An Auburn man will serve 75 years in jail after being found guilty earlier this year of killing an Alaskan aboriginal woman in Fairbanks, Alaska, about 30 years ago. Steven H. Downs, 48, received this punishment from Judge Thomas Temple on Monday evening in Fairbanks Superior Court. For both the murder and the subsequent eight years of sexual assault, he received a 67-year sentence.
In February, a jury found Downs guilty of killing and sexually assaulting Sophie Sergei, 20, of Pitka’s Point, Alaska. According to the prosecution, the maximum punishment for murder was 99 years, with an additional eight years for sexually abusing Sergei in 1993. After 25 years, Downs will be qualified for discretionary parole. In his sentence, he opted not to comment.
In a Fairbanks courtroom on Monday, Chief Assistant Attorney General Jenna Gruenstein argued that 20 of the requested 99 years should be deferred, meaning he would serve 79 years for the murder conviction. She asked for that Downs to serve the mandatory eight-year term for sexual assault following the completion of his murder sentence.
She claimed that despite his heinous crimes, Downs had no remorse. He denied knowing her when questioned by authorities and made light of the fact that there was a reward for information leading to her capture. According to Gruenstein, Downs displayed a “deep level of dishonesty.”
Given Downs’ physical and medical conditions, defense attorney James Howaniec of Lewiston informed the judge that any sentence over 20 years would be equivalent to a life sentence. According to Howaniec, Downs is over 400 pounds overweight and has “extremely” high blood pressure.
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Howie had requested a 50-year term for his client in a sentencing document, with 30 of those years suspended, thereby reducing the length of the punishment to 20 years. Howie had urged that the obligatory eight-year sexual assault sentence be served concurrently. Both attorneys characterized the crimes as terrible and said they significantly impacted the Fairbanks neighborhood.
Howaniec claimed that aside from his most recent charges, Downs had no prior criminal record. He excelled academically and made a nice living while attending nursing school and college. Howie pointed out that Downs was just 18 at the time of the incident. He was 4,000 miles away from home in a strange land where the winters were long and bitter.
Howaniec described him as “extremely immature, drinking and partying a lot,” including consuming a lot of marijuana. He had a “beautiful girlfriend” and was “extremely popular.” Downs was under exam pressure near the end of his first year, just like the other pupils. There was no indication of premeditation, according to Howaniec. However, there is a “possibility that something very crazy happened” to Downs on the night of the crime.
Howaniec stated he intends to challenge the convictions, and Downs has maintained his innocence since his arrest. According to Gruenstein, Downs should be classified as the “worst offender,” which would entitle him to the worst punishment possible. At the time of the 1993 crime, a murder conviction in Alaska carried a sentence of 20 to 99 years in prison.
Judge Temple referred to Downs’ behavior in preying on an unknowing stranger to commit sexual assault and then killing her to cover up his crime as “brazen” and “callous.”
He claimed that the victim had probably been subjected to “horror” by Downs. Although Downs’ crime didn’t qualify as a “worst offender” murder that required the harshest punishment, Temple said it was still one of the “most heinous forms of murder out there.” Temple claimed that in determining Downs’ sentence, he considered the victim’s impact.
The judge stated that murdering Downs would have had the most excellent effect on Sergei, “a very significant impact, at the top of the scale. Enormous impact According to (legal) counsel, Mr. Downs’ life aim is to one day give his parents another embrace. Miss Sergei hasn’t been able to give hugs since April 1993. Everyone has denied missing Sergei’s hugs. She won’t receive another hug. There is a significant impact. The impact of murder and rape is the highest possible.”
In 1993, Downs was a freshman at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and resided in the same dorm as the victim. His room was in a women’s bathroom’s bathtub area, one floor above the crime site. The case was abandoned until 2018, when it was reopened because Downs’ aunt provided a firm with her DNA, which randomly matched to semen discovered inside Sergei at the crime scene.
