A West Rogers Park man was sentenced Wednesday to 25 months in prison for mailing a letter threatening to blow up a Jewish high school.

A half-dozen friends and neighbors testified that Mohammad Alkaramla, 25, was a peaceful man with many friends in his multiethnic neighborhood until his estranged wife moved to Jordan with their son. The caring man known to friends as “Mo” then became depressed and feared Middle East strife would make life dangerous for his son, they said.

Alkaramla, who was born in Jordan, mailed a letter in late 2008 to the Ida Crown Jewish Academy, threatening to plant a bomb there if Israel didn’t withdraw troops from the Gaza Strip within two weeks, said his father, Tawiq Alkaramla.

“He knows all people are the same,” his father said to U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer. “He went crazy like with stress. … He thinks Gaza is by Jordan. All he knows is what he sees on the TV.”

At a bench trial in July, Pallmeyer found Mohammad Alkaramla guilty of a single count of making threats against the school. Investigators traced his fingerprints and a stamp on the letter to his home. They found he had searched for targets on the Internet in the days before the letter was mailed.

“Will Give You until 01.15.2009 to back OFF from Gaza in Palestine or will set our explosive in your areas,” the letter said in part.

Alkaramla, who has been in custody since July, briefly read from a written statement.

“I realize I was in a downfall of my life, thinking of myself,” he said of the decision to make the threat. “I regret and am deeply sorry for all my troubles.”

While there was no evidence in Alkaramla’s trial that he intended to carry out his threat, Pallmeyer ruled that he deserved a stiff sentence because he targeted schoolchildren. Officials at the school adopted strict safety measures in the weeks after the letter arrived and eventually built a wall around the school.

“He lived near the school. If you walk by it, you have to see there are children there,” Pallmeyer said. “On some level, he must have known those threats could not have done anything to make his son any safer.”

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(Source: Chicago Tribune)