Michigan Teen Sentenced in School Terror Plot
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}A teenager accused of plotting a massacre at his suburban Detroit (search) high school was sentenced Thursday to at least 4 1/2 years in prison for threatening terrorism and amassing an arsenal in his home.
"Though he has to pay the piper, we want to give him as much a chance for salvation as we can," Circuit Court Judge Matthew Switalski (search) said in sentencing Andrew Osantowski. "You still have a future."
Osantowski, 18, wept while the judge spoke.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"I look back and realize how lost I was," he told the court before he was sentenced. "I am truly sorry for the things I have done. My family never raised me like this."
The case appears to be among the first in the nation in which anti-terrorism laws were applied to school violence, according to law enforcement officials.
Osantowski was found guilty last month of threatening an act of terrorism and using a computer to threaten terrorism after authorities found Internet chat room messages in which he wrote that he might kill students at Chippewa Valley High (search).
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Each charge was punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Osantowski also was convicted of receiving and concealing guns and possessing a firearm in a felony.
Osantowski was arrested in September after a girl he had written to in the chat room shared the messages with her father, a police officer. In some of the messages, Osantowski said he was bullied at school and at home and wanted to take revenge.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"I can't imagine going through life without killing a few people," he wrote.
A search of Osantowski's home yielded weapons, ammunition, bomb-making paraphernalia, videotapes showing the teen in possession of assault weapons, a Nazi flag, and printed materials about Adolf Hitler and white supremacy.
His lawyer argued the jury never should have been allowed to see the weapons.