BELLEFONTE, Pa. — The 38-year-old man who said God led him to kill a gas station attendant in Snow Shoe Township with a machete, said yesterday God also told him to plead guilty to murder in the first degree.

Eric Jerome Fant was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Avinash Kaushal, 50, in which he used a 2-foot-long machete to behead the man after robbing the cash register at a Citgo gas station in Snow Shoe.

Yesterday at the Centre County Courthouse, Bellefonte, Judge Charles C. Brown Jr. sentenced Fant and ordered him to also pay restitution of more than $6,000.

Fant, a native of Memphis, Tenn., withdrew his innocent pleas to escape the death penalty and pleaded guilty to first degree murder and robbery charges in connection with the Feb. 11 robbery of a gas station and decapitation of an employee in the township off of Interstate 80.

District Attorney Ray Gricar said the plea bargain for first degree murder was the only option to seek.

"The question for me to consider was 'What was the likelihood of getting the death penalty,'" Gricar said.

Gricar initially wanted the death penalty, but because they would have to get past the insanity plea — the original option made by Fant's public defenders.

"There's no doubt in my mind that he's mentally ill," Gricar said. "We have avoided the risk of his being found not guilty by reason of insanity, and the only thing we paid for that, was giving up the death penalty."

Gricar spoke to Kaushal's family by phone and they agreed to the plea.

Fant said after the hearing God told him to kill Kaushal and to plead guilty. "I knew I would plea guilty when I told them I did it," Fant said. "God told me to."

Feb. 11, Fant pulled off I-80 at Snow Show and robbed the Citgo convenience store where Kaushal was working. Fant told Kaushal, an Indian native who was living in the United States on a work visa, to lie on the floor, then slashed the back of his neck with a machete.

Authorities say Fant's crime spree began in South Carolina, where he is accused of stealing a car outside of Charleston. He then drove to Dearing, Ga., where authorities say he killed 65-year-old Dorothy C. Street in her home. Street died from "severe injuries to the head and neck."

Fant continued to Tennessee, authorities say, where he is charged in a Feb. 9 attack of Annette Richeson 42, at a clothing store, when she received serious injuries to her hands and arms.

After the murder and robbery in Snow Shoe, Fant continued on I-80 when New Jersey State Police stopped to question him while he was pulled over sleeping in the car. After a 10-mile chase, police captured him and police said he had blood on his clothes. A videotape of the chase showed Fant throwing a machete out of the car.

Gricar said he expected Fant to be extradited to face charges in a least one of the other states but had not spoken to the other prosecutors about where Fant would go next.

The Associated Press Contributed to this article.