The mother of a British man accused of trying to grab a cop's weapon to shoot Donald Trump says her son has been "broken" by his time in custody.
Michael Sandford, a 20-year-old Briton from Dorking, England, was arrested in June at a Trump rally in Las Vegas after allegedly attempting to take a police officer's gun with the stated intention of shooting the billionaire Republican. Sandford is awaiting trial for being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm and for impeding and disrupting the orderly conduct of government business, but not for threatening Trump.
"Luckily we're not looking at attempted murder," his mother, Lynne Sandford, said at a news briefing in London, reports
CNN. She said she believes the absence of that charge "shows the police do acknowledge this wasn't a realistic attempt on Donald Trump's life."
According to authorities, Sandford indicated that he'd been planning to kill Trump for a year, thinking he would get one or two shots off before being killed himself by police. He was arraigned on felony charges on July 6, and his trial is due to begin Aug. 22, according to the
Las Vegas Review-Journal.
But Sandford hasn't been faring well in prison.
"He's in pieces. He's broken. He's bewildered," his mother said, according to CNN. "He begs me not to hang up the phone when we do speak."
Sandford was diagnosed with autism at 13, and later with depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and anorexia.
At 14, "he'd just given up on himself. He'd lost the will to live. He found everything too difficult," his mother says. He spent four months in a U.K. psychiatric hospital, CNN said.
When he was 18, Sandford moved to New Jersey to be with his girlfriend, but he began to lose contact with his family, and ended up sleeping on the street and later in his car.
Sandford's family acknowledges his crime, but are hoping he can be returned to the U.K. for treatment rather than be imprisoned in the U.S.
"What we very much hope is that there won't be a trial," Sandford's lawyer, Saimo Chahal, told the
Associated Press last week. "Our best aim is for Michael to be repatriated back to the U.K. before he is sentenced."
"There's no getting away from what he did. He did attempt to do a very bad, very wrong thing," Ms. Sandford says. "But he's not a bad person. That's why we want to get him back to the U.K. We want to get him psychiatric help, and we want him to see his family."
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