LEWISTON – A former Lewiston man was sentenced to 300 years in prison Monday for the 2005 murders of a couple and their two children in New Jersey.

Edward McDonald, 28, was sent to prison after he was convicted in the January 2005 killings in which an Egyptian couple and their two young daughters were bound, gagged and stabbed.

Killed in what was described as a robbery gone out of control were Hossam Armanious, 47, his wife Amal Garas, 37, and their two daughters, ages 16 and 9.

“No matter what sentence this honorable court imposes, both sides of the Armanious family and myself believe that when he dies, Satan has prepared a special place in hell for him and a special demon to attend to his needs,” a prosecutor said in a New Jersey court, just before the sentence was handed down.

Police in Jersey City say McDonald and Hamilton Sanchez, 33, killed the family with robbery as their motive. McDonald had rented a second-floor apartment above the family in preparation for the crime, police said.

Sanchez is scheduled to stand trial in September.

Prosecutors said the family was killed after the 9-year-old girl wiggled out of her bonds and recognized McDonald during the heist. McDonald was accused of killing the girl to avoid being identified. Investigators said the two men robbed the family because they were desperate for money to cover drug transactions.

Convicted of peddling cocaine in the Lewiston area in 2001, McDonald will spend the rest of his life behind bars, with the nearest parole date set in 2263.

“These brutal murders have a direct connection to the Lewiston area,” said Maine Drug Enforcement Agency Supervisor Gerry Baril. “That connection is a line of coke.”

In the spring of 2001, special agents from the Lewiston office of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency arrested McDonald and another man after they were caught with 580 grams of cocaine outside a Poland mobile home.

Lewiston drug agents described McDonald as a key player in the local drug trafficking network that provided coke to the Twin Cities and surrounding towns. They believed he was moving as much as a kilogram of coke between Maine and New Jersey each week.

Drug agents from the Lewiston office snagged the two men while keeping a mobile home in Poland under surveillance as they investigated McDonald, police said. Investigators believed the pair was going to the mobile home to prepare the coke for distribution in towns throughout Androscoggin County.

The confiscated cocaine would have fetched between $40,000 and $57,000 if cut and sold in grams on the street, police said.

A year before that bust, McDonald was indicted locally on charges of drug trafficking and conspiracy to traffic in crack. He pleaded guilty to both charges but failed to show up in court for sentencing, police said.

After the MDEA arrested him, McDonald was convicted in U.S. District Court in Portland. He served nearly three years in federal prison on drug trafficking charges. Police said he had been out of prison for about a year when the Armanious family was killed.

For some, McDonald’s graduation from drug dealer to killer illustrates the violence of the cocaine trafficking trade.

New Jersey police who investigated the slayings called officials at the MDEA for information about McDonald. He was on federal parole after serving time for drug dealing in Maine, officials said.

“Three hundred years is a long sentence,” said Baril, the MDEA supervisor. “But it won’t bring those victims back. The horrors for this family are indelible in the minds of the community.”