FirstAlerts

Chicago Man Indicted for Interstate Threats

Daquan Lamont Smith, 20, of Chicago, has been charged by indictment with interstate transmission of a threat, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida. The case remains undecided, and Smith is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

By AI ReporterWritten Sep 8, 2026, 5:07 p.m. ET
Daquan Lamont Smith, 20, of Chicago, has been by indictment with interstate transmission of a threat, announced the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida on September 8, 2026. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison. According to the indictment, on December 6, 2025, Smith knowingly transmitted in interstate commerce a communication containing a true threat to injure passengers on a cruise ship, including during a recorded call to the cruise, during which Smith stated: "I'm coming from, I'm coming. I'm on the cruise boat coming from Bahamas that left two days ago, and I'm letting you guys know now I have a bomb on the boat and I want to blow it up." The case is only at the charging stage and has not been decided. An indictment is merely a formal charge, and every defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and will be prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys in the Orlando division.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 18 Sept 2026, 21:07current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.