LITTLE ROCK — A Little Rock man who can’t seem to stop making bombs pleaded guilty Monday to a federal charge accusing him of making one in his backyard in 2010 that exploded between his legs and left him a partial amputee.

In exchange for Aaron Lewis’ guilty plea to a charge of making an unregistered destructive device, prosecutors agreed to drop another pending bomb charge against the 38-year-old man.

That charge concerns a pipe bomb he gave his therapist last spring while she was evaluating him in connection with the earlier charge. In giving her the “gift,” she told North Little Rock police, he described it as “artwork.”

Prosecutors said that was the third bomb charge that Lewis has racked up in federal court since 2005, when St. Francis County sheriff’s deputies and federal agents stopped him in a car his girlfriend was driving in Forrest City. Inside was a pipe bomb that authorities said he planned to detonate as a diversionary tactic while the couple burglarized an X-rated video store.

Lewis pleaded guilty on Feb. 17, 2006, to a charge of possessing an unregistered destructive device, a pipe bomb in that case, and served three years of probation.

In his guilty plea Monday, Lewis agreed with the facts that Assistant U.S. Attorney John Ray White said he would have presented to a jury if the case resulting in leg injuries had gone to trial.

On the afternoon of Oct. 5, 2010, Little Rock police and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were called to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences after a patient showed up with injuries caused by an explosion, White said.

A woman who accompanied Lewis to the hospital told police that Lewis said he had been in the backyard of his home at 4 Ohio Cove, stuffing a green metal cylinder that resembled an oxygen tank with match heads, when the homemade bomb went off between his legs.

Lewis told the woman that he had been making the bomb so that he could blow a hole in the ground and build an underground structure.

Inside his home, ATF agents later found the exploded green canister.

“The way it was described to me, it was split open like a banana peel,” White told Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Miller. “A piece of it went through the ceiling and got stuck in a rafter.”

In accepting Lewis’ guilty plea, Miller shook his head and said: “I pause, because it appears to me that this case is being brought, I think, because the government has to.”

He told Lewis that if he was making an explosive device in his backyard, even if his intention wasn’t to do any harm, “the government has to bring this charge because it can’t let people get hurt.”

Miller asked attorneys whether there were any emotional or mental issues involved and instructed them to be ready to explain the extenuating circumstances at Lewis’ sentencing to help him determine the appropriate sentence.

“If I felt that Mr. Lewis was building this to blow things up, there wouldn’t be a question,” Miller said, referring to the type of sentence he would impose.

Lewis faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. A sentencing date won’t be set until a pre-sentence investigation is completed by U.S. probation officers.

Court records indicate that Lewis underwent a mental evaluation, but the results of it weren’t publicly available.

The case that White said would be dismissed stemmed from a call that North Little Rock police received on Feb. 29, 2012, to the Family Service Agency at 628 W. Broadway.

Therapist Marlyn Lipton, then 57, handed police a 4-inch copper pipe that was sealed on both ends and had a fuse sticking out of one end, saying Lewis had given her the object a couple of days earlier as a gift.

She told police that Lewis gave it to her after seeing some artwork on a shelf in her office, pulling the pipe from his pocket and saying: “Look what I made. This is my artwork.”

He then handed it to her, saying: “It is for good luck.”

An affidavit filed by an ATF agent in support of a criminal complaint and an arrest warrant said Lipton asked her client whether the device was “some type of bomb,” and he replied that “it was not and that it was filled with fiberglass and crystal.”

Two days later, however, after the pipe had sat on Lipton’s shelf alongside her other “artwork,” and after she examined it several times and “thought nothing of it,” she reviewed Lewis’ file and “discovered that he had made similar devices in the past” that had “caused harm to himself and to property,” the affidavit said.

That’s when Lipton alerted the agency’s management, who called police.

Lewis has been jailed since last July, when U.S. Magistrate Judge David Young determined that he presented a threat to the safety of the community if released. He will remain jailed until his sentencing date.

Lewis was represented at his plea hearing by attorney Lance Sullenberger III.

Arkansas, Pages 11 on 02/26/2013