The former two-term mayor of a Pennsylvania town has been ordered to serve up to a year in jail for shooting a gun at – and threatening to kill – two players of the popular mobile game Pokémon Go.
Ida Reams, who served as mayor of Osceola Mills from 2013 to 2021, was intoxicated when she confronted the two male players of the augmented reality game in the parking lot of a food bank in the town in March last year.
Reams, 52, had called police herself to report two “suspicious” people, and emergency operators heard her shouting to somebody to leave her alone or she would “fucking kill” them. It was followed by two gunshots before the call was disconnected.
The men were engaged in a round of Pokémon Go – in which players search for animated virtual characters using their mobile phones’ GPS capability – outside an adjacent Veterans of Foreign Wars post when Reams came out and challenged them.
A district court judge in Clearfield county sentenced Reams, whose previous attempts to secure a plea deal were unsuccessful, to between four months and one year in prison, according to Pennsylvania news station WHTM. Reams also reportedly faces 18 months of probation.
Originally she was charged with felony aggravated assault, which were later downgraded to misdemeanor simple assaults and DUI.
Judge Fredric Ammerman clashed with the Clearfield district attorney, Ryan Sayers, at an earlier sentencing hearing over the collapse of two previous agreements – under which Reams, who has cancer – would have served either eight days in jail or four months of home detention.
Ammerman rejected both deals and a demand from Sayers for him to recuse himself on the grounds of bias. In resolving the case this week, Ammerman said he was not happy with the latest agreement, but it was “probably the best this is going to be” given the length of time since the offense and unavailability of witnesses to testify.
Reams, who won two elections for mayor before being termed out in 2021, will report to prison on 11 January, her attorney Joshua Maines said.
The two Pokémon Go players, meanwhile, were also reluctant to testify and they had proven “hostile” to the prosecution, Sayers said.
In their own account of the confrontation given to police, the victims said they were playing the game around the VFW when Reams came out “clearly intoxicated” and shouting at them before she chased them in her car and fired four or five shots from a revolver.
