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Marcus Schrenker Sentenced 51 Months
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by candice.tsuei | August 19, 2009 at 01:07 pm
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Marcus Schrenker, formerly an Indiana financial advisor, pleaded guilty to criminal charges for purposely crashing his plane and will serve 51 months in federal prison.
Judge Roger Vinson sentenced Schrenker after a lengthy and rambling speech by the amateur daredevil pilot, who sobbed and asked forgiveness from his family, air-traffic controllers and Panhandle residents.
The story dates back to Jan 11 this year. Schrenker, the president of Heritage Wealth Management in Indianapolis, was in a financial disaster and in the middle of a divorce. In attempt to escape from his mess, he flew his Piper model PA46-500TP plane from Indiana, bailed out over southern Alabama, and parachuted to the ground. The plane then crashed in the Florida panhandle.
Law enforcement officials found him bleeding from gashes in his arms. Schrenker said in a letter later he was on the way to Destin, Florida, to visit his father when he parachuted from the plane and retrieved a motorcycle he had put in a storage unit.
Schrenker's sentencing is tomorrow in Pensacola, Florida. With nine new counts of securities fraud filed against him and each of the charges could bring two to eight years in prison, Schrenker also faces more than five years for the federal case of his staged plane crash. In addition, Schrenker has been charged with two felonies - one for failing to tell clients his license lapsed, and one for doing business without being registered as financial advisor. The maximum term he faces is 26 years.
Monetarily, Schrenker was ordered to pay $34,649 in restitution to the U.S. Coast Guard, which searched for him after he made a fake distress call, on top of the $871,387 to Harley Davidson Credit Corp. for the plane.
“These additional charges filed today represent a tremendous amount of work by our investigators in partnership with the Hamilton County Prosecutor,” Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita said in a statement. “These new charges ... reflect the broader scope of Schrenker’s alleged financial misdeeds that prompted this investigation.”
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at 13:13 on August 19th, 2009
Interesting. His was definitely an unusual case.