HACKENSACK – The sentencing of convicted machete murderer Arthur Lomando was postponed on Thursday when his legal team withdrew from the case after Lomando made threatening statements in jail and criticized their trial strategy.

Judge Margaret Foti accepted the withdrawal on the grounds that their safety would be jeopardized in representing him. She revealed that Lomando earlier this month told a court psychiatrist: “I don’t really feel like hurting myself, but I would like to strangle my lawyer.”

He also sent a letter to the court on Monday slamming the decision by his attorneys not to have him testify during the three-week trial in January.

Lomando, a 47-year-old former New York City cop, was due to be sentenced on first-degree murder charges Thursday for stabbing his ex-girlfriend, Suzanne Bardzell, to death in an ambush outside her Midland Park home in October 2015.

But Foti agreed to delay the sentence so Lomando can retain new counsel.

“I just can’t see in good faith, ethically, moving forward in light of that letter and the specific allegations made,” Anthony La Pinta, Lomando’s attorney, said Thursday.

A hearing date was scheduled for April 12.

A jury needed only three hours of deliberations in February to find that Lomando acted with premeditation in October 2015, when he stabbed Bardzell with a machete-style knife more than 30 times.

Prosecutors said Lomando drove 70 miles from his Long Island home to Bardzell's Midland Park house. There, he allegedly waited 90 minutes for her to arrive home from a teaching job at Community High School in Teaneck. Then, he allegedly attacked her in broad daylight.

Hours after the killing, he attempted suicide by throwing himself in front of a Manhattan subway train. He survived the jump, but doctors were forced to amputate both of his feet in the hospital.

In his letter to the court on Monday, Lomando also requested to not be present for the sentencing in order to avoid statements by the victim’s family.

“I don’t want to be disruptive during the sentencing,” Lomando wrote. “If I’m forced to be here you’re going to cause me to be disruptive, and I don’t want to be disrespectful.”

Foti, however, denied the request out of courtesy to Bardzell’s family.

“The defendant’s appearance in court is important to provide the victim’s family members with closure,” Foti said.

Tom Pahl, Bardzell’s brother, said he planned on addressing the judge and not Lomando personally.

“He doesn’t deserve my time,” Pahl said.

Lomando rolled into the Hackensack courtroom in a wheelchair on Thursday wearing prosthetic legs. He requested that his counsel remain on the case despite the letter, and lashed out when they declined.

“Well then you better return some money. You were paid for the full amount,” Lomando shouted to La Pinta.

The three-week trial led jurors through a harrowing chronicle of the last month of Bardzell's life, a time when her three-year relationship with Lomando became increasingly hostile.

Bardzell made several complaints against him in that period, including an accusation that he had broken into her house and threatened to kill her while he was holding scissors. She obtained a temporary restraining order and called police multiple times to say he had violated it.

In the days before her death, police filed at least three separate charges against him for those alleged violations.

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Bardzell's family endured graphic photographs of the crime scene presented at trial and surveillance footage of the attack captured by security cameras around her home. In the film, a man, whom authorities later identified as Lomando, is seen approaching Bardzell's car moments after she pulls into her driveway and smashing the car window with the knife handle. Bardzell fights him briefly by kicking him, but Lomando stands up, opens the car door and begins stabbing.

Lomando's defense team never disputed Lomando's role in the killing, but instead painted him as a longtime victim of mental illness who lost control of himself during the killing.

Lomando was admitted to a psychiatric hospital twice: Once in 2003 for depression and again in September 2015 for having suicidal thoughts, court documents said.

His problems spilled into his career as a police officer. He was routinely bounced between precincts because of arguments with other officers, according to court documents,

In 2004, he was fired from his job as a police officer for alleged infractions related to vacation and overtime, court documents said.



