KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — A federal judge has ordered a 28-year-old Tullahoma man to spend 210 months, or 17 and a half years, behind bars for burning a building at the Highlander Center in New Market and for trying to help a foreign terrorist group, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday.
Regan Darby Prater also faces three years of supervised release after prison and must repay $1,289,000. He had pleaded guilty in April 2026 to an arson charge and to attempting to give material support to a designated terrorist organization. Investigators had arrested him on the arson charge in April 2025.
Federal prosecutors said Prater made the trip from his Tullahoma home to the New Market campus in March 2019 and set off a homemade fire bomb made with napalm and lit by a sparkler. The blaze leveled a building and did more than $1.2 million in damage. Before lighting it, he painted the emblem of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist militia from the 1930s, on the parking lot pavement.
In his plea, Prater admitted white-supremacist beliefs drove the attack, along with hostility toward the faith-based mission of the center and its place in civil rights history.
The second count stems from 2019, when Prater got hold of a file said to list personal details on more than 35,000 people tied to the Israeli government. He passed it to someone he thought was linked to Hezbollah, which the United States has listed as a terrorist group since 1997.
The Highlander Center has long served as a training ground for grassroots organizers and social movements, and it played a well-known part in the civil rights era.
The FBI Nashville Field Office led the investigation with help from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
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