EVERETT — Maybe it was the movie he’d watched about a guy who gets shot by police. Or it could have been the TV commercial starring a hard-charging lawyer who vows to fight for wronged parents whose children have been taken away.
Stephen Dowdney, 45, cited the movie and commercial as possible explanations for what prompted him to rob nearly $50,000 from a Bothell bank vault in March.
“I’m being honest when I say I have no idea why I did what I did,” a contrite Dowdney said last week.
Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Eric Lucas questioned parts of Dowdney’s story, primarily the defendant’s version of why he’d lost custody of his son. The judge poked at Dowdney’s explanation, reading through the court documents in the man’s child custody case.
Then, Lucas sentenced Dowdney to 13 years in prison for the bank heist.
“Use the time to improve your life,” the judge said.
Dowdney is expected to appeal his conviction. He represented himself during most of the court proceedings, opting to keep a defense attorney on hand only as an advisor. He filed motions to dismiss the charge, arguing that prosecutors failed to follow court rules when they first filed a criminal complaint in district court.
After Dowdney lost his motions, he agreed to have Lucas decide the verdict based on police reports. The judge convicted Dowdney earlier this month of first-degree robbery with a deadly weapon.
He faced up to 16 years in prison. Dowdney has multiple other felony convictions. Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Matt Hunter acknowledged that Dowdney’s past crimes weren’t violent. A 2010 attempted robbery conviction out of King County was the result of a shoplifting incident involving a friend that turned bad.
Hunter also told the judge that Dowdney was a pleasant adversary in court.
“He’s been a nice guy, but he’s a thief,” the deputy prosecutor said.
Witnesses reported that a man rode up to the bank on a bicycle March 11. Dowdney was wearing an “old man” mask, cap, jacket, jeans taped at the ankles, brown tennis shoes and gloves. Once inside he pulled a gun, and threatened employees. He warned them that the bank was being watched and demanded that no one activate any hold-up alarms.
He ordered an employee to open the vault and to load up cash in a bag. He pedaled off, and employees called 911. A police dog found an abandoned bicycle nearby.
A tracking system was stashed with the loot and police were able to catch up with Dowdney in Lynnwood. A Snohomish County sheriff’s deputy spotted him in a Jeep Cherokee, and the bank robber attempted to escape into a nearby grocery store.
Dowdney was seen stripping off his clothes. He shed his jacket in a produce bin. He dropped a gun, knife, sheath and belt in the frozen food aisle. Officers caught up with him and took him to the ground. The gun turned out to be a fake.
“A lot of people have asked, ‘What the hell’s wrong with me?’” Dowdney said last week.
His late teens and early 20s were filled with bad decisions as he rebelled against his father, Dowdney said. He went straight for about 10 years, but his life began to crumble again when he and his wife lost custody of their son. He told Lucas that he’d called Child Protective Services after his wife began acting strange.
Under questioning from Lucas, Dowdney admitted that he didn’t do what state social workers demanded of him to win back his son.
“I hadn’t done anything to lose my child,” Dowdney said.
He started abusing alcohol and lost touch with reality, he said. Dowdney told the judge he wasn’t trying to justify his actions, just explain his frame of mind at the time.
“I’m not a violent individual,” he said. “It’s why I’m so ashamed of this crime. It’s an act of a bully, and that’s not what I ascribe to be.”
If the victims were here, he’d apologize to them, Dowdney said.
“I really regret what I did, not because I got caught, but because I allowed everyone else to beat me,” he said.
Lucas picked at the man’s story, saying he was fact-checking. Prosecutors hadn’t provided the judge a copy of the records for the dependency case. He looked them up through the county’s new online court records system.
“It sounded as if you’re portraying yourself as a victim,” Lucas said.
The sentencing process “is supposed to help you,” the judge said. He encouraged Dowdney to use his obvious intellect to solve his problems and to become someone that his son wants to get to know.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463; hefley@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @dianahefley
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