Ex-Bend PD captain out of prison, on house arrest
A former Bend police captain, convicted along with his wife in a multimillion dollar fraud and money-laundering scheme, has been released from a halfway house and now sits on house arrest, a federal corrections official confirmed Tuesday.
It was one of the biggest fraud cases in Bend history: the case of Tami and Kevin Sawyer, convicted masterminds behind a multimillion dollar real estate scheme.
Tami is still in a federal prison, just shy of serving two years of a nine-year sentence for 21 counts related to fraud. She and her husband plead guilty in January of 2013 — Kevin was convicted of one count of making false statements to a bank on a mortgage application.
According to federal Bureau of Prisons spokesman Edmond Ross, Kevin Sawyer was released on schedule: freed from a federal prison in October to a halfway house and subsequently allowed to finish his sentence on house arrest starting on Jan. 26th. Ross said Kevin’s projected formal release date is April 14th.
NewsChannel 21 spoke Tuesday with one of the Sawyers’ victims, David Middleton, at his Redmond home.
Middleton did not want to go on camera, but said Kevin Sawyer deserved every bit of the sentence his wife got. Middleton said the couple swindled his father out of big money, and the family has hardly seen a penny of the money the Sawyers have been ordered to pay back as restitution.
But he said he has little hope that he and the dozens of other investors will ever see the nearly $6 million that a federal judge ordered the Sawyers to pay.
In all, court records show the Sawyers stole more than $7 million — money they used to fund a vacation home in Mexico and a lavish lifestyle.
Property records show the Sawyers own eight houses in Bend, one of which NewsChannel 21 found to be in foreclosure. Previous KTVZ reports show their homes were supposed to be auctioned off to repay victims.
Kevin retired from the police force shortly after he was put on paid administrative leave following a federal investigation. His criminal conviction did not stop him from collecting the pension he earned in almost 30 years as a police officer.
