Miguel Marrero, who was arrested on July 4, 2024, for shooting a St. Croix woman and her then-15-year-old daughter at the Candido Guadalupe Terrace housing community, was sentenced Wednesday to serve a combined 30 years in prison.

Marrero pleaded guilty in February to federal charges of discharging a firearm during a crime of violence — which carries a minimum 10-year sentence — and being a felon in possession of a firearm. He also pleaded guilty to local charges of first- and third-degree assault. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Wilma Lewis sentenced Marrero to serve consecutive terms of 15 and two-and-a-half years for the two federal counts, followed by 12-and-a-half and four years for the local counts. Marrero, 53, will serve the latter two terms concurrently.

The sentencing came after hours of arguments from Marrero’s attorney, Jason Gonzalez-Delgado, that the “totality of the circumstance” in Marrero’s case warranted a departure from federal sentencing guidelines. In a sentencing memorandum filed June 16, Gonzalez-Delgado asked the judge for a sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment in light of Marrero’s status as a single parent and what was described as years of bullying and abuse the victims leveled against Marrero’s son.

Prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Marrero to 20 years in a sentencing memorandum of their own, filed last week.

Gonzalez-Delgado claimed Wednesday that the bullying persisted over four years of beatings, intimidation and menacing text messages that necessitated multiple calls to the police, the housing community’s administration and the involved minors’ school administration. The shooting, he said, happened in a matter of two or three seconds.

“He tried to solve it. He couldn’t solve it. He blew a gasket,” Gonzalez-Delgado said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Rhonda Williams-Henry, representing the Justice Department, argued that nothing presented to the court “even remotely resembles” the extraordinary circumstances required to grant Marrero sentencing relief based on his status as a caregiver. Lewis agreed.

The parties spent far longer discussing the circumstances leading up to the shooting, which was seen widely in a video circulated on social media at the time. The video, which was played twice in court Wednesday, appeared to show Marrero’s son fighting the minor shooting victim — identified in court as J.O. — with Marrero’s encouragement. J.O.’s mother then confronted Marrero and slapped him twice before walking away, at which point Marrero pulled out a gun and shot her in the back before firing more shots at the fleeing group of minors. J.O. was shot in the ankle and the knee, and her mother received damage to her spine, colon, kidney and large intestine. She was treated at Juan F. Luis Hospital before being airlifted to a hospital in Miami. She remains in a wheelchair.

Marrero told the court that he encouraged his son, then 17, to fight one of the teenagers in an effort to back the rest off. He said he armed himself in case the rest entered the fight. Williams-Henry called it a “crazy, stupid thing” to do.

“That’s not an effort to prevent confrontation. That’s an effort to have a confrontation,” Lewis said after denying the motion for departure.

While acknowledging the history that led up to the shooting, Lewis said her “overwhelming reason” for denying the departure came from consideration of the events on July 4, 2024. She said the court was hard-pressed to find evidence that Marrero tried to avoid conflict, that he reasonably perceived himself to be in danger or that his response to being slapped was proportional and reasonable. Firing a gun at the first victim and the fleeing minors, she said, was “simply incomprehensible to this court.”

“If your actions are correct, then we live in the wild, wild west,” she said later.