Samuel Davis Kemp, who last summer was dragged from the U.S. Postal Service's Rutherford Avenue distribution center while telling his manager he would kill him, was sentenced Wednesday to two years of probation.

Kemp's appearance in federal court in Roanoke capped a case that began with a July 26 incident that the veteran postal worker blamed on a mixture of pain medication and alcohol.

"I did something very much out of character which will never happen again," Kemp, 59, told U.S. District Court Judge James Turk.

"I hurt a lot of people. ... I'm sorry for it."

At an October hearing in which he pleaded guilty to threatening his supervisor, the former postal worker testified that he had been called in unexpectedly for an all-night shift. Because he was having back problems, he went home during a meal break and took hydrocodone. Then he had several liquor drinks.

He did not realize that the medicine would intensify the effects of the alcohol and had no memory of what happened next, he said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Charlene Day said that Kemp returned to work, where a co-worker told Kemp's supervisor that Kemp smelled of alcohol. When Kemp was called to the manager's office, he was belligerent. Police were called and officers ended up pepper-spraying Kemp and taking him to a hospital, where he was found to have a blood-alcohol content of 0.289 percent.

At Wednesday's hearing, Day argued that Kemp's tussle with police warranted bumping up the sentencing guidelines to a range that did not include probation.

Kemp's attorney, Randy Cargill of the federal public defenders office, protested, saying that a state charge of resisting arrest had been dismissed, and that Kemp had pleaded guilty to threatening the supervisor, not the police. He had only voiced threats, not made physical contact with the manager, Cargill said.

Cargill emphasized Kemp's decades of postal work and service with the Marines in the Vietnam War. But he also noted that years ago, his client was convicted on related impaired driving and manslaughter charges.

"He is a decent man, but he has a problem with alcohol," Cargill said.

Turk said he was troubled by Kemp's prior convictions but would give him the benefit of the doubt. In the July incident, "You really didn't know what was going on," Turk said.

The judge said Kemp's first four months of probation would be under house arrest, with electronic monitoring to ensure he left only for church or necessities such as doctors appointments. Turk said Kemp would be billed for the $4.74 daily cost of monitoring.