Year's `Break' Catches Up With Killer -- Judge Reimposes Suspended Sentence For Enumclaw Man

A year ago, Judge Norma Huggins gave an Enumclaw man who'd assaulted his wife a break: If he'd get mental treatment, avoid weapons and not commit more crimes, she'd overlook probation violations and not send him to jail.

But Donald Dunn Jr. didn't follow the court's orders. A month later, on June 2, he shot a 17-year-old girlfriend in the back after holding her hostage in a van outside Snoqualmie. On April 8, Dunn was sentenced to 20 years for Vanessa Baisden's murder.

Yesterday, he got one year more.

At a hearing to decide whether to revoke the one-year suspended sentence Dunn received last May for pointing a rifle at his wife, Huggins told the 23-year-old she'd given up trying to help him rehabilitate himself.

Last spring, she decided against sending him to jail when he violated probation by assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

"The court took the position that Mr. Dunn had very serious problems (and tried) to help him deal with them," the judge said. "Mr. Dunn has proven to this court he was not interested in rehabilitation."

Louis Frantz, Dunn's attorney, argued that the original crime had been plea-bargained to a misdemeanor and that few people get a year in jail for a misdemeanor.

"What is it in this (misdemeanor assault) that warrants a one-year sentence?" Frantz asked. "Nobody has articulated a reason why this man should be punished in this way."

Huggins, a King County Superior Court judge, could have imposed the penalty but had it run concurrently with the 20-year murder sentence. Or she could have imposed it and given Dunn credit for time served in jail after his arrest for murder, as one probation officer suggested.

But another probation officer, who had recommended in March 1993 that Dunn be sent to jail for a year for the assault of his wife, again recommended a year in jail.

Huggins agreed this time, saying, "Otherwise, I don't think it has a great deal of meaning."

A lawyer for Vanessa Baisden's family, Kevin Healy, wrote a letter last week to Huggins, asking for the hearing before Dunn was transferred from the King County Jail to a state prison.

"It is feared that once Mr. Dunn is entrenched in the prison system, his previously imposed jail sentences will be overlooked and forgotten," Healy wrote.

The Baisdens also want a 90-day sentence Dunn received for his assault of the 14-year-old girl added to his jail term.

Healy and John Baisden attended yesterday's hearing, and Baisden thanked Huggins for giving his daughter's killer an extra year. The judge demurred. "I wish things were different," she said.

Dunn is to serve the first year at the county jail. From there, he'll go to a state prison.