Tennessee man sentenced to 17.5 years for arson, trying to aid Hezbollah by giving info on Israeli gov members

(Oct. 21, 2026 / JNS)

Regan Darby Prater, 28, of Tullahoma, Tenn., was sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison for trying to provide information about more than 35,000 people purportedly affiliated with the Israeli government to someone he believed was associated with Hezbollah, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Prater was sentenced on Oct. 20 to 210 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. The court also ordered him to pay $1.289 million in restitution.

He obtained a document in 2019 that purportedly contained the individuals’ personal information and sent it to the suspected Hezbollah associate, writing, among other things, “start the hunt,” prosecutors said.

Hezbollah is a U.S.-designated terror group.

He also pleaded guilty to setting the Highlander Center on fire, a nonprofit research and education center in Newmarket, Tenn., in March 2019. Prater used a homemade incendiary device containing napalm, destroying a building and causing more than $1.2 million in damages.

Before the fire, Prater painted a symbol associated with the Iron Guard, a Romanian Nazi paramilitary organization, in the center’s parking lot.

He acknowledged that his white-supremacist ideology and opposition to the center’s faith-based educational priorities and ties to the civil-rights movement motivated the attack.