Spokane County has placed a public defender on administrative leave after a state prosecutor last week filed criminal charges against the lawyer related to his management of the funds from of a nonprofit that he set up to help homeless people.
John “Sather” Gowdy, 37, was charged on April 16 based on an investigation that a Spokane Police detective alleges provided probable cause to charge Gowdy with first-degree theft and eight counts of money laundering with funds that were supposed to have been used at Heal Spokane.
Gowdy formed the nonprofit in 2018 when he was a student at Gonzaga University School of Law.
Spokane Police Detective Tim Schwering interviewed Heal Spokane board members who alleged that Gowdy used the nonprofit as his own personal “slush fund” from which he purchased “food, energy drinks, air soft guns, candle making equipment, (and) car wash material.”
The case was originally sent to Spokane County Prosecutor Larry Haskell’s office, but court records indicate that Haskell asked Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Kiewik to prosecute the case.
Efforts to reach Gowdy and attorney Joe Kuhlman, who earlier represented Gowdy, were unsuccessful.
The investigation began when Schwering was contacted in July 2023 by an assistant attorney general with the state’s consumer protection division.
Schwering then began speaking with Heal Spokane board members. He learned that Gowdy had been removed as the organization’s head in March 2023.
Board member Katherine “Kat” R. Bopp told Schwering “that an internal audit showed that John Sather Gowdy had made numerous purchases made with funds from Heal Spokane for his personal use. In one instance, Gowdy stated he made an Amazon purchase for sleeping bags with kids that Heal Spokane service, but Bopp discovered the transaction in question had been for air soft guns.
According to Bopp, who started with Heal Spokane at the end of 2018 as the director of operations, the organization was all voluntary and did not pay its employees salaries.
“Most of the projects with Heal Spokane were self-funded,” Schwering quoted Bopp as saying. “For example, they would do a fundraiser on Facebook for $1,500 for children’s boots for winter would result in them spending $1,500 on children’s boots for winter.”
But after board members started checking, they found where Gowdy had made several withdrawals from a Numerica Credit Union account set up to hold Heal Spokane funds, documents say.
Those amounts almost match exactly the buy-in amounts that Gowdy used to play slot machines at Northern Quest Resort & Casino.
“From inception, (Bopp) estimated that Gowdy misappropriated approximately $40,176.05,” court records state.
“For comparison, for the lifetime of the non-profit, a total of $79,000 was brough(t) in, meaning over $50% of the assets were diverted for his personal use.”
When Bopp audited the purchases, she found that in one instance Gowdy claimed to have purchased gloves, socks and hand warmers, but really purchased Tide Pods and resin molds for his personal crafts.
“Gowdy admitted using some of the Heal Spokane funds for his personal use and provided a check to repay the organization for the money he took; however, the amount of the check was for less than what Gowdy had taken,” Schwering wrote.
When the board tried to get Gowdy to explain and/or repay the misused funds, his attorney, Kuhlman, responded with a letter.
“Our main concern is that the members who claim to be on the board acted in violation of their bylaws, fraudulently held themselves out to be officers or on the board without making any record of filing with the state,” he wrote in part.
“Your client’s dereliction of their own duties in almost every capacity they claim to have, if they were even on the board, is the problem; so like we say in Tennessee: ‘{A}int nothing stopping you but fear and space.’ F.A.F.O”
The last part of Kuhlman’s response is an acronym for an expletive and the words “around and find out.
Based on his investigation, Schwering concluded that he had developed probable cause to charge Gowdy with first-degree theft for the more than $40,000 of unauthorized spending and eight counts of money laundering for each time Gowdy withdrew Heal Spokane funds to gamble at Northern Quest.
A summons was issued on Friday demanding Gowdy appear on May 9 before Superior Court Judge Rachelle Anderson or he could face arrest.
