This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
An electrician who started a spectacular fire that destroyed a Salt Lake City apartment complex under construction was sentenced Wednesday to four years in federal prison and ordered to pay restitution of nearly $3 million.
Dustin Jay Bowman, 35, an electrician who was working on the project, apologized for setting the blaze in February of last year in the building located in the 500 East block of 500 South.
"The last few years have been really bad with addiction," Bowman told U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart, adding that he had grown up in a family with addictions and didn't understand the problems associated with it until his 30s.
Bowman had admitted to investigators that he had been smoking Spice, a synthetic form of marijuana, before setting the blaze in one of the unfinished units.
Stewart handed down the four-year sentence after telling Bowman he found his remorse among the most sincere of the thousands of people who have appeared before him for sentencing.
Bowman's court-appointed attorney, Jaime Zenger, said Bowman had made a "horrible mistake."
"He had no intention of burning the building down and causing millions of dollars in damage," she told Stewart.
The sentence was part of a plea bargain that Bowman and Zenger reached with federal prosecutors last year. The judge ordered Bowman to pay restitution of $2.98 million at a rate of at least $15 a month while imprisoned and $400 a month once he gets out or in an amount determined by probation officers.
Bowman asked to be placed in a halfway house to serve out part of the sentence but Stewart said that request was up to the federal Bureau of Prisons, though the judge included that request in his recommendations, which also included placing Bowman in a prison in Colorado.
The four-alarm fire on Feb. 9, 2014 sent flames billowing into the nighttime skies and spread quickly through the complex's exposed lumber and siding. The resulting glow could be seen as far away as Davis County.
In several interviews with investigators, Bowman admitted that after smoking Spice, he entered the apartment complex and lit some cardboard on fire and tossed it against a boxed bathtub leaning against a wood wall because he "wanted to see the fire department," according to the complaint file against him.
Bowman became a suspect after investigators watched surveillance-camera footage that captured the image of a man walking through an alley immediately west of the apartment building shortly before the fire began.
The apartment building was rebuilt and now has tenants living there.