By Olympic Peninsula News Group and Herald Staff
SEQUIM — A man accused of fighting a Sequim police officer, and who has some connection to a woman found dead, was sentenced months ago in Snohomish County, then released, for attacking jail guards.
On Thursday, a police officer pulled over Bret Allen Kenney, 34, for a routine traffic stop in Sequim. A struggle ensued. Officers feared he was trying to reach for one of their guns. Two shots rang out, but no one was apparently hit, according to court documents. Both Kenney and an officer were taken to a hospital for scrapes and bruises. Kenney was evaluated and cleared for booking.
Kenney was booked into jail for investigation of first-degree assault of a police officer, disarming a law enforcement officer and driving under the influence of drugs.
That same morning, police responded to a welfare check in the 100 block of Senz Road, outside Sequim — where the man in the traffic stop lived. There, they found a dead woman.
Her death is being investigated as a homicide.
Kenney has a criminal history in Snohomish County. In November, he was sentenced to over six years in prison for attacking Snohomish County corrections deputies in the jail back in 2017. He beat one deputy unconscious, and hit another with a stun gun, according to court documents.
He was released in mid-January to community custody just two months after Superior Court Judge George Appel’s sentence, a Department of Corrections spokesperson said.
Kenney was previously convicted of a Jefferson County assault in 2007, a Kitsap County robbery in 2009 and another in Thurston County a couple years later. Kenney, who was living in Lake Stevens at the time, could’ve faced life in prison for the Snohomish County assaults. But a recent change in state law made it so one of the previous robbery convictions didn’t count toward his three strikes.
In a letter to the judge before his Snohomish County sentencing, Kenney wrote that he’d “learned a valuable lesson.”
This story originally appeared in the Peninsula Daily News, a sister publication to The Herald.
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