Wilfrido A. Cardenas Hoffman, 30, of El Hatillo, Venezuela, allegedly called Newtown residents and left voicemails claiming to be Adam Lanza and threatening to kill them in the days following the Sandy Hook shootings.
HARTFORD — The Venezuelan man who admitted making 90 threatening phone calls to Newtown two days after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was sentenced today to one year in prison, according to an Associated Press report.
Wilfrido A. Cardenas Hoffman, 31, pleaded guilty two months ago to calling and threatening about 47 families and businesses in Newtown in December 2012.
Hoffman was arrested last summer while transiting through Miami International Airport, en route to Mexico, after federal investigators tracked down his calls to Newtown. He made them using an Internet-compatible phone from Venezuela after watching coverage of the school shootings on CNN.
Mental health experts at the Yale School of Medicine had recommended Hoffman be sentenced to time served, with mandatory treatment in Venezuela.
His defense had asked the court to take into consideration that he suffers from schizophrenia, cannot receive adequate medical care in prison, is more vulnerable to abuse in prison, and would suffer the effects of incarceration more severely because he is not a citizen of the United States.
U.S. Attorney Deirdre M. Daly did not take a position on his request for time served in light of his psychiatric diagnoses and proposed treatment plan in Venezuela, but she submitted a lengthy reply to the request to provide the court “with the relevant case law, and an accurate characterization of certain facts” before it makes a decision.
Daly questioned the defense’s argument that adequate treatment is not available in U.S. prisons and the claim that the criminal justice system has treated Hoffman more harshly because of his deportable alien status.