Man who bought rifles used in 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino gets 20 years in prison
The man who bought the semiautomatic rifles used by the husband and wife terror suspects in the 2015 San Bernardino massacre was sentenced to 20 years in prison Friday.
Enrique Marquez Jr., 28, showed no emotion at the hearing as relatives of some of the 14 people who died in the mass shooting urged the judge to lock him up.
“He didn’t get the maximum, but the judge did best he could. I wanted the maximum,” Gregory Clayborn, who lost his 27-year-old daughter, Sierra, in the bloodshed, told the Daily News Friday. “I thought he deserved the maximum.”
Addressing the court before sentencing, Clayborn said Marquez deserved the full 25 years sought by prosecutors.
“He’s a terrorist, your honor,” Clayborn told the judge. “And if you let him out, he’s going to do it again.”
Marquez supplied two of the weapons that Syed Rizwan Farook and wife Tashfeen Malik used on Dec. 2, 2015, when they opened fire on a gathering of San Bernardino County health inspectors who worked with Farook.
Minutes after the deadly attack that also wounded 22 others, a post on a Facebook page linked to Malik pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State terror group, officials said.
Farook, 28, and Malik, 29, died in a shootout with cops later that day.
In court filings, officials said Marquez forged a friendship with Farook when they lived next door to each other in Riverside years earlier.
They said Marquez converted to Islam and conspired with Farook in 2011 and 2012 to stage random shootings at Riverside Community College and along a local freeway in acts of jihad-inspired domestic terrorism.
Their plots were never realized, and Marquez called 911 after the San Bernardino shooting to confess his former neighbor used his firearms in the rampage.
“They can trace all the guns back to me,” he told the emergency operator, according to an affidavit.
Defense lawyers had asked the judge for a more lenient sentence of five years in prison.
They said Marquez had been manipulated by Farook since he was an awkward 13-year-old neighbor seeking an escape from alleged abuse at home.
Marquez had stopped speaking to Farook years before the San Bernardino attack and didn’t know it was going to happen, the lawyers said.
In determining the sentence, U.S. District Judge Jesus Bernal said he considered the fact that Marquez had called 911 and later cooperated with authorities.
“In a legal sense, I cannot punish Mr. Marquez for your loss,” Bernal told the families in his courtroom. “He is not responsible for the murders.”
Marquez pleaded guilty in 2017 to conspiring with Farook to provide material support to terrorists and making false statements about the guns he bought in his name for Farook.
With News Wire Reporting
