorporated community sandwiched between San Diego and the U.S.-Mexico border.
San Diego State was the site of the 1996 fatal shootings by Frederick Martin Davidson, a 36-year-old graduate engineering student who was defending his thesis before a faculty committee when he pulled out a handgun and killed three professors.