Nine months ago, 33-year-old Emanuel Kozma was found in a treehouse, where he’d tried to hide from police searching for him in connection with package and mail thefts in Alki. He subsequently was charged with three felonies and has been in jail since his original arrest on January 8th. Last month, a jury found him guilty of theft; today, he was sentenced – and is about to go free, having been sentenced to what amounted to time served.
In addition to the theft case, Kozma also had pleaded guilty to two other charges – one, a plea bargain that brought the burglary charge in the Alki case down to criminal trespass, the other in a case for which he had a warrant out for his arrest when caught in Alki. In that case, he pleaded guilty to felony harassment. Charging documents in that case say he had threatened to shoot and kill an 18-year-old woman who was described as a friend, when she avoided responding to his requests to drive him to a probation appointment. The threat happened near Kozma’s home in White Center in the summer of 2014.
Court documents say Kozma’s criminal record – with three and a half pages of convictions – goes back 20 years, to age 12, with what’s described as “numerous misdemeanors and felonies” along the way, including harassment, assault, indecent exposure, and weapons charges. Today, Judge Dean Lum sentenced Kozma to a year in jail, suspended while he is monitored for two years, plus what amounted to the time he’s served since the January arrest, 274 days. He’s still on the King County Jail Register right now, but court documents say the judge signed the order for his release (a drug warrant from Everett is still listed on the register, and it’s not clear whether that’s been resolved, so we’ll continue checking on his post-sentencing status). The photo above, by the way, is the most recent one the state Corrections Department had when we requested it after his arrest.
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