Witnesses told a district judge that Jacob Rabb admitted multiple times to blowing up his Plum home in 2022 with his partner and his four children inside.
Charges against Rabb, 41, including four counts of attempted homicide, were held for court Wednesday after a preliminary hearing before District Judge Mike Doyle.
Police charged Rabb in March, saying he intentionally manipulated a natural gas line to a dryer in the Hialeah Drive house, which caused an explosion while he, his four children and their mother were home on April 22, 2022.
No one was killed, but one of the children suffered burns on his back and torso, according to a criminal complaint filed against Rabb.
The blast is unrelated to an August 2023 house explosion in Plum’s Rustic Ridge neighborhood that killed six people.
Laura Petty, Rabb’s former partner and the mother of his four boys, told the court she woke up the night of the explosion with the roof collapsed on top of her and one of her sons crying next to her.
She testified that Rabb helped shuffle the family out of the burning home and had to be restrained by neighbors as he attempted to go back into the structure to locate their eldest son.
“We couldn’t find my 11-year-old anywhere, and that was terrifying,” Petty said as she wept in the courtroom.
The boy managed to make it out of the blaze on his own but had to be flown to UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh for the burns he suffered, Petty said.
Petty said she didn’t initially suspect that Rabb could be behind the blast.
That was before he admitted to it, she said.
After the two separated and Petty filed a protection from abuse order against Rabb, she said, he left two notes hidden in her kitchen.
One of them read, “P.S. I did blow up the house,” she testified.
Two months later, she said, Rabb entered her home as she slept and held a knife to her throat, keeping her and the children hostage for about two hours and threatening to kill them.
During the incident, Rabb told Petty he “disconnected the gas valve” of a dryer in their former home’s basement, allowing free-flowing gas into the home, Petty testified.
That’s consistent with natural gas data from the home, Allegheny County Deputy Fire Marshal George Hollenberger told the court.
Hollenberger said it appeared that gas had been allowed to flow freely into the basement three times in the days before the blast and ahead of a final time on the night of April 22. Between the periods of free flow, the deputy said, gas usage returned to normal levels.
“The only thing that could cause that to happen is an open half-inch gas line,” Hollenberger said.
The fact that the periods of free-flowing gas were brief and levels later returned to typical readings indicated that someone had manually tampered with the gas pipe to the dryer, Hollenberger said.
“Those numbers are not normal,” he told the court.
The lack of explosions from previous gas flows could have been caused by too little gas, too little oxygen or the lack of a spark, Hollenberger said.
Allegheny County Assistant District Attorney Connor Adair called it “dumb luck.”
Plum police Detective Daniel Moriarty said Rabb admitted during an interview to writing the notes found in Petty’s kitchen, but he did not admit to blowing up the house.
During an interview with Rabb’s father — who Petty said had gifted the two the washer and dryer — the elder Rabb said his son had admitted to causing the explosion, Moriarty said.
In November 2025, Rabb was committed to Western Psychiatric Hospital after he told the supervisor of a three-quarter house where he had been staying in Pittsburgh’s Knoxville neighborhood that he was planning to kill himself and kill Petty and their children, Moriarty said.
Sarah McGuire, Rabb’s public defender, asked the judge to dismiss the homicide charges against her client, saying much of the prosecution’s case rested on hearsay.
Rabb’s actions to save the victims on the night of the fire, she said, indicated that he didn’t intend to kill his family. Subsequent statements and his alleged confessions were made in the context of his breakup with Petty and his mental health difficulties, according to McGuire.
But Adair described the explosion as a murder-suicide plot, even if Rabb might have changed his mind after the blast.
The two attorneys agreed to dismiss seven charges of criminal mischief and dangerous burning, but the major felonies, including attempted homicide, aggravated arson and causing a catastrophe, will head to county court.
Shackled and clad in a lime green Allegheny County Jail jumpsuit, Rabb remained silent throughout the hearing.
Repeatedly denied bail, Rabb remains in jail. His formal arraignment is set for May 26.