NATCHEZ, Miss. (KTVE/KARD) — On January 10, 2024, U.S. Attorney Brandon B. Brown announced that 33-year-old Kenneth Allen Moody was sentenced to serve 18 months in federal prison for telling police officers that he planned to commit a mass shooting at Natchez High School in Natchez, Mississippi.

A federal grand jury returned an indictment on August 24, 2022, charging Moody with one count of interstate communication of a threat as the result of a threatening phone call he made in July 2022 to the Vidalia Police Department. In the phone call, Moody, who was living in Vidalia, La. at the time of the incident, stated that he wanted to turn himself in because of what he was going to do.

When asked what he was planning, Moody told the VPD dispatcher that he was going to possibly perform a mass shooting at the Natchez High School in Mississippi. Moody told the dispatcher that he had been planning the shooting for months and had loaded automatic weapons. According to reports, Vidalia Police were able to locate the cellular device he had used to make the call to them and traced it to a device in Hot Springs, Ark. with subscriber information belonging to Moody.

At the time of the call, Moody was living in the Vidalia area. He admitted to making the call to VPD with the intent to make a threat or with the knowledge that the communication would be viewed as a threat.