BREMERTON — By pleading guilty and signing on the county prosecutor’s dotted line, 37-year-old Luke Travis Groves could walk free.
He could say that on one day in 2008, he illegally possessed a firearm. He’d be on the hook for some court fines but he’d be able to go home to his wife, Rebecca, and their 4-year-old daughter, Sophia.
But he won’t plead.
He believes doing so would be a lie.
And so Groves will fight his charge and go to trial, likely this week. The stakes are high — if he’s convicted by a jury, he’ll likely be sentenced to between five and 10 years behind bars.
He spent last week working on a living will, so that if he goes to prison and something happens to his wife, his daughter will go to family.
As to his criminal charges, Groves and his wife won’t budge. The prison time doesn’t matter. Pleading guilty means lying.
“At least I’ll be able to sleep at night knowing I upheld my beliefs,” Groves said.
Groves’ current legal problems began when he came back to Bremerton after a Thanksgiving trek to see his family in Shelton on Nov. 28, 2008. When he approached his home around 4 p.m., he noticed a window broken on his front door.
He called the cops, who came and searched the residence. No one was found inside; nothing was found to be taken.
That included a Remington .22-caliber long rifle and an Accu-Tek .380 handgun, firearms that Groves’ wife, Rebecca, had owned before the couple met.
The officers ran Groves’ name through a criminal database and found him to be a felon. He was arrested.
He recalls thinking, “Someone broke into my house, and I’m the one going to jail for my wife’s guns.”
Groves is indeed a felon. He pleaded guilty in 1990, when he was 18, to breaking into a Shelton-area school. He served nine days in jail, did several hundred hours of community service, and was on probation for two years, his wife Rebecca said.
But nothing in his paperwork from Mason County Superior Court warns him he was not to possess firearms, he claims.
Groves did receive a letter from the Department of Corrections that said he could not own guns, but he believed the so-called “firearms notice” covered only the time he was on probation for the burglaries.
Compounding his confusion, Groves said, was one of his careers. He worked as a seasonal firefighter for the federal Bureau of Land Management in the mid- and late-’90s, each time disclosing to his employer his felony conviction.
There were no hang ups with the federal government, he said, noting he often worked with potent chemicals to conduct controlled burns.
He met his wife, Rebecca, in 2003. The guns came with her, and there wasn’t much discussion about them, he said.
They know now that a hearing before a judge would’ve avoided their current mess by getting his gun rights reinstated.
“If I’d known better, he’d have his gun rights back,” Rebecca said. “If he’d known better he’d have his gun rights back.”
But under the law, Groves did not have the right to own firearms, according to Kitsap County Prosecutor Russ Hauge.
“It’s a weapons crime, and the law is very clear,” he said.
He sees the case has many “mitigating factors” and said his office has reflected those in attempting to resolve the case.
But if his office “looked the other way” on the case, it would be violating its obligation to prosecute law breakers, Hauge said.
Groves won’t concede, even with an offer of zero jail time on the table, he admits. He’s adamant he did not know he couldn’t be around guns past his probation for burglary, and the government bolstered his belief by letting him handle volatile chemicals as a firefighter despite his disclosure of being a felon.
Groves now works for a company sealing and waterproofing crawl spaces and basements.
“This man can keep us debt-free on $10 an hour,” Rebecca said. “And they’re going to put him in prison.”
He’ll choose prison if, in his mind, it means his dignity remains intact.
“He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t lie. He did a stupid thing and he paid for it,” Rebecca said of the 1990 burglary. “He wouldn’t be able to look himself in the mirror knowing he lied.”
Information from: Kitsap Sun, www.kitsapsun.com/
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