Vt. man who stole firearms from Brewer store gets 10 years

BANGOR – One of the two men who stole 15 guns including semiautomatic, high-capacity pistols and rifles from a Brewer military supply store a week after the deadly Virginia Tech shootings was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison.

U.S. District Judge John Woodcock imposed the maximum sentence on Tennyson Marceau, 20, of Lyndonville, Vt., in federal court in Bangor at the end of a three-hour hearing.

“This was a particularly brazen, calculated and dangerous crime, involving very, very serious weapons and very, very dangerous weapons,” Woodcock said of the April 23 break-in at Maine Military Supply on outer Wilson Street.

“In view of the Virginia Tech shootings, this crime had a more profound effect on this community and all of Maine,” the judge said. “This crime sent a chill down the spines of communities in the area. It was thanks to truly extraordinary efforts by law enforcement that this crime was solved and relief brought to these communities.”

Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people on the Blacksburg, Va., campus on April 16 before taking his own life. He legally purchased one of the pistols he used, a 9 mm Glock pistol, five weeks before the shooting.

All but four of the guns stolen from the Brewer store have been recovered, Woodcock said Wednesday.

During the hearing, the judge also sentenced Marceau to three years of supervised release after he completes his prison term and ordered him to pay more than $7,400 in restitution.

Marceau’s co-defendant, Sayer Tamiso, 19, of Hampden, is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 7. He also faces up to 10 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Marceau pleaded guilty in June to charges of conspiracy, theft of firearms from a federally licensed dealer and possession of stolen firearms. Tamiso pleased guilty to theft of firearms from a federally licensed dealer that same month.

The two met in Vermont before Tamiso moved to Maine a few years ago, according to court documents, and planned the burglary the week before while Marceau was visiting his friend. Both admitted in court to checking out the firearms at the store when they went in to buy a CO2 cartridge for a paint-ball gun.

About 2 a.m. April 23, they threw a landscaping rock through the display window, entered the store, and loaded a backpack and duffel bag with the 15 guns before leaving, federal prosecutors said. The robbery took about 90 seconds to complete, according to court documents.

The break-in was captured on the store’s security system, but neither of the burglars’ faces nor the license plate of the getaway vehicle could be seen. The car was identified as a 1994 white Jeep Cherokee.

Detective Robert Jordan of the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Department searched hundreds of similar vehicles registered in the area, the judge pointed out. Jordan systematically began to visit and interview Jeep owners. The 39th address he visited was the Hampden home of Tamiso’s grandmother, where Tamiso had been living, according to court documents.

Eventually, Tamiso led police to Marceau and both men were arrested in May.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joel Casey, who prosecuted the case, urged Woodcock to sentence Marceau to the 10-year maximum. If the federal sentencing guidelines rather than the statutory maximum had been imposed, Marceau would have faced between 13 and 151/2 years in prison because of the number of sentencing enhancements that applied. They included increases under the sentencing guidelines for the number of guns stolen, the fact that Marceau took at least 12 of them to Vermont to sell, and because some of them were assault rifles that were banned before 2006.

Virginia Villa, the federal public defender who represented Marceau, argued unsuccessfully that the enhancements should not have been applied. She also objected to Casey’s connecting local communities’ reactions to the burglary to the Virginia Tech shootings.

Woodcock overruled her objection.

jharrison@bangordailynews.net

990-8207