NEWPORT — A 36-year-old Charlestown man has pleaded guilty for his role in an armed home invasion attempt in Claremont nearly two years ago during which he was critically wounded by a gunshot fired by the apartment’s occupant in self defense.
Loren Richardson pleaded guilty to two counts of burglary and was sentenced on the first count to one-and-a-half years to seven years in state prison with 81 days credit for time served in Sullivan County Superior Court on June 26, according to court records.
He received a three-and-a-half to seven-year sentence on the second count, all suspended for five years upon release after serving his sentence on the first count, court records show.
Two counts of criminal threatening with a deadly weapon were dropped under the plea deal.
Richardson, armed with a handgun, was shot in the abdomen by an occupant of a ground-floor apartment at the corner of Walnut and Trinity streets in downtown Claremont on July 31, 2023, when he and another man forced their way through the porch door, police said at the time.
After the occupant fired the shot at the intruders, Richardson and alleged accomplice Kody Bardin fled the scene, with Richardson leaving a trail of blood from his wound on the street. Police later found Richardson at Valley Regional Hospital where he was being treated for the wound before he was flown to DHMC due to his critical condition, police said in a sworn affidavit.
Bardin, who was subsequently located at his apartment on Pleasant Street in Claremont, has been charged with two counts of burglary and two counts of criminal threatening with a deadly weapon. He is scheduled to appear in court in Newport for a pretrial status conference on Aug. 22, according to court records.
Previously, a 22-year-old woman who drove Richardson to Valley Regional after he was shot, pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of obstructing justice for wiping clean blood from the car in which she transported him to the hospital. She received a deferred six-month jail sentence.