A white Colorado supremacist and self-proclaimed neo-Nazi was sentenced to more than 19 years in prison for conspiring to blow up a Colorado synagogue, the Justice Department announced Friday.
Richard Holzer, 28, received a 235-month sentence, equivalent to about 19 and a half years in prison for his plot to attack the Temple Emanuel de Pueblo synagogue, according to U.S. prosecutors for the Colorado district. Holzer was also sentenced to 15 years of supervised release.
Holzer, who was arrested and charged with a federal hate crime in 2019, pleaded guilty to his charges in a lawsuit settlement last October. He admitted to undercover FBI agents at the time of his arrest that he wanted to “do something to tell Jews in the community that they are not welcome in Pueblo and that they should leave or die,” according to the Justice Department. .
Federal officials said Holzer’s scheme to set off explosives in the synagogue met the definition of domestic terrorism, although the dynamite and pipe bombs he received from undercover FBI agents could not have been detonated.
“Mr. Holzer went to a place of worship for violence and destruction to expel people from the Jewish faith from our community,” Michael Schneider, the FBI’s special agent in the Denver office, said in a statement.
Holzer also made threats of violence on social media and posted a photo of himself pointing a gun and wearing clothes with white supremacist symbols on his Facebook account in 2019.
Colorado District Attorney Jason Dunn said Holzer’s sentence was “a step forward in our ongoing fight against extremism.”