Man to be Sentenced in Newtown Post-Sandy Hook Threats

Update: He is being sentenced Thursday. We will update the story when a sentence is handed down.

The man who pleaded guilty to making threatening phone calls to Newtown residents days after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is requesting that his prison sentence only be for the time he has so far spent.

Wilfrido Anibal Cardenas Hofmann requested the sentence on the grounds that he has schizophrenia,he can’t receive adequate medical care in prison, he is more vulnerable to abuse in prison and that he would suffer more severely because he is not a U.S. citizen.

He is scheduled to be sentenced Friday at 9 a.m. in front of U.S. District Judge Michael Shea in Hartford.

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The government as part of the plea agreement chose not to take a position on the amount of time to be served.

Cardenas Hoffman made over 90 telephone calls to 47 different numbers in the Newtown area two days after the shooting that claimed the lives of 20 children and six adults.

He made a series of threats, including ones that he was the shooter Adam Lanza and that he was coming to kill people. Lanza committed suicide during the shooting event, according to court documents.

Hoffmann made the calls from Venezuela and used various methods to hide his identity, but investigators caught up with him and obtained a warrant for his arrest in May 2013. He was arrested in June 2014 while traveling through Miami International Airport.

According to court documents he grew-up in a stable family environment in Venezuela and attended a private high school. He went on to attend college, but didn’t graduate. He held mostly short-term minimum wage jobs.

The government refutes that he wouldn’t be granted adequate medical care and notes that sentencing guidelines don’t identify vulnerability to abuse as a basis for departure, according to court documents.

Also, the government noted that a defendants alienage isn’t ordinarily relevant under sentencing guidelines.