One year after 38-year-old Admiral resident Duane Atwood‘s arrest, he has pleaded guilty and been sentenced in one of the two cases against him – indecent exposure and failure to register as a sex offender. Making a periodic check of the files, we discovered Atwood was sentenced last Friday. He pleaded guilty in connection with an incident in July of last year on Beach Drive near Cormorant Cove Park, in which he called out a question to a woman who was walking by his vehicle, then exposed himself when she approached to reply. The victim got his license-plate number, which eventually led investigators to Atwood. They subsequently discovered he had moved back to the area four years earlier without re-registering as a sex offender as he was required to do because of a 2000 conviction in another West Seattle case, an arson/burglary incident found to have been committed with sexual motivation.
Last Friday, Superior Court Judge Judith Ramseyer sentenced Atwood to one year for the indecent exposure/failure-to-register case, as recommended by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Though he has already been in jail longer than that, he remains there because of an unrelated charge filed five months after his indecent-exposure arrest. We reported on that case last December, when he was charged with felony harassment, accused of repeatedly calling an acquaintance in the middle of the night in 2012 and 2013, progressing from sexual innuendo to threats of rape and murder. The online court docket says he was scheduled for trial in that case later this month, but the date’s been postponed to October.
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