U.S. JANUARY 25, 2019 / 9:44 PM / UPDATED 21 HOURS AGO

Man gets 27 years in botched plot to bomb Colorado police station

Keith Coffman
3 MIN READ

DENVER (Reuters) - A man who pleaded guilty to planting a bomb outside a Colorado police station to avenge the killing of his friend almost a half-century ago was sentenced on Friday to 27 years in prison, federal prosecutors said.David Michael Ansberry, 66, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Denver for the botched bombing of the Nederland police station in 2016, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Jason Dunn said.

The homemade device failed to explode despite repeated attempts by Ansberry to detonate it with a cell phone, according to an FBI arrest warrant affidavit.

Ansberry belonged to an itinerant hippie group known as “Serenity, Tranquility and Peace,” or STP, according to a memorandum filed by prosecutors ahead of Ansberry’s guilty plea in July 2017.

The group had a presence in Nederland, a mountain community about 15 miles west of Boulder, in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the group’s members, Guy Goughnor, was killed in Nederland in 1971, according to prosecutors.

“The Nederland town marshal, Renner Forbes, eventually confessed to killing Goughnor and was convicted for that crime in 1998,” federal prosecutors wrote in court documents. Forbes has since died.

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