More than 40 witnesses testified throughout the trial, which began in mid-January, in Fairbanks Superior Court in person or via videoconference on a TV monitor in the courtroom. Witnesses occupied a table ringed by plexiglass, some wearing masks because of COVID-19 concerns. Other people in the courtroom were all disguised. Due to the jurors and attorneys being exposed to the illness, delayed the trial was twice.
The judgments on both charges were reached after a jury of three men and nine women deliberated for 20 hours over four days. The jury heard testimony from former university students who described what they saw and heard at the alleged scene of Sergie’s murder. Among the accounts was that of a guy who was seen exiting the bathroom right before Sergie was killed.
On the late evening of April 25, 1993, on the second floor of Bartlett Hall, Sergie was last seen alive, according to the police, when she went to a friend’s dorm room to light a cigarette. The following afternoon, maintenance personnel discovered her death in the bathtub of a women’s restroom on the second floor. She is thought to have died on April 26, 1993, at 1:30 a.m.
Sergie was fatally shot in the back of the head with a.22-caliber revolver, stabbed in the cheek and eye, assaulted with a blunt instrument, ligatured to keep him from moving, and maybe shocked with a stun gun, according to investigators. DNA had created the profile in 2000 based on indications of foreign bodily fluids discovered inside Sergei. The national DNA database of criminal offenders had that profile loaded with no matches.
The police provided the crime scene DNA from Sergie’s murder in September 2018 for a novel method of so-called “genetic genealogy” analysis, which recently assisted in resolving a cold case involving a double homicide in Washington state. After his aunt uploaded her DNA to a genealogy website, the analysis returned Downs’ identity in December of that year because of a chance hit.
He was detained in Fairbanks at the local jail after being apprehended at his Auburn home in February 2019. Up until the sentencing, his bail had been revoked. Police obtained warrants to search Downs’ residence, fingerprints, and DNA. Downs’ DNA profile matched the semen discovered in Sergie’s vagina by a one-in-330-billion chance, according to testimony from a forensics expert at the crime lab in Alaska.
Police were informed by Downs that he had never even heard of Sergie. He told the authorities that the DNA match was a “mistake” and would be explained by a lab or investigative blunder.
He said he had no firearms at the time of Sergie’s murder. Still, his former roommate, Nicholas Dazer, who the defense has cited as a potential suspect in the case, admitted to authorities years later that Downs had a.22-caliber revolver at the time of the crime.
Downs admitted to the police that he was present the night Sergie was killed with his then-girlfriend, Katherine Lee. On the fourth floor of Bartlett Hall, where Lee’s room was located, Downs had been “in and out,” according to testimony she gave in court.
A few years later, she claimed that she and Downs had gone target shooting right before the murder, identifying the murder weapon as a.22-caliber revolver. However, Lee asserted that she didn’t think he owned any guns and that the man had borrowed the firearm. According to her and Dazer’s testimony, Downs’ behavior wasn’t different around the time of Sergie’s death.
Before his arrest, authorities discovered a.22-caliber revolver in Downs’ residence. However, Downs claimed to have purchased the weapon in 2015 from a dealer in Turner, Maine, a claim that the dealer corroborated throughout the trial.
Early in his first year, a then-student who dated Downs admitted during the trial that he had a “fixed-blade” hunting knife in his dorm. However, she claimed that since she was from an area of Alaska where most people owned comparable knives, she didn’t give it much thought.
To cast doubt on Downs’ guilt during the trial, the defense named three individuals as potential suspects, including Downs’ former roommate. At trial, the prosecution presented evidence that no DNA matching discovered anyone other than Downs and Sergie at the crime site.
The defense claimed that only the semen discovered in Sergei could be traced to Downs and that no other physical evidence gathered at the crime scene or during Sergie’s autopsy could do so. Howie served as his defense team’s leader, including two other Maine attorneys and a Fairbanks lawyer.
