John D. Letellier has had a change of heart.
The transient pleaded guilty in 1999 to second-degree robbery, a crime that ultimately counted as his third strike under Washington’s law for persistent offenders.
At his sentencing hearing, Letellier told a Clark County judge that he’d held up a Subway sandwich shop for the sole purpose of receiving his third strike because he felt more comfortable in prison than the outside world. His criminal record includes convictions for robbery in Kitsap, Pierce and King counties and dates to 1973.
That was a mistake, Letellier, now 58, said in a letter to The Columbian this week.
His letter was apparently in response to a Nov. 14 Columbian article that examined the viability of the three strikes law. It mentioned Letellier’s case.
“The crime itself was the epitome of idiotic, senseless stupidity, and I can only emphasize at this belated juncture sorrow and remorse for my inexplicable behavior,” he wrote from his prison cell at Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Aberdeen.
In the letter, he explains what led him to seek prison, saying he no longer holds that “fatalistic” attitude.
He was homeless from 1996 to 1999 with little support from anyone and “spent almost the entire three years hitchhiking across the country from truck stop to truck stop and panhandling as a means of support,” he wrote.
Two months before the May 21, 1999, Subway holdup, Letellier wound up at the mental health inpatient wing of St. John Medical Center in Longview. A few days later, he was transported to the Vancouver Veterans Affairs medical center, but was soon told there had been a mistake and there wasn’t any room there, he said.
He said he was told to come back in six to eight weeks.
“I did not even have decent clothes to wear or have any money,” he wrote. “I simply ambled away in a daze where I ended up in a city park on a bench. As cold weather set in late at night, I panicked.”
That night, Letellier decided to enter a Subway sandwich shop on Fourth Plain Boulevard, put his hand in his pocket as if he had a gun and asked the employee for the money. He walked out with $107 in cash and a $5 Subway gift certificate. Police picked him up on a nearby street.
“The police arrived, thus accomplishing my ‘plan’ to go to jail where I would at least have a roof over my head and get fed,” he wrote.
He said that he now sees himself as a completely different person. He’s taken more than 11 years of anger management courses and is a regular attendee of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
“I no longer have a fatalistic outlook and, certainly, I have paid a tremendous price up to now,” he wrote.
Letellier said he decided to plead guilty to save Clark County taxpayers from footing the bill of a trial. Ironically, his incarceration has resulted in a far greater bill.
Letellier is among 311 third-strike prisoners in Washington’s prisons; they cost taxpayers $34,000 annually to incarcerate.
Laura McVicker: 360-735-4516 or laura.mcvicker@columbian.com.
