PARIS – Two Massachusetts teenagers have received four-year prison sentences for robbing the Big Apple store in Bethel so they could get money to buy heroin.

Brian Kinlin Jr. and Daniel Shannon, both 19, of Rockland, Mass., pleaded guilty Thursday in Oxford County Superior Court to charges of felony robbery and receiving stolen property in connection with the heist at the Railroad Street convenience store last December.

Judge Ellen Gorman went along with the recommended sentences despite several letters from the teens’ relatives in Massachusetts, pleading for leniency.

The boys were staying at a condominium owned by Shannon’s parents at Sunday River Ski Resort in Newry when they entered the Big Apple store, with Shannon brandishing a .22-caliber handgun.

A store videotape showed Kinlin yelling at customers at the store while Shannon ordered store clerk Kelly Breton to empty the cash register.

The pair fled by car with $583.37 in cash and checks, which they later admitted they were going to use to drive to Brockton, Mass., to buy heroin.

Twenty minutes after the robbery, the pair crashed into a tree near Stearns Hill Road on Route 26 in Paris.

At the accident scene, police found cash strewn about in the car. Shannon later showed police where he hid the gun in the side body molding in the trunk.