DAYTON — An Indiana man convicted of killing a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration confidential informant at an Englewood ambush was sentenced Tuesday to life without the possibility of parole.

Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Frances E. McGee told Anthony Croom that his crime was one of the most heinous she had ever heard of, and the most heinous she had seen without death specifications.

Croom was convicted Feb. 3 of five charges: aggravated murder, two counts of murder and two counts of felonious assault, plus firearm specifications on all of those charges. For the purposes of sentencing, the murder and felonious assault counts merged into the aggravated murder count. All charges deal with the Aug. 2, 2007, death of Anthony Hurd.

“Anthony Hurd was my son, my best friend, and the one person on Earth that I knew loved me unconditionally, despite my faults,” his father, Thomas Hurd, told the judge. “I will never heal from the loss of my son.”

Thomas Hurd also said that he had considered killing Croom, and could have because he tracked him after learning he was a suspect in his son’s death. Hurd also said that, had he wanted to, he could have smuggled a plexiglass shank into the courtroom and killed Croom before anyone knew what was happening.

“If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” Hurd told Croom. “That’s not what I want for you. I want ongoing suffering for you.”

Croom told McGee that he would pray for the Hurd family because “the only thing he got was a cover up.”

Croom, 43, of Bunker Hill, Ind., was indicted in October 2010.

At the time of his death, Anthony Hurd, who was from Richmond, Ind., was in Ohio hiding from three men who had sold him crack cocaine while he was wearing a wire, according to trial testimony. The buys were in the summer of 2006.

Prosecutors claim Croom was hired to kill Hurd to derail criminal prosecutions of those three men, who are all from Richmond.

The men — Rollie Mitchell, Tyree Smith and Billy Hicks — were charged in state court in July 2007, just weeks before Hurd, 24, was shot eight times as he sat in the passenger seat of a Chevrolet Blazer that was in the parking lot of a Sunoco gas station, 1070 S. Main St.

A Wayne County (Indiana) Sheriff’s Office detective testified that the charges in state court against Mitchell, Hicks and Smith were dismissed because of Hurd’s death.