Man sentenced to prison for setting fire that killed his mother
A Las Vegas judge sentenced a man to 10 to 25 years in prison on Thursday for setting fire to a trailer home where he lived with his mother, resulting in her death.
“There hasn’t been a day since it’s happened that I didn’t regret it,” Clifton Hall, 32, said through tears at his sentencing hearing.
In October, Hall pleaded guilty but mentally ill to second-degree murder through what’s known as an Alford plea, meaning that he agreed only that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him.
In the early hours of Jan. 8, the Metropolitan Police Department and Moapa Valley Fire District responded to a burning trailer at 985 Liston Ave.
Inside, firefighters found Hall’s mother, Patricia McGinnis, who died at the scene.
“I’m going to have a hard time forgiving myself. I lost the most important thing to me in the world, and it was all because of me,” Hall said in court Thursday.
David Lopez-Negrete, Hall’s defense attorney, said that McGinnis’ death was “tragic, but not the result of someone who was bent on causing harm to himself, to anybody else.”
Lopez-Negrete asked Judge Tierra Jones not to give Hall a life sentence and said he felt that Hall’s mental illness and substance abuse issues explained his “terrible” decision making on that January night.
“He was trying to rescue her in that moment, breaking down windows, using a hose,” Lopez-Negrete said. “And ultimately, of course, he couldn’t do it.”
Prosecutor Christopher Hamner said in court that he didn’t want to signal that the state felt “one way or the other” about whether or not Hall ought to be sentenced to life in prison or to 25 years.
“She was always super forgiving whenever I was really stupid,” Hall said of his mother. “She always forgave me.”
In addition to serving a sentence of 10 to 25 years, Jones ordered Hall to pay more than $4,500 in restitution to victims of crime.
Contact Estelle Atkinson at eatkinson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @estellelilym on X and @estelleatkinson.bsky.social on Bluesky.
