YouTuber, snowboarder will miss Olympic training for prison over plane crash stunt
Trevor Jacob is a former Olympian with his sights set on the 2026 Winter Games in Italy, but his intentional crash of a plane in a YouTube stunt is hindering his plans.
A former Olympic snowboarder who intentionally crashed a small airplane in an advertising deal aimed at YouTube views is to spend six months in prison under a sentence imposed Monday by a Los Angeles federal judge who agreed his history of illegally boarding freight trains had been overstated.
In a statement released through his lawyer, Trevor Daniel Jacob, 30, said he’s “excited to continue my positive growth as a person through my six month term in prison.” He said his prosecution “was a massive learning experience” and said he’s grateful U.S. District Judge John F. Walter “considered many different aspects of my unique situation.”
“I believe he made the right decision in imposing this punishment,” Jacob said.
Here’s his full statement:
Jacob’s sentencing memorandum says he was living alone in a Lompoc City Airport hangar and “in a lonely place” when he piloted his Taylorcraft BL-65 east across California on Nov. 24 2021, intentionally crashing it in the Los Padres National Forest near Santa Maria instead of reaching his purported destination of Mammoth Lakes.
Just before the crash, Jacob parachuted from the plane in a stunt he filmed and later posted on his YouTube channel in a video titled “I Crashed My Airplane.” The video promoted a wallet as part of an advertising deal between Jacob and the company behind the wallet.
“Using the video camera mounted on the selfies stick and the video cameras mounted on the airplane, defendant was able to record the airplane as it crashed into a dry brush area within Los Padres National Forest,” according to Jacob’s plea agreement. “After parachuting to the ground, defendant hiked to the location of the wreck and recovered the data containing the video recording of defendant’s flight and the crash of the airplane.”
Jacob then lied to National Transportation Safety Board investigators about recovering the wreckage, which he also secretly destroyed, and falsely told them he didn’t know where the plane had crashed. In fact, he had reached the wreckage via helicopter and used a pick-up truck to take it back to the Lompoc airport, where Jacob cut it up and disposed of it in trash receptacle “and elsewhere,” according to the plea agreement.
“Jacob lied to federal investigators when he submitted an aircraft accident incident report that falsely indicated that the aircraft experienced a full loss of power approximately 35 minutes after takeoff,” according to a press release Monday from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. “Jacob also lied to [a Federal Aviation Administration] aviation safety inspector when he said the airplane’s engine had quit and, because he could not identify any safe landing options, he had parachuted out of the plan.”
Prosecutors announced in May 2023 that Jacob was going to plead guilty to destruction and concealment of a tangible object with intent to obstruct federal investigation, which is a felony. The 18-page plea deal says the crime was part of “a scheme to gain notoriety and to make money.”
“Defendant intended to make money by promoting the wallet in the video that would depict, among other things, defendant parachuting from the airplane, and the airplane descending and crashing,” according to the plea deal, filed May 10.
Jacob’s lawyer Keri Curtis Axel asked Walter to impose probation and community service, saying Jacob has already learned from the debacle and is sufficiently punished by not being able to train for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy or set foot in Canada again.
“These consequences are punishments that have real bite for him. He is deeply emotional about the fact that he will be banned from Canada,” according to the 17-page defense memo, which described Jacob as “an intrepid sportsman” and “all around extreme sports champion.”
Several of Jacobs’ friends and family members wrote support letters for him, including his mother and father, his dentist, television producer Mark Burnett, the father of two of Jacob’s friends and the former chairman of MGM Worldwide Television Group; as well as Jacob’s friend and fellow professional snowboarder Hagen Kearney, a two-time Olympian.
Kearney and Jacob met when they were nine-years-old, and Kearney said Jacob “has always been someone that I have looked up to as an athlete, competitor, and for his overall character.” He asked Judge Walter “from the bottom of my heart to be as lenient as the law permits you to be” as Jacob continues to pursue his Olympic dreams.
“This upcoming winter season is extremely pivotal in the qualification process for the Olympics. I speak for a large part of the snowboard community, as well as myself, that we would love more than anything to see Trevor return to the Olympics to represent our country,” Kearney wrote.
Burnett, who created Survivor, The Apprentice, The Voice and Shark Tank, said he’s known Jacob for 15 years and knows “there is absolutely no excuse for Trevor’s actions and as someone who has become a father figure to Trevor, the seriousness of these charges has weighed heavily on my heart.” He said he knows Jacob “has realized the error of his ways and hopes to proudly represent the USA again at the next Winter Olympics.”
“As the former Chairman of MGM and producer of multiple television shows and films, I have worked with people from all walks of life and one of the main predictors of success was how individuals treated others around them,” Burnett said. “People who can lift and encourage the success of others typically go much further than those who hold their successes to themselves. Trevor is a person who champions those around him, and I personally believe there are so many who have yet to benefit from Trevor’s uplifting nature.”
To be clear, Burnett is the man responsible for putting Donald Trump on The Apprentice.
Jacob’s mother, Lynn Jacob, said since he was two years old, “Trevor has always been very rambunctious and full of energy.”
