North Carolina man sentenced to 19 years for attempted kidnappings of two women in Center City

A North Carolina man was sentenced to 19 years in federal prison Friday for back-to-back attempts to violently abduct women he targeted on Center City streets.

Jacob Montague, 38, pleaded guilty last year to charges stemming from both incidents — the first of which occurred in November 2020 when he pulled a knife on a woman walking near Rittenhouse Square. She managed to escape and later identify him to police.

A day later, he struck again, attacking another woman along the Schuylkill River Trail, putting a knife to her neck and dragging her into his car before bystanders managed to free her and wrestle him to the ground.

Montague “hunted young women in our community,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Priya DeSouza said in court filings leading up to his sentencing Friday. “The trauma [he] inflicted upon his victims … has altered their lives. [He] robbed these women of their innate sense of personal safety.”

But as he sat in court Friday — his shoulders slumped, his head cast downward — he struck a far different impression than that of the man who’d filled his victims with so much terror.

A graduate of Duke with a law degree from the University of North Carolina, Montague had come to Philadelphia in 2020 to support Democratic political campaigns, his mother told the court.

But he’d struggled with mental health issues for years and stopped taking his medication, she said, leading to the violent tendencies that led to the abduction attempts.

She told U.S. District Judge Joel Slomsky she was torn between compassion for her son’s victims and concern for her son’s well-being — an impulse that had prompted her to drive up from North Carolina 52 times since his 2020 arrest.

But while acknowledging Montague’s mental health struggles, DeSouza maintained they did not excuse his crimes.

Just hours before his Philadelphia kidnapping spree, she said, Montague had been stopped by police in Delaware County for following another woman for miles as she drove away from a Whole Foods in Glen Mills.

She called 911, and when state troopers pulled him over, Montague maintained he was simply driving around to admire the fall foliage.

They let him go but subsequently charged him with stalking and harassing that woman — charges to which he later pleaded guilty in state court.

But within hours of that incident, DeSouza said, Montague had come to Center City with more “vile intentions” in mind.

His attack on the first of the Philadelphia women was partially caught on nearby security cameras which showed him approaching her with a knife.

When the woman backed away, pulled out her phone and threatened to call police, Montague fled back to his car and drove away.

His next victim was attending a Zoom meeting on her phone and walking her dog along the Schuylkill River Trail when Montague struck again.

As the people on the other end of the line listened in, he grabbed her by the neck, held a knife against it and dragged her away, telling her that she was “just so beautiful” and that she should “just relax.”

Though bystanders managed to free her before Montague could drive away, the woman said in a letter to the judge that she still feels uncomfortable walking down city streets years later.

“I knew he was going to try and stab me,” she wrote.

But almost as soon as Montague was arrested, DeSouza said, he began plotting to convince authorities that he was incompetent to stand trial and could not be held responsible for his crimes.

Such efforts had previously worked — for a time — in North Carolina, where he’d been arrested in December 2019 on charges of burglary, larceny, and possession of a stolen vehicle. A court there released him on bail and deemed him incompetent to stand trial — a decision it later reversed.

In recorded phone calls with his mother from jail in Philadelphia, he said he’d pretend to be insane to get better treatment while he was behind bars.

Montague’s attorney, Richard J. Fuschino Jr., acknowledged Friday that his client was fully competent when he entered his guilty plea to the kidnapping charges in April. But he maintained there are still signs of mental illness that the judge should consider when deciding upon a sentence.

For instance, two months after his decision to plead guilty, Montague sent a letter to Slomsky asking if he could clerk for him.

His LinkedIn page — which lists past jobs with an animal rescue and dance nonprofits — lists his current occupation as “Prison, Federal — Full-time.”

“Being smart, being well-educated, being competent do not mean that you’re mentally perfect — they may not even mean you’re mentally well,” Fuschino said. “This whole case is very tough.”