What bank robber and former Army Ranger Luke Sommer has done now is, allegedly, assault one of his fellow robbers, Nathan Dunmall, with intent to commit murder, and with a deadly weapon, a shank. “You’ve gotten bigger since the last time I saw you!” Dunmall recalls Sommer saying as he held Dunmall in a choke hold. According to a court affidavit filed by FBI agent D.A. Treat, the two fought in cell 40 at the Federal Detention Center at SeaTac last January. Dunmall, slightly bloodied, said he was working out in his cell – he’d just finished a set of bar dips – when Sommer jumped him. Typically, Luke offered up too much information to prison officials afterward (his chattiness helped convict him for the commando-style takedown on a Tacoma bank in 2006). “I had a knife with me. I threw it down, check the cell,” he told a guard. They checked the cell, no knife. Keep looking, said Luke, “I had one on me.” They found it nearby, a sharpened piece of plastic with a wrapped-fabric handle, fashioned from a part taken from a stair-stepper exercise machine. “I hid the shank in my shoe,” Luke bragged to a prison official. “No one ever looks there.” Officials had worried that Sommer, who now sports a “POW/MIA” tattoo and faces additional time on his already 24-year sentence, would try to attack his fellow robbers who ratted him out, and had imposed orders to keep him separate from the others. God was on Dunmall’s side this time, Sommer supposedly said afterward, but there will be other opportunities; it’s a big federal system.
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