AUBURN — A Greene man who plotted the murder of 20-year-old Romeo Parent III of Lewiston in 2013 and drove the victim and his killers to the spot where he was slain was sentenced Tuesday to serve 10 years in prison.

Androscoggin County Superior Court Justice MaryGay Kennedy told Nathan Morton, 25, before leaving the bench in the courtroom: “None of this makes any sense. None of it.”

The only motive provided by prosecutors in Parent’s murder was that he had implicated William True, 21, of Lewiston in a residential burglary the two had committed a week earlier. True had spent the weekend in jail; Parent had not.

The term: “Snitches get stitches” was a common phrase heard in testimony during two trials last year in which True and Michael McNaughton, 27, of Lewiston were convicted of murder stemming from Parent’s killing.

Morton served as the state’s primary witness, putting both defendants at the scene of the crime, having driven them to the remote area in Greene in his Volkswagen Passat sedan. A plan hatched by Morton, McNaughton and True a day before Parent’s murder was to lure him to the wooded area in Greene on the pretense of burglarizing a camp for drugs.

Much of the lifestyles and relationships among the people involved, directly and indirectly, in Parent’s slaying revolved around the use, sale and purchase of illegal drugs.

Morton had been charged with murder in the April 9, 2013, killing of Parent. That charge was dropped by prosecutors on Tuesday.

More than a year after Parent’s murder and shortly before McNaughton’s trial, Morton told police that True had participated in Parent’s murder. Until Morton’s June interview with police, no witness had placed True at the scene of the murder. True had been charged only with hindering apprehension for his part in moving Parent’s body a day after he was killed.

Parent’s stripped and bound body was later recovered from Jug Stream in Monmouth. Morton had not only provided his car for the transport of Parent’s body, but he proposed the sites of the murder and the dumping of the body.

Morton testified that he drove McNaughton, True and Parent to the murder scene and waited in his car, high on drugs, listening to music and making drug deals while Parent was being killed. Morton said he walked into the woods with McNaughton after Parent was killed and saw his lifeless body lying on the ground and saw True standing nearby. Morton hunted for McNaughton’s screwdriver that was used to stab Parent in the back of the neck while he was strangled with a homemade garrote fashioned from a bicycle cable and wooden dowels.

In a plea agreement, Morton pleaded guilty last year to charges of conspiracy to commit murder and hindering apprehension or prosecution. On the first charge, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison with half of that time suspended, plus four years of probation. On the second charge, he was sentenced to 10 years, to be served at the same time as his sentence on the first charge.

When freed, Morton will be barred from possession or use of alcohol and illegal drugs with random searches and tests. He must undergo substance abuse counseling and have no contact with any of his four co-defendants, including McNaughton and True.

Kennedy read a letter penned by Parent’s mother, Rita Hamel.

Parent was “the kind of person you could be so mad at that you couldn’t stand to be in the same room with one minute and then be best friends with him five minutes later. He had a goofy personality always would try to make you laugh even if you didn’t want to,” Hamel wrote.

“I miss him so very much and I hear him in my mind every single day,” she wrote.

The week before Parent was murdered and the last time she saw her son, Hamel gave him a haircut and they hugged.

“I told him to stay out of trouble. He said he would,” she wrote. She spoke with him by phone the following Sunday, two days before his murder.

“He seemed fine,” she wrote. “He had no idea that people were plotting to kill him.”

Parent suffered from behavioral health issues for most of his life and did not understand social cues that most reasonable people would understand, Hamel wrote.

The quality of the company he kept had declined during the last years of his life, she wrote, as Parent’s circles increasingly included generally homeless young people involved in drugs and petty crimes in an effort to survive life on the streets. Morton was one of those people that Parent encountered.

“His opportunities to grow up and change his life were taken away,” she wrote about her son.

When Parent was a high school student in 2009, Hamel returned to college to study criminal justice with the idea of working to help juveniles in the justice system. She graduated last year.

“I no longer know whether I can do what I set out to do,” she wrote. “I don’t know if I can work with juveniles or young adults and not see my son in them. When I lost my son, I lost my direction and I don’t know which way I’m going anymore.”

Hamel wrote that she and her daughter continue to struggle every day with how go on living.

“There is a great emptiness that will never be filled,” she wrote.

“Romeo suffered terribly in his last moments in life, which was needlessly taken from him based on a decision that Nathan Morton made.”

Hamel wrote she “will never understand why Parent was murdered in an effort to protect a small criminal organization.

“A piece of my heart has been torn out,” she wrote.

She watched Morton testify at trial, but senses he has no remorse, she wrote.

“What I did see was a smug and cocky kid with no regard for the value of human life.” Morton “has shown that he’s a person that will do whatever it takes to meet his needs and wants. He knew what was going to happen to Romeo, and he chose not to do anything to prevent it. He had opportunities to do the right thing, but continued to make bad choices,” she wrote.

Morton’s plea agreement required that he testify truthfully and accurately what happened to her son, but Hamel believes Morton told so many lies to protect himself and others involved that it’s hard to tell whether he has upheld his part of the agreement.

“No matter what sentence is imposed, it will never be enough,” she wrote. “He will one day be released and he will go home . . . Romeo is never coming home.”

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