Tennessee Man Gets 17½-Year Prison Term for Arson and Supposed Hezbollah Spy Plot

Regan Darby Prater, a 28-year-old from Tullahoma, Tennessee, received a 210-month federal prison term on Oct. 20, followed by three years of supervised release, for two serious offenses. He admitted to igniting the Highlander Center, a nonprofit research and education facility in Newmarket, Tennessee, in March 2019 with a homemade incendiary device containing napalm, destroying a building and inflicting more than $1.2 million in damage.

Prior to the arson, Prater painted a symbol associated with the Iron Guard, a Romanian Nazi paramilitary group, in the center’s parking lot, citing his white-supremacist beliefs and opposition to the center’s faith-based and civil-rights focus as motivation. In a separate scheme, he obtained a 2019 document that purportedly listed personal information on over 35,000 individuals linked to the Israeli government and sent it to a suspected Hezbollah associate, urging them to "start the hunt." The court also ordered Prater to pay $1.289 million in restitution for the arson damages.