Scotty McCreery in courtroom as man is sentenced in home invasion

Scotty McCreery sat on the front row in a Wake County courtroom Tuesday as a man arrested in the 2014 home invasion that left the “American Idol” winner staring down the barrel of a pistol was sentenced to at least 17 years in prison.

Mikkail Jamal Shaw, 21, apologized to McCreery and his friends before Judge Paul Ridgeway handed down the sentence.

“I made a very bad decision, and I apologize for that,” Shaw said. “I have to take it in stride and better myself.”

Shaw’s grandfather, Haj Malik, testified at the hearing that his grandson was a follower, not a leader. Malik told the judge that he expected his grandson to take whatever sentence was given to him and try to grow from his mistake.

Former Wake County judge Abe Jones, who represented Shaw, urged Ridgeway to consider a sentence that would allow the defendant an opportunity to reform while in prison.

Shaw, whose parents left him and his siblings for others to raise, tried several times to take positive steps in his life. He enlisted in the Marines, but left after three months. He went to Miller-Motte College, but left after three months. He worked at Burlington Coat Factory, but left after a year there.

Jones asked Ridgeway to make prison counseling part of the sentence, and the judge did.

At the close of the brief hearing, McCreery left the courtroom quickly. Several of his friends walked over to Shaw’s grandfather and shook his hand before following the country star out of the courtroom.

In McCreery’s recently released book “Go Big or Go Home” and in 2014 TV interviews, he elaborated on the incident. Several men with guns barged into a Raleigh apartment about 2 a.m. on May 5, 2014, where the country music star and friends were watching the movie “Gladiator.” McCreery and his friends had brought home food from a local Cookout restaurant when they heard a knock at the door.

One of the men who lived in the apartment thought it was a neighbor and opened the door after seeing nothing alarming through the peephole. Several men barged in, according to a search warrant related to the case, and left with wallets, cellphones, money and a laptop from the singer and his friends.

The first man had an assault rifle, according to one of McCreery’s interviews, and held it against the sternum of the man who opened the door.

One of the robbers paced the floor. He held a pistol to McCreery’s head and against the head of another man in the apartment.

“Get down! Get on the floor and give us everything you got,” the intruders shouted, according to McCreery’s memoir. “There are shouts, screams, and curses. My friends are saying, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’”

McCreery, who won Season 10 of the FOX reality show in 2011, has talked about how “staring down the barrel of a pistol” helped put his life in perspective.

“This is real and raw, and I’m thinking I’m going to die any second,” McCreery recalled in his book.

He also said that the robbers did not recognize him.

“Maybe they’ve been too busy being thugs to keep track of Season 10 of ‘American Idol.’ I don’t know, and I don’t care. I just want them gone,” McCreery wrote.

This story was originally published June 28, 2016 at 10:33 AM with the headline "Scotty McCreery in courtroom as man is sentenced in home invasion."