Jakub Heintzelman: Northwood Man Sentenced to 11½ Years in Shooting Death of 15-Year-Old Symini Moore

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An 18-year-old Northwood man has been sentenced to 11½ years in prison for the reckless homicide of a 15-year-old Woodmore High School student and for separate child pornography charges that investigators found on his phone.

Jakub Heintzelman learned his sentence in a Wood County Common Pleas Court hearing after previously pleading guilty to a list of charges. 

Those charges included reckless homicide with a gun specification, improperly transporting a firearm in a vehicle, carrying a concealed weapon, and an underage alcohol violation. All of those counts were tied to the death of Woodmore High School sophomore Symini Moore.




On the evening of January 23, 2026, Lake Township police and emergency crews responded to Heintzelman’s apartment in the 3700 block of Lakepointe Drive and found Moore dead from a gunshot wound.

Investigators determined that Moore and other friends were at the apartment when the gun discharged while Heintzelman was handling it.

Heintzelman claimed he was cleaning or disassembling the gun when it went off, as seen in the footage below. 

However his friends told detectives that they had been drinking, and Heintzelman was playing with the gun before it went off, as per Law & Crime.

According to Wood County Prosecutor Paul Dobson, the weapon had been fully loaded and was within reach inside his car earlier that same day.

“Foolish, reckless handling of firearms as if they were toys causes this kind of horrific outcome,” Mr. Dobson said. “This was a senseless, completely avoidable event.”

While investigators were looking into the shooting, they searched Heintzelman’s phone and discovered illegal material that led to two second-degree felony charges of illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material. 

Prosecutors made it clear that Symini Moore was not a victim in either of those cases, and the two children involved were separate from one another. 


Jakub Heintzelman 



Judge Mary “Molly” Mack handed down the maximum sentence for the homicide and gun charges. 

Heintzelman received 7½ years for those counts, and that total includes a mandatory three-year term for the gun specification attached to the reckless homicide charge. 

The felony count of improperly transporting a firearm accounted for 18 months of that sentence, as per WTOL News.

Heintzelman also pleaded guilty to both of those charges related to the inappropriate content found on his phone as well and received four-year prison terms for each one. 

Those two four-year sentences will run at the same time as each other, but they will be served after the 7½-year homicide sentence is complete, bringing the total prison time to 11½ years.

Because the illegal use of a minor charges are second-degree felonies, Ohio’s Reagan Tokes law allows the prison system to add up to two more years to his sentence if he commits serious violations while behind bars. 

Heintzelman was also classified as a Tier II sex offender. That means he will have to register with the local sheriff’s office every six months for 25 years once he is released.

During the hearing, Moore’s mother read a personal statement and a letter her daughter had written to her future self. She described the milestones her daughter will now never reach. 

“Cases like this have no good outcome,” Mr. Dobson said. “The judge was right when she said that nothing she could do could bring a true remedy to this tragedy,” he added.

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