One Day To Life
The nurses were plotting against him.
He could hear them whispering. He knew he had to escape his room in the ICU at Lakewood’s St. Anthony Hospital before they killed him. David Hoffschneider ripped out his IV and catheter, put on his clothes, and walked into the hallway. He didn’t make it far before hospital staff stopped him.
Six days earlier, the 34-year-old, a recovering heroin addict, had picked up his methadone from the clinic as he had done every morning for about two years. That night, July 2, 2016, he swallowed some extra medication and a Xanax to help him sleep, something he says he’d done before with no issues. This time was different. His father, David Varela, with whom Hoffschneider was living, found him asleep but struggling to breathe. Varela called an ambulance.
At St. Anthony, Hoffschneider was intubated and administered more than a dozen medications. His medical records indicate that on July 5 he developed agitated delirium—a state of fear, panic, and hyperactivity that can lead to respiratory arrest—and required sedation. As the drugs wore off on July 8, he grew increasingly apprehensive about the nursing staff and tried to escape. The next day, on the afternoon of July 9, he was discharged, without a psychiatric evaluation, into his father’s care.
Hoffschneider had never experienced delusions before, but his paranoia grew more intense after he left the hospital. As he approached his father’s garden-level apartment in Lakewood, he saw some neighbor kids playing outside. Once inside, he saw someone run by the window. He looked out and thought he saw one of the children’s mothers telling him that a drug cartel was after him. “I’m warning you,” she said. “They are going to get you.” Panicked, he asked his father to patrol the area around their home.
Hoffschneider’s mind was betraying him with false visions, but the fear was real. He loaded two guns and hid them out of his father’s sight. It was past midnight when Hoffschneider says he fired a “warning shot” toward the apartment’s wall. He thought the noise might make his neighbors call the police, who could, he believed, protect him from the cartel. Varela jolted awake to find a blank look on his son’s face and a ricocheted bullet hole in the front door. Hoffschneider fired again. A window in the living room shattered.
The gunfire had drawn the building’s other residents outside, and they had called the police, as Hoffschneider had hoped. But ambulances also had to be summoned: Two of Hoffschneider’s neighbors had been hit by the bullets. One woman was struck in her thigh; the other suffered a wound to her torso, where the slug lodged near her spine.
Convinced that the responding law enforcement officers were cartel members in disguise, Hoffschneider fired at least five additional shots over the next hour as Lakewood police surrounded the apartment. Varela ran outside around 1:35 a.m. after grabbing Hoffschneider’s 9 mm pistol. A silver Winchester rifle was still inside, though Varela had unloaded it, dropping the ammo into his pocket. As SWAT moved in—using explosives to breach the apartment and firing foam baton rounds—Hoffschneider picked up two knives for protection. A nearly seven-hour standoff ended with him on the kitchen floor, tased and handcuffed.
with—and often fascinated by—cases in which alleged perpetrators have pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI). People such as John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan; Lorena Bobbitt, who cut off her husband’s penis after she says he sexually assaulted her; and
