Student says weapons were for protection
The seminary student who tried to take an arsenal aboard a USAir flight at Tampa International Airport was sentenced Thursday to nearly five years in prison.
Roman Christian Regman’s explanation for the 9mm pistol, two hand grenades, six military-style knives, 181 rounds of ammunition and five explosive devices? A strange tale of fear and abuse at the hands of his stepfather.
The 22-year-old man’s mother, Cornelia Regman, testified in halting English that her son purchased the weapons to protect her and himself.
Cornelia Regman testified that after the death of Roman’s father, a colonel in the Romanian military, she was relentlessly wooed by a childhood friend.
She insisted in testimony she was not a ”mail-order bride.”
The pair married in 1989 in Romania, but the relationship quickly turned abusive when she refused to submit to his strange sexual fantasies, she testified.
”He wanted to keep me like a slave in the home.”
Roman Regman suspected his stepfather was bisexual and told his mother he feared he would be molested at night by the man, his mother said.
”My son was always scared of him,” she told U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday. ”He abused him mentally and emotionally.”
Ultimately, the two fled from him to Florida, she testified.
Her son was not trying to sneak the weapons on board the plane, she said. Regman told authorities he had the guns when he went through airport security on Aug. 21, according to police records.
Cornelia Regman said that when she told him she didn’t want the weapons in her Brooksville home, he agreed to store them in Pennsylvania where he was a student at the Orthodox Church of America’s St. Tikhon’s Seminary.
Roman Regman pleaded guilty in November to one count of possessing explosives and three counts of possessing an unregistered firearm.
As his mother wept, Merryday sentenced Roman Regman to four years and nine months in federal prison, followed by three years’ probation. He also ordered him into mental health counseling.