Ryan Lee pleads guilty to harassment for LC threats but maintains innocence

The teenage target of social media posts threatening to rape and kill her, and to shoot up Lewis and Clark High School, ripped both the 19-year-old man originally accused of sending those messages and Spokane County prosecutors for allowing him to plead guilty to a misdemeanor on Thursday.

The emotional testimony of the girl and her parents punctuated the guilty plea and sentencing of 19-year-old Ryan B. Lee, who originally faced seven felony counts for a string of messages that began in May 2018 and forced school officials to beef up security and made some parents too afraid to send their children to school.

As a result of the plea agreement, Lee was sentenced to two years of probation. If he does not comply with the conditions of his release, Lee faces up to 218 days in jail. Lee had been facing about two years in prison and a requirement to register as a sex offender.

Lee’s plea to a lesser charge than those he originally faced came after an FBI analysis showed that none of the messages had come from Lee, and Superior Court Judge John Cooney threw out what Spokane police described as a confession from Lee.

The father of the victim said Thursday that Lee was able to threaten to “sexually mutilate and can threaten to kill my daughter and shoot up Lewis and Clark and walk away with a slap on the wrist.”

“It is truly a slap in the face of my daughter and other victims,” the father said.

The girl said she remembered having a math class with Lee, who would sometimes help her with equations.

“I thought of him as a sweet kid who would not hurt a fly. Man, was I wrong,” the girl testified. “You threatened to kill me, to rape me. You took an innocence away from me that you can never give back.”

The girl, now 17, said she has recurring dreams in which Lee shoots her and that she’s always afraid she will die before she wakes up. She said she now believes that she will look back on her high school years as the worst time of her life.

“I’m sorry you haven’t been given the help you need,” the girl told Lee. “I’m sorry you are getting away with this. I will not be your victim. I won’t let you defeat my confidence. I won’t let you crush my character.”

Lewis and Clark High School Principal Marybeth Smith also spoke about the terror the messages put her staff, students and parents through as she tried to continue to educate students just after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the Sept. 13, 2017, shooting at Freeman High School.

Smith said Lee sent her an “apology letter.” According to Smith, Lee sent the messages because “he was seeking attention.”

“We likely won’t know what drove him to such actions,” Smith said. “But we can be sure that these actions won’t be tolerated.”

Following the messages, Smith beefed up security to patrol the hallways outside mostly empty classrooms.

“The cost of these threats was easily in the tens of thousands of dollars,” Smith said. “The impact was devastating and incalculable. My students are still afraid.”

But defense attorney Carl Oreskovich, who along with Derek Reid negotiated the plea agreement, said Lee sent the letter to Smith because a Spokane police detective told him to write it during the interview that was subsequently thrown out as evidence.

“Much of what was said is driven by emotion, not fact,” Oreskovich said. “I’m trying to be compassionate but not let the record get distorted. This is a young man who endorses things that are not accurate because that’s what he thinks others want.”

Oreskovich said he would have preferred if Spokane County prosecutors had dropped the case after all of the evidence showed that Lee did not send the threatening messages.

“We don’t like this agreement any better than they do,” Oreskovich said. “But when a young man is facing seven felonies, there is tremendous risk in that.”

Lee agreed to what’s called an Alford plea. That means he believes he’s innocent but agreed to take advantage of the negotiations and avoid the risk of trial for the felony charges. He chose not to make a statement when Judge Cooney gave him the opportunity.

“I have a daughter your same age,” Cooney told the teenage victim. “It would completely eat me up to see her go” through a similar situation.

“Mr. Lee, you have pleaded guilty,” the judge continued. “You have caused a lot of damage to the entire community.”

Lee’s father, Lewis Lee, said after the sentencing that, as a father of four daughters, he could understand the pain of the girl, her parents and the families of two other girls who received threatening messages.

“I have complete compassion for what the (victim and her family) are going through,” Lewis Lee said. “But we can absolutely prove that they have the wrong person.”

When investigators initially charged Ryan Lee, Lewis Lee said he and his wife knew very little about the case. “Had their theory been correct, we would have had this handled by June” 2018.

But the analysis of the evidence kept coming up empty. The case turned when the FBI analysis showed that the messages did not come from any of the Lee devices that investigators searched, he said.

“We are also disappointed in this outcome,” Lewis Lee said. “We know Ryan did not do this. But we were not willing to subject him to this for another six to nine months.”

Oreskovich, the defense attorney, said he has seen no indication that Spokane police investigators will continue the investigation.

“My hope is that they would investigate to find out who was involved,” Oreskovich said, “and who caused this.”