Prosecutors recommend maximum sentence for Columbia terror suspect

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KMIZ)

Federal prosecutors are recommending a Columbia man who admitted to trying to conspire with terrorists spend the maximum 20 years in prison.

Robert Hester Jr. is set to be sentenced March 4 in Kansas City. He pleaded guilty in September to charges of trying to supply bomb-making materials to a terror group in late 2016.

Hester was charged in federal court in 2017. According to court documents, he was making plans to bomb a Kansas City bus station with people he believed were members of the terror group ISIS, but were actually undercover law enforcement personnel.

Federal agents contacted Hester after he made social media posts that investigators said were sympathetic to terrorists.

"Hester did not act in a vacuum," the U.S. attorney's office wrote in a memo recommending the sentence. "His conduct was part of a larger movement of growing support for ISIS in the United States and abroad. ISIS depended upon radicalization online, and especially through social media, to bring its persistent threat of violence to the United States and throughout the world.

"That Hester heard that call to violence, pronounced it, and sought to carry through on it, presented a significant threat of mass violence."