A California man has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for cyberstalking families of Parkland, Florida, school shooting victims.
CBS News reports that U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz imposed the sentence on Brandon Fleury, 22, of Santa Ana, California.
Fleury was convicted by a jury in October of three counts of cyberstalking and one count of transmitting a kidnapping threat.
Trial evidence showed that between December 2018 and January 2019, Fleury used several Instagram accounts to threaten and harass families of victims of the Valentine's Day 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which left 17 dead and 17 wounded.
In some messages, Fleury claimed kinship with and even impersonated shooting defendant Nikolas Cruz. In others, he invoked the names of infamous serial killers such as Ted Bundy.
"I killed your loved ones hahaha," one message said. "Did you like my Valentines gift? I killed your friends," said another.
Prosecutors said that Fleury's victims lived "in constant fear that the individual bombarding them" with the messages would follow in Cruz's footsteps,
On Fleury's electronic devices, authorities also found thousands of saved images of Bundy, images of the targeted victims and screenshots of the messages that he had sent the victims.
There was ample testimony at Fleury's trial that he is autistic, although several mental health experts said he did understand right from wrong.
His attorney, Sabrina Puglisi, said she had hoped the judge would consider Fleury's mental issues in imposing a sentence.
"I think that it's a high sentence given Brandon's background and other similarly situated cases, but I believe that the judge felt the need to have the sentence send a message to others that are out there on the internet doing this bad behavior," Puglisi said.
