ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — An upstate New York man who admitted building a remote control for a mobile X-ray device intended to kill Muslims has been sentenced to eight years in prison.
Eric Feight, 57, of Hudson, pleaded guilty in 2014 to providing material support to terrorists. He was sentenced Wednesday in federal court in Albany.
Feight, a control systems engineer, told U.S. District Judge Gary Sharpe that co-defendant Glendon Scott Crawford first approached him to help create a mobile X-ray to sterilize medical waste, only later telling him it could be used to target Muslim terrorist cells operating in the U.S.
“Potential targets were never discussed with me,” Feight said. The married father of three said he became afraid to drop out after Crawford introduced him to two seemingly dangerous investors in the project, actually FBI undercover agents.
He procrastinated for six months in delivering the remote control while refusing to integrate it to directly operate the actual X-ray machine the agents brought, adding he didn’t think it would work, he said.
“You understood what it was you were doing,” Sharpe said. The machine could have worked and killed people as intended, he said.
“It’s bizarre somebody with your background, your intelligence and your experience would be listening to Crawford’s nonsense,” Sharpe said.
Feight’s sentence was shorter than the 15 years prosecutors requested.
Crawford, 51, an industrial mechanic at General Electric in Schenectady, where Feight was a subcontractor, was convicted of attempting to produce a deadly radiological device, conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction and distributing information about weapons of mass destruction. He could face 25 years in prison at his sentencing in March.
Investigators taped Crawford, a Navy veteran and also a family man with no criminal history, calling Islam “an opportunist infection of DNA” and approaching a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who was an FBI informant for support with the X-ray.
Feight and Crawford were arrested in 2013 and have been jailed since.
Investigators began tracking Crawford in 2012 after he approached two Albany-area Jewish groups. Authorities said the device was inoperable. Nobody was hurt.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
But there is no evidence of anti-Muslim bias in the United States. Marc Rubio said so.
Wait…what?! They must have been holding something really heavy over that guy’s head.
Trump: This is astounding what we do to our white christian citizens who actually confront terrorists and kill them. These men are hero in my book.
This sounds like a clear case of entrapment; the FBI provided an opportunity to break the law Feight would never have had otherwise, and when he wanted to back out, they intimidated him into breaking the law against his will. He also does not sound like an anti-Islamic terrorist, he sounds like an engineer hired to control a portable device to sterilize medical waste who found out it was something else and was then threatened should he back out.
Crawford is another story, sounds like he was justly convicted.
I am ashamed of a good number of folks in this country.