He threatened a Muslim family that planned to move to his neighborhood. Now, he’ll go to prison.

“We really feel that justice has been served, and probably this will be a deterrent to people who think that they can take the law into their hand,” Asgar said.

Asgar declined to provide details of the family’s current living situation but said that they are still looking for a new home.

Prosecutors wrote in documents filed in the case that Asgar and his family had been deeply shaken by the incident. Asgar “could not sleep for weeks,” they wrote, and had trouble finding the words to explain what had happened to his two children because he did not want to give them the feeling of “powerless discrimination” that he felt, they wrote. The incident had made the family “think twice about expressing their faith and religion — an injury worse than any broken bone or destroyed property,” prosecutors wrote.

Howard’s lawyer, David Scott Boardman, did not return a request for comment. In court, Howard said he was dying from AIDS as he addressed the judge, according to the Tampa Bay Times. He blamed his actions on the testosterone supplements he was taking to combat weight loss for causing his outburst.

“I’m a good person,” he said, according to the Times. “This incident just happened, and I wish I could undo it.”

U.S. Attorney Maria Chapa Lopez said in a statement: “Crimes perpetrated against people because of who they are or what they believe simply cannot be tolerated.”

Asgar has also filed a civil suit against Howard as well as another neighbor, his lawyer Randi Morales said.

The incident with Asgar came amid an uptick of hate crimes in 2016, which raised concern among anti-hate groups about what effect President Trump’s campaign and election, with its racially and ethnically charged rhetoric and policy initiatives, was having domestically. In 2016, about 1 in 5 of those hate crimes targeted a person’s religion, a quarter of those Muslims. Attacks on Muslims had risen 67 percent in 2015, and then another 19 percent in 2016, making it the year with the highest number of hate crimes against Muslims since 2001, the year of the 9/11 attacks. The FBI has yet to release its statistics for 2017.

Of 1,094 bias-related incidents that the Southern Poverty Law Center tracked in the month after Trump’s election, 134 took place at private homes, according to a report from the National Fair Housing Alliance, which it said raised concerns about whether bias crimes were bleeding into housing discrimination.

“At least with this message from the court and the Justice Department, we will feel more safer in searching for our new home,” Asgar said. “This was a painful journey. So much emotional distress and many worries.”