Man accused of killing friend with machete in 2019 at Washington lake will face a new trial

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A Snohomish County man will stand trial for murder for the second time this fall after a Whatcom County jury deadlocked in 2022 and was unable to determine whether the man killed his friend in self-defense while they were camping near Baker Lake in April 2019.

Thirty-four-year-old Alexander Vanags, of Arlington, will be on trial in Whatcom County Superior Court for second-degree murder beginning the first week of September. Vanags is accused of using a machete to kill 28-year-old Mark Stebakov of Arlington on April 13, 2019 while the two were camping with one another at a rural site near Baker Lake.

Vanags' criminal case, which was filed in April 2019, has been marked by numerous lengthy delays.

He had originally been scheduled to go to trial in March 2020, but his trial was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, and subsequent shut down of all jury trials in Whatcom County. Vanags was later released from the Whatcom County Jail in July 2020 pending his trial after his bail was reduced from $1 million to $100,000.

His case was then continued until it went to trial beginning in mid-June 2022 and lasted roughly three weeks. It ended in a mistrial because the jury deadlocked after one day of deliberations, The Bellingham Herald previously reported.

Vanags was then expected to be retried in late October 2023, but his trial was pushed to late February after the defense's medical expert suffered a stroke last fall and was unable to testify.

Vanags' trial was then continued again to September after a short hearing in court Wednesday, Jan. 31.

The Whatcom County Prosecuting Attorney's Office asked for the trial to be pushed by three months, as a new prosecutor has taken over the case and they need time to secure a medical expert, Whatcom County deputy prosecuting attorney Maggie Peach said in court Wednesday.

Peach said she didn't ask for a continuance in the case lightly, as Stebakov's family has been devastated by the previous hung jury and numerous continuances in the case.

"It needs to get tried again, it needs to get resolved. The family needs closure in this case, so I'm asking for the shortest continuance that I think allows for a realistic trial date," Peach said.

One of Vanags' criminal defense attorneys, James Dixon, said Wednesday that he had no objections to pushing the trial date back, but asked that it be pushed out to September instead.

Dixon, who said he also did not make the request for a continuance lightly, said there was no way the defense could go trial based on other cases and the attorneys' summer vacation schedules.

Dixon told the court Wednesday that an unaffiliated murder trial in King County that he's handling, in which the person accused is in custody, is headed to trial in mid-April and is expected to last roughly a month. Then, starting in June, Dixon is gone on a pre-planned month-long overseas trip with family.

His business partner and co-counsel defending Vanags, Jennifer Cannon-Unione, has three young children and normally takes the summers to spend time with them, including on weekend camping trips and outings, Dixon said.

He then informed the court that the defense had provided a medical expert's report to the prosecution roughly two months ago, but that the prosecution had yet to reach out to find their own experts to issue a response to the report. Dixon said if he wanted, he could have made an argument for a lack of due diligence in the case on the prosecution's part.

Because of pre-planned vacations and summer schedules, Dixon said the trial needed to be pushed to September, or it had to start right away in February as planned.

Peach, the prosecutor, pushed back on Dixon's argument that the case needed to be continued in part due to summer vacation plans.

"We all have families and lives outside of our jobs," Peach said.



Whatcom County Superior Court Judge David Freeman ultimately set Vanags' trial to begin Sept. 3. Freeman said while he found Dixon's request to take the summer months and August off the table "dubious," he did see merit in the argument regarding the prosecution not yet securing an expert to respond to the defense expert's report.

2022 Jury Trial

In closing arguments in Vanags' 2022 jury trial, his criminal defense attorneys, Dixon and Cannon-Unione, had argued that Stebakov's killing was justifiable homicide.

In order to be justifiable homicide, a person has to reasonably believe the person killed intended to inflict great personal injury or death; that there was an imminent danger of such harm being accomplished; and that the defendant used the force and means a reasonably prudent person would use under similar conditions, according to court records.

Vanags' defense attorneys had said the two men were excited to camp with one another and planned to take LSD. Vanags' attorneys argued Stebakov attacked Vanags after the pair had taken LSD at the campsite and that Vanags acted in self-defense.

The attorneys said Vanags hit Stebakov with the machete until Stebakov stopped attacking him. They also said prior to the fight, Vanags had pleaded with Stebakov to drink water, to leave him alone and to leave the campsite, The Herald previously reported.

The defense attorneys called Vanags' actions "a final last resort."

But senior deputy prosecuting attorney Kellen Kooistra, who prosecuted the case at the time, argued Vanags' actions were not what a reasonable person would do in a similar situation.

Kooistra said Vanags hit Stebakov more than a dozen times with a machete, killing him, and argued that the evidence left at the campsite showed Vanags didn't just act in self-defense. Kooistra said text messages, photos, videos and other evidence showed Stebakov was dead within three hours of the pair taking LSD.

Kooistra also said that after Stebakov died, Vanags moved things around the campsite and took photos and videos, including of Stebakov's body. Vanags stayed at the campsite with his dead friend for more than an hour before finally leaving, Kooistra said.

Once reaching cell service, Vanags first called his mother, then his friend and then his wife, before calling 911 at 2:11 a.m. — more than 2 1/2  after Stebakov died, The Herald previously reported.

Kooistra argued that Vanags had an intent to kill Stebakov based on the number of wounds on Stebakov's body and the number of times Vanags swung a machete at his friend's head.

"There's simply no way by his actions that this killing was justified," Kooistra said at the time.

The jury was sent to deliberate the second-degree murder charge on June 30.

The previous jurors sent several written questions to the court, including asking to replay the 911 audio recordings from when Vanags called law enforcement after returning form the campsite and whether or not a person could still feel their life is in danger if they are impaired, court documents show.

The jurors also sent a question asking the court how they would move forward if they could not reach a unanimous verdict and whether there was a time-frame in which they needed to reach a verdict by.

Ultimately, the jurors all agreed they were deadlocked and couldn't reach a unanimous verdict on the murder charge. A judge declared a mistrial July 1, 2022.

The prosecutor's office said at the time that it intended to retry the case. Now, after two years of delays following the mistrial, the case is expected to head to trial beginning in September.