When one call is not enough, a New York man faces prison time after making 12,000 calls.

When one call is not enough, a New York man faces prison time after making 12,000 calls.

A New York man is confronting the possibility of imprisonment after he confessed to threatening a Congressional staff member while making over 12,000 calls to various Congressional offices.

Ade Salim Lilly, aged 35, pleaded guilty in a D.C. court on Thursday to charges related to interstate communications that involved threats to kidnap or harm, as well as for his excessive phone calls, which were made after he was apprehended in a concealed location in Puerto Rico.

Court documents reveal that Lilly began contacting 54 Congressional offices on February 1, 2022, with more than 6,500 of those calls aimed at offices in Washington, D.C.

Notably, during a two-day period in February 2023, he made 500 calls to a single Congressional representative, frequently employing offensive language and disregarding requests to stop.

Lilly is now facing a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for the threat charge, in addition to a potential two-year sentence and another $250,000 fine for the repeated calls, with a federal judge set to determine his punishment.

Reports indicate that Lilly began to obscure his phone number to mislead Congressional staff into answering his calls, during which he issued violent threats, including a specific threat to kill a staff member on October 21, 2022.

The reasons behind Lilly’s actions are yet to be determined; however, media sources suggest that a federal judge will impose his sentence based on the federal guidelines established by Congress.

One of the people interviewed on the matter, U.S. Attorney Graves underscored that threatening another person’s safety or life is a criminal offense, not a protected form of speech, and emphasized that this case serves as a warning that such threats will not be tolerated and that offenders will face serious repercussions.