How do I perform a Unit Test using threads?

Executive Summary: When assertion errors are thrown in the threads, the unit test doesn't die. This makes sense, since one thread shouldn't be allowed to crash another thread. The question is how do I either 1) make the whole test fail when the first of the helper threads crashes or 2) loop through and determine the state of each thread after they have all completed (see code below). One way of doing the latter is by having a per thread status variable, e.g., "boolean[] statuses" and have "statuses[i] == false" mean that the thread failed (this could be extended to capture more information). However, that is not what I want: I want it to fail just like any other unit test when the assertion errors are thrown. Is this even possible? Is it desirable?

I got bored and I decided to spawn a bunch of threads in my unit test and then have them call a service method, just for the heck of it. The code looks approximately like:

Thread[] threads = new Thread[MAX_THREADS];
for( int i = 0; i < threads.length; i++ ) {
    threads[i] = new Thread( new Runnable() {
        private final int ID = threadIdSequenceNumber++;
        public void run() {
            try {
                resultRefs[ID] = runTest( Integer.toString( ID ) ); // returns an object
            }
            catch( Throwable t ) { 
                // this code is EVIL - it catches even
                // Errors - don't copy it - more on this below
                final String message = "error testing thread with id => "
                            + ID;
                logger.debug( message, t );
                throw new IllegalStateException( message, t ); 
                // need to wrap throwable in a 
                // run time exception so it will compile
            }
        }
    } );
}

After this, we will loop through the array of threads and start each one. After that we will wait for them all to finish. Finally, we will perform some checks on