DENVER—A former hippie who left a homemade bomb outside the police station of a Colorado mountain town was sentenced to 27 years in prison on Jan. 25, after a judge found it was an act of terrorism intended to avenge the killing of a friend by the town marshal in 1971 even though it never exploded.
David Ansberry pleaded guilty to leaving the device containing the unstable chemical compound HMDT, a peroxide-based compound that has been used by al Qaida terrorists, in a duffel bag outside the station in a strip mall in Nederland on Oct. 11, 2016. U.S. District Judge Christine Arguello said the device was not a hoax and people could have died had Ansberry been successful in his attempts to detonate it remotely using a cellphone.
