Teen Tied To School Gunman Sentenced

A tribal chairman's teenage son, once accused of conspiring with a 16-year-old friend who killed nine people on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, was sentenced behind closed doors Friday on a lesser charge of sending threatening messages.

The sentence for Louis Jourdain, 17, wasn't revealed, and his father, Floyd Jourdain Jr., said he would not disclose it.

"The judge's ruling will reflect what I've said all along ... my son is a good kid," the elder Jourdain said.

Attorneys left the court without commenting.

Louis Jourdain pleaded guilty last fall to making threatening interstate communications, a crime that can carry up to five years in prison. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop a conspiracy to commit murder charge.

The March 21 shootings started at the home of Jeff Weise's grandfather, where Weise killed the older man and his companion. Weise then carried out the worst U.S. school shooting since Columbine, killing five students, a teacher and a security guard at Red Lake High School before killing himself.

Floyd Jourdain has said his son had distanced himself from Weise and the two weren't even on speaking terms at the time of the shooting.

Authorities examined about 400 pages of text messages from the younger Jourdain, and said some of them may have been seen as threatening or inappropriate, his father has said. He has said his son admitted to "wrongheaded and inappropriate use of the Internet, but he does not accept responsibility for the 10 lives lost at Red Lake on March 21 because he is not responsible."

A court docket released in November, some of it blacked out, said the younger Jourdain used a computer to conduct interstate communications that "could be taken by an objective observer as threatening" sometime between Jan. 1, 2003, and March 2005.

Jourdain was charged as a juvenile, and the sentencing hearing was closed despite efforts by shooting victims and the media to make it public. Prosecutors told family members of victims that they couldn't talk about the sentence because of a gag order, the families said.

A law firm representing several of the families issued a statement saying it was asking too much of those families to "blindly accept the outcome of a prosecution which was conducted entirely in secret."

Some of those at the courthouse Friday directed their frustration at Floyd Jourdain.

"I don't understand why he can't come and tell us," said LeeAnn Thunder, whose son Steven Cobenais was shot in the face in Weise's attack. "I mean, it was closed upstairs, but he's walking out right now, so why can't he tell us?"

"If this kid could have talked to somebody, maybe people would still be alive," she said.

Steven, a sophomore, was already in Minneapolis for a medical appointment to be fitted for a prosthetic eye.

The 16-year-old said he held Louis Jourdain partly responsible for the shootings and hoped he would go to prison "because of what he did to us kids and all of our friends."