“He was diagnosed with ADHD when he was 8-9 years old. Trevor has always loved to be the center of attention and loves all the feedback that he gets. He has never fit the mold of the perfect child and has thought of consequences after his sometimes questionable actions,” she wrote, adding that her son “does not have a mean bone in his body.”
Axel’s memo said Jacob “is a selfless person” to his peers.
“As his support letters illustrate, what has shocked, confused and disappointed his family and peers the most is that his actions do not align with his character,” Axle wrote. “His selflessness does not extend only to those close to him. Instead, when an opportunity arises to be of service, he takes it. As detailed in his support letters, Trevor has helped complete strangers in extreme danger. But these random acts of kindness and service are not because he is simply an ‘adrenaline junkie.’ As Joshua Swindell puts it, ‘I think his real purpose in life is service to others.’”
Judge Walter showed some leniency by imposing only half the sentence that Assistant U.S. Attorneys Dominique Caamano and Dennis Mitchell recommended, but the sentence still ensures Jacob won’t be snowboarding for much of this winter: He’s to surrender to federal custody by noon on Jan. 29 to begin his six-month sentence.
“He’ll essentially be incarcerated for most of the winter season,” Axel, a partner with Waymaker LLP in Los Angeles, told Legal Affairs and Trials in a phone interview.
But, Axel said, “Trevor has a very positive mindset, and while he really wanted probation, he's already wrapped his mind around this, and he appreciates the time the court took to look at his individualized situation.”
Prosecutors wanted Jacob to relinquish his pilot’s license, but Axel said Judge Walter agreed the issue should be decide by the Federal Aviation Administration. The prosecution’s memo said the need to send a message to others through a prison sentence “is very significant in this case.”
Jacob “most likely committed this offense to generate social media and news coverage for himself and to obtain financial gain,” prosecutors wrote. “Nevertheless, this type of ‘daredevil’ conduct cannot be tolerated.”
Axel said Judge Walter made clear Jacob’s crime was serious and merited imprisonment, but he agreed there were reasons to support a lesser sentence than the one year that prosecutors recommended. Walter also agreed with Axel and prosecutors that the U.S. Probation Office overstated Jacob’s criminal history by considering two criminal convictions that stemmed from the same train-hopping incident in 2017 involving a Union Pacific train he rode from Goleta, California, north of his hometown of Santa Barbara, to Nevada County, near Lake Tahoe.
Axel said Jacob was “erroneously charged in two different counties,” for misdemeanor trespassing on railroad property, but he represented himself in both cases and pleaded guilty without challenging the duel charges.
She included with her memo meta data from a video of his train hopping that Jacob had posted to YouTube, as well as screenshots from the video in which “a Southern California beach is clearly present in the picture.”
Axel said Nevada County prosecutors may have thought they had jurisdiction because Jacob had a prior train trespass case when “as a teen, he had a jumped over a train with a skateboard.” Axel said Jacob deleted his train hopping videos from YouTube as part of a condition of his plea in Nevada County but still had them on a hard drive. One month after Jacob pleaded guilty, Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office charged him for the same train-hopping incident, and he ended up pleading guilty there, too, while representing himself.
“This should have been one misdemeanor offense instead of two offenses, as Trevor was simply erroneously charged in Nevada County for conduct that happened in Santa Barbara County,” Axel wrote.
Prosecutors agreed, as did Judge Walter, which kept Jacob in the first criminal history category under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, instead of the second. That put him in a range of 12 months to 18 months in prison instead of 15 months to 21 months, and judge Walter applied a downward departure from the guidelines range to get Jacob to six months. Walter also ordered Jacob to serve two years on probation after he leaves prison.
Jacob competed in the 2014 Winter Olympics, and he was among the youngest athletes to qualify for the U.S. Open when he was 13, competing in the half-pipe before changing to snowboard cross in his late teens. He’s also won mountain biking competitions, according to Axel’s memo, and he’s “a pilot, skydiver, motocross athlete, skateboarder, and has studied and teaches mountain biking, Jiujitsu and karate.”
“All of these sports are daring, and provide a personal rush and sense of unique achievement, but they can be lonely endeavors as well, where the voice in your head is the only thing that keeps you going,” according to the memo, which says Jacob earned his achievements “through athleticism, persistence, discipline, and with a high tolerance for risk and physical pain.”
Axel said the same qualities “that have brought Trevor success and fame in these extreme sports led him to a series of bad choices that culminated in the offense to which he has plead guilty.”
“In a lonely place, Trevor carefully planned a new stunt that he regrets. Worse yet, he covered it up and then lied about it to investigators. As the sentencing letters reflect, he sincerely and honestly regrets this conduct, and has given heartful apologies to everyone in his life who has been adversely affected by his crime, and will do so to the Court as well,” according to the defense memo.
Court documents:
Nov. 13 defense sentencing memorandum
Nov. 13: prosecutors’ sentencing memorandum
Nov. 20: addendum to prosecutors’ memo
Dec. 4: judgment and commitment
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