The long indict

Nearly four years after his arrest, an imprisoned Sacramento man has been indicted on a bevy of federal weapons and assault charges, including allegedly shooting at multiple agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The legal trouble facing Jason Broadbent means he may spend the rest of his life in state and federal prisons.

In mid-October, Broadbent was arraigned in the U.S. Eastern District Court of California on 14 charges, including possession of machine guns, possession of a pipe bomb, trafficking methamphetamine within 1,000 feet of a school and trying to assault federal agents with a.40-caliber Glock. According to U.S. Assistant Attorney David Spencer’s criminal complaint, the ATF was trying to arrest Broadbent in south Oak Park on Nov. 19, 2015 when he allegedly fired his gun near three of its agents.

Initially, the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office charged Broadbent with 19 felonies related to his 2015 encounter with the ATF. Lauren Horwood, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said that’s partly why it took so long to bring Broadbent’s case before a federal grand jury.

“He’s been in custody since it happened, but facing local charges,” Horwood noted.

Court records show Broadbent only appeared once on those charges, during his initial arraignment, and then never again appeared in Sacramento Superior Court, where more recent convictions came for illegal weapons possession in 2006 and 2013. The 2015 case is still classified as “active.”

Around the time Broadbent had his run-in with the ATF in Oak Park, he’d also been arrested on several counts of manufacturing illegal weapons in Yolo County. Broadbent was convicted March 2, 2018 and sentenced to 53 years in state prison. Terry Thornton, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, confirmed Broadbent began serving that sentence on March 29, 2018.

Some 19 months later, federal prosecutors took their own crack at Broadbent. Horwood said, if convicted, he faces a 30-year federal prison sentence, though she could not say if it would come only after his five-decade state prison term.