Lowell Lowe has spent years listening to voices others don’t hear, and looking at things others don’t see.
On Monday, the mentally ill ex-con learned that he’ll spend nearly 13 years in prison for fatally stabbing an Arlington man in June 2002, a person who had done nothing but try to help him.
Gerald Schindler, 58, had invited Lowe, 40, to live in his home. But Lowe had stopped taking the medication that usually controls the symptoms of his paranoid schizophrenia. He also had recently been using methamphetamine, and was drinking heavily the night Schindler died.
Lowe last month pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. On Monday, he told Snohomish County Superior Court Judge George Bowden he doesn’t remember what compelled him to kill Schindler, and that he’s sorry.
“He was a real good person. He gave me a place to stay,” Lowe said.
Lowe was arrested shortly after the murder. There was blood on his pants and hands and he had a hypodermic syringe hidden in his sock.
He admitted the stabbing to acquaintances, and also threatened to kill them, too, court papers show.
The case spent nearly a year working through the courts, with much of the delay connected to mental health evaluations of the defendant.
Although Lowe has been diagnosed for decades as struggling with mental illness, the experts ultimately decided he wasn’t sufficiently ill the night of Schindler’s killing to distort his ability to tell right from wrong.
His attorney, public defender Mary Beth Dingledy, asked the judge to sentence Lowe to the least punishment called for under state sentencing guidelines.
“Because of his disability, he can do evil things to people, but he is not an evil person,” she said.
Schindler’s family packed the first row in the courtroom. They told Bowden that the death was a shock, and that the family’s greatest desire was to make sure Lowe isn’t again in a position to take another life.
“I don’t think you can give us justice,” Schindler’s eldest daughter, Dawn McArthur, told the judge.
Lowe has prior convictions for assault with a deadly weapon and aggravated assault, according to court papers.
Bowden said the defendant’s history troubled him, and he shared the concerns of Schindler’s family. At the same time, he said the defense had presented “years and years” of reports documenting Lowe’s mental problems, and an agreement that prosecutors would recommend 13 years behind bars.
The tragedy of Schindler’s death is that he was killed trying to help somebody, Bowden said.”He took Mr. Lowe into his home when he was homeless,” he said.
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