A Tullahoma, Tennessee, man is set to spend more than 17 years in federal prison after being sentenced in the 2019 burning of a building belonging to the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee. The building was valued at more than $1.2 million.
Regan Darby Prater, 28, was sentenced Wednesday to 210 months in prison and three years of supervised release, and he was ordered to pay almost $1.3 million in restitution for arson and attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Prater pleaded guilty to the charges in April.
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Prater used what is described by federal officials as a “sparkler bomb” — a napalm-based incendiary device ignited by a common sparkler — to destroy the building maintained by the Highlander Center, a nonprofit research and education center in New Market, federal officials said.
As part of his guilty plea, Prater admitted he drove from Tullahoma to the Highlander Center, ignited the sparkler bomb and destroyed a building.
Before detonating the bomb, Prater spray-painted the symbol of the Iron Guard, a 1930s-era paramilitary arm of the Romanian Nazi Party, in the center’s parking lot, officials said. The same symbol was engraved on the rifle used in the terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, just two weeks prior to the Highlander arson in Tennessee.
Prater acknowledged he committed the arson at the Highlander Center, federal officials said, due to his white supremacist ideology and as a response to the Highlander Center’s faith-based educational priorities and its connections with the Civil Rights Movement.
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Prater also admitted to providing material support in 2019 to Hezbollah, which the U.S. has recognized as a foreign terrorist organization since 1997, officials said.
Prater obtained a document purporting to contain personally identifiable information of more than 35,000 people purportedly affiliated with the government of Israel. He provided the document to a person he believed to be associated with Hezbollah, stating, among other things: “Start the hunt.”
The case was investigated by the FBI’s Nashville Office with assistance from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
— Compiled by staff writer Ben Benton