Former U.S. soldier gets 45 years for helping neo-Nazi group in plot to kill troops

Prosecutors said Eric Melzer, 24, of Kentucky, gave information about the location and layout of a U.S. military installation overseas to the anti-government group Order of Nine Angles.

A former U.S. Army soldier was sentenced Friday to 45 years in prison, the maximum, for plotting what prosecutors described as a "murderous ambush" overseas on members of his own troop.

Eric Melzer, a 24-year-old from Kentucky, shared location and layout information about a sensitive U.S. military installation to the violent, anti-government, neo-Nazi organization Order of Nine Angles. He was arrested in June 20020 and pleaded guilty in 2022.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Melzer intended to spark a jihadist terror attack on his own unit or any other that took up its location in order to undermine the United States abroad and further the goals of O9A, a largely United Kingdom-based group that has sympathized with al Qaeda.

"Melzer allegedly attempted to orchestrate a murderous ambush on his own unit by unlawfully revealing its location, strength, and armaments to a neo-Nazi, anarchist, white supremacist group,” then-Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York at the time, Audrey Strauss, said in a statement at the time.

She said he was motivated by racism.

Melzer was convicted of attempting to murder U.S. service members, providing and attempting to provide material support to terrorists, and illegally transmitting national defense information.

"He is not the unrepentant monster the prosecutors and the Court portrayed him to be," defense attorney Jonathan Marvinny said by email. "He deserved punishment, but he also deserved the chance to prove he could do something positive with his life. Today’s sentence took that opportunity from him." 

Marvinny and two other attorneys on Melzer's defense team argued in a sentencing memo last year that Melzer should get 15 years, plus 10 years' supervised release.

The memo depicted Melzer as a product of neglect, abuse and a troubled family who found himself "in thrall to a bizarre satanic cult" and doubled down on his involvement when subjected to a Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 on base, where he was " drinking heavily, and spending far too much time online."

Prosecutors said Melzer was involved with the group starting in 2017 and joined the U.S. Army the next year specifically to help O9A "infiltrate its ranks," according to a Justice Department statement Friday.

In 2019, he deployed to Italy as a member of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, prosecutors said. It was then, they contend, that Melzer broadened his extremism diet, consuming propaganda from the group then known as ISIS, or the Islamic State.