TACOMA — A former U.S. Army Ranger who led a 2006 military-style robbery of a Tacoma bank and tried to hire someone to kill a federal prosecutor had his sentence reduced Wednesday by 12 years in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
Luke Elliott Sommer, 36, a dual American-Canadian citizen from Peachland, British Columbia, successfully petitioned U.S. District Judge James Robart to review his sentence based on his age at the time of his crimes, according to a news release from U.S. Attorney Nick Brown. Sommer also claimed to be reformed while in prison.
Robart noted that Sommer’s crimes “are some of the most extreme, violent and dangerous actions to come before this court” before reducing the sentence to 31 years from its original 43 years.
Sommer is serving his sentence at Coleman Penitentiary in Sumter, Florida. The federal prison system does not offer parole.
Sommer led the Aug. 7, 2006, Bank of America robbery that included four other men in body armor and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Two of the men had fully automatic AK-47 assault rifles. Sommer and another man carried semiautomatic handguns.
In court Wednesday, the bank’s former branch manager recalled seeing the red dot of Sommer’s laser site pointed at her tellers.
“The staff was never the same, I will never be the same,” the branch manager said. Two tellers also testified.
Sommer said he wanted to use his portion of the more than $50,000 gained in the robbery to start a Canadian crime family that would rival the Hell’s Angels. But Sommer never got the chance. The robbers were arrested within days and weeks after a citizen took note of the getaway car’s license plate. Sommer was arrested in Canada.
Sommer was first sentenced to 24 years in prison in 2008, for conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery, armed bank robbery, brandishing a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence, and possession of an unregistered destructive device (a hand grenade).
In 2009, shortly after his conviction, Sommer offered an undercover FBI officer up to $20,000 in exchange for murdering the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted him. Sommer told the officer he wanted news reports to say it was “murder not an accident.” He was convicted of that crime in 2010.
In 2009, Sommer used a prison-made knife to attack a co-defendant in the bank robbery case at the Federal Detention Center at SeaTac. The victim suffered a minor stab wound and multiple abrasions.
The robbery and Sommer’s alleged Svengali-like hold on one of his co-defendants, Alex Blum, was the subject of a 2017 book, “Ranger Games”.
Robart noted Wednesday that “punishment is not vengeance or retaliation.” The judge said he put an emphasis on communications from Bureau of Prisons staff who said Sommer has “worked hard to do the right thing while incarcerated.”
