A Maine man convicted this year in the murder of an Alaska Native woman in Fairbanks nearly 30 years ago was sentenced to a total of 75 years in prison.
File - In this Aug. 6, 2019, file photo, Steven Downs is led into a courtroom for arraignment in Anchorage, Alaska.Downs has pleaded not guilty after being charged in the sexual assault and murder of a woman in Alaska in a case that remained unsolved for years. Downs entered his plea Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2019, in a courtroom in Fairbanks, Alaska. He is charged in the death of Sophie Sergie, who was found stabbed and shot in a bathtub at a University of Alaska Fairbanks dormitory.
Chief Assistant Attorney General for Alaska Jenna Gruenstein argued Monday that 20 years of the recommended 99 years for murder should be suspended, meaning he would serve 79 years for the murder conviction. She asked the judge to require Downs to serve the eight-year mandatory sentence for sexual assault after he completed the murder sentence.
He was “very immature, drinking and partying a lot,” including smoking a lot of marijuana, Howaniec said. He was “very popular” and had a “beautiful girlfriend.”There is a “possibility that something really psychotic happened” to Downs the night of the crime, but there was no evidence of premeditation, Howaniec said.
The case had gone cold until 2018, when it was revived after Downs’ aunt had submitted her DNA to a company that matched it in a random hit to semen found inside Sergie at the crime scene. Police said Sergie was last seen alive when she left a friend’s dorm room to smoke a cigarette late on the night of April 25, 1993, on the second floor of Bartlett Hall.
Police had submitted the crime scene DNA from Sergie’s killing in September 2018 for a new technique of so-called “genetic genealogy” analysis that had recently helped solve a double-murder cold case in Washington state. He said he hadn’t owned a gun at the time of Sergie’s murder, but his then-roommate, Nicholas Dazer, named by defense as an alternative suspect, told police years later that Downs had owned a .22-caliber revolver at the time.
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