EVERETT — For two hours Theodore Ohms tried to outrun and outsmart the cops.
Those two hours earned him a dog bite to the leg and 20 years in prison.
“My question is: Was it really worth it? Was it really worth it?” Tamara Fietkau asked Ohms on Thursday before he was
sentenced to two decades behind bars.
Fietkau’s arm was nearly ripped off when Ohms crashed into her van on northbound I-5 as he tried to outrun Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies. Seconds earlier he had fired shots at a pursuing deputy, pointing the handgun through the sunroof of a Volkswagen Jetta. The deputy was not struck, but one bullet hit the patrol car’s undercarriage.
“He put at great risk the lives of several people who were simply trying to stop him,” Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Janice Albert said.
He endangered the lives of Fietkau and the other commuters traveling on the freeway on Sept. 1, she said.
The crime string started when Ohms, 24, refused to pull over for a sheriff’s deputy who noticed that the Jetta had cancelled license plates. Ohms later told police that he didn’t want to stop because he had a warrant for his arrest and didn’t want to go to jail.
The shooting, crash and manhunt stranded thousands of commuters. Rifle-toting police officers swarmed neighborhoods east and west of the freeway in search of the convicted felon.
A police dog tracked him to a wooded area in Everett’s Beverly Park neighborhood.
Ohms cost taxpayers a lot of money during those two hours.
The state Department of Transportation estimated that it cost about $400,000 to have I-5 shut down while police searched for Ohms and cleaned up the crash on the freeway, the judge was told.
Ohms wasn’t ordered to pay back those costs, but he likely will be ordered to pay for the damage he caused police vehicles as well as the medical bills for Fietkau.
Since his arrest Albert has listened to recordings of some of the jailhouse phone conversations between Ohms and others, she told the judge. In some of the early conversations, Ohms bragged about how many times he’d outrun police and laughed about how other inmates asked for his autograph.
After he pleaded guilty late last year Ohms told someone that what he’d done was stupid and he had been showing off for his then- girlfriend who was in the Jetta during the chase, Albert said.
Ohms apologized to Fietkau on Thursday.
“There’s no excuse for my actions,” he said.
He also took time to dispute a statement that he reportedly made to investigators.
Fietkau on Thursday told the judge that it bothered her that Ohms had called the crash a “fender bender.” She has nightmares about that day and feels awful that her family had to see her injured.
“I could have lost my arm. I could have lost my life,” she said.
Ohms on Thursday denied calling the crash a fender bender.
“I don’t know where you got that, but I never said that,” he said. “It happened. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m sorry.”
Fietkau told the judge that she hopes Ohms gets some help in prison. She said she hopes he realizes that his actions put others in danger.
“I’d like him to stop and think,” she said.
Ohms has an eighth-grade education and has severe drug addiction, said his attorney Cassie Trueblood with the Snohomish County Public Defender’s Association. He does not make rational decisions, she said.
“There is no excuse for his behavior,” she said. “I hope time can do something good for him. I don’t think he is a lost cause. I think he can come out of prison a better man.”
Ohms had a warrant for his arrest for failing to report to the state Department of Corrections. He was being supervised because of a drug conviction. He had been on community custody since March 2009.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463; hefley@heraldnet.com.
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