EVERETT — His legal troubles didn’t end last week when he was sentenced to 8½ years in prison for vehicular homicide.
On Thursday, the same day he was sentenced, Snohomish County prosecutors filed charges of second-degree domestic violence assault against Michael Spieker.
Jurors found at trial that the 28-year-old Mountlake Terrace man had been drinking and using cannabis before being involved in a crash that killed his friend Staci Laugle in the summer of 2017.
The assault charge is separate and involves a June incident with an off-and-on girlfriend. It alleges that he broke her nose following a party where he drank alcohol and smoked pot. He was awaiting sentencing on the vehicular homicide conviction when he was arrested. He’d been prohibited from consuming alcohol or using controlled substances as a condition of his release.
As they left a party, some of Spieker’s friends asked the girlfriend for her number, to keep in touch with her while Spieker was in prison. That made him “very jealous,” according to police.
She drove him home, and they argued in the parked car. She hit him in the chest and told him to get out, she told police. He struck her twice in the face, according to the allegations. Everything went black, she reported. He gave her a yellow rag for her broken and bleeding nose, then got out of the car.
He’s accused of violating a no-contact order during a phone call made from the jail.
At one point in the conversation, he pretended he was talking to someone other than his girlfriend, according to the charges. Prosecutors are convinced it was her.
In that call, he allegedly told her: “So hey. Remember, remember that time with Dean when I pushed him and people thought I punched him? Same thing here.”
He also allegedly told her under the pretense he was talking with someone else that he hopes she keeps an open mind and, after he is released from prison, he can “put a bigger ring on her finger.”
Moments later, he allegedly said, “I just hope she can set the story straight with the prosecutor… I need her to stay strong for herself and me.”
Later, the woman left a voicemail message for a victim witness advocate with the prosecutors office, saying, “I’m not remembering clearly” and it would be easier to drop the assault charge.
“The defendant has revealed by his actions he is not only willing to contact witnesses in violation of a court’s order, but do so in efforts toward witness tampering,” deputy prosecutor Matthew Pittman wrote in court papers.
Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446; stevick@heraldnet.com.
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