Trevor Jacob, a 29 year old American YouTuber is facing up to 20 years in prison for trying to boost his number of subscribers.
In principle, this is a piece of information that could be described as grotesque and almost makes you smile. " Almost ", the nuance is important. Told by Abené Clayton, an American journalist for the Guardian, the story is that of the American YouTuber Trevor Jacob. Snowboarder selected for the Sochi Olympics and followed by an already large community, he specialized in "shock" videos showing himself in perilous situations and inviting his followers to tremble at the slightest of his exploits. But to attract more and more people on his channel, the young man would have gone too far.
On November 24, 2021, he decided to take off a small Taylorcraft BL-65 from 1940 in order to " spread the ashes of his friend Johnny Strange " around Mammoth Mountain. Trevor Jacob had previously equipped it with multiple cameras at all key locations. He had also taken care to put on a parachute, to equip himself with another camera and a selfie pole. After a smooth take-off and about 35 minutes of flight, he simply jumped out of his plane and started filming his fall, obviously taking care to also capture the irretrievable descent of the plane to the ground... until the crash. According to the police, as soon as he touched down, Trevor Jacob went to the crash site to retrieve the recordings.
On December 23, 2021, he published a video simply called " I crashed my airplane " in which he explains that the plane had begun to " lose power " due to an " engine failure ". He reported the crash of his plane only two days after the accident, informing the National Transportation Safety Board, but specifying that he did not know the exact location of the wreckage. Problem is that on December 10, 2021, Trevor Jacob and a friend went to the crash site to recover the remains of the plane and store them in a hangar before destroying them little by little. Facts that he finally admitted to the investigators much later.
Investigators who have gradually put the puzzle together. Trevor Jacob saw his pilot's license revoked by the Federal Aviation Administration in April 2022 and if the video was indeed a huge success (more than 3 million views), there is now talk of a prison sentence of up to 20 years for the unconscious.
