Steven Craig Powell faces more legal action stemming from his surreptitious videotaping of two neighbor girls while they bathed or used the toilet.
The girls’ mother filed a civil lawsuit against Powell, 62, last week in Pierce County Superior Court. The woman seeks undisclosed damages on behalf of her daughters for invasion of privacy and “severe emotional distress.”
“Defendant Steven Powell’s offensive and unlawful conduct of watching and filming plaintiff’s most intimate private affairs was extreme and outrageous in that it went beyond all possible bounds of decency and is utterly intolerable in a civilized society,” the woman’s attorney, Anne Bremner, wrote in the lawsuit.
The News Tribune is not publishing the mother’s name to protect the identity of her daughters.
Bremner told The Associated Press when she was preparing the lawsuit earlier this year that the family does not expect to get any substantial money from Powell. The hope is the suit continues to pressure him to discuss his daughter-in-law Susan Cox Powell’s disappearance, the attorney said.
The Utah woman went missing in 2009, and authorities considered Steven Powell’s son and the woman’s husband, Josh Powell, a person of interest in the case. Authorities and the missing woman’s relatives believe Steven Powell might have information about his daughter-in-law’s disappearance.
Detectives searched Steven Powell’s Pierce County home in August 2011 seeking evidence of Susan Powell’s disappearance. Josh Powell was living with his father at the time. It was during that search that authorities uncovered evidence Steven Powell had been videotaping the neighbor girls.
A Pierce County jury in May convicted Steven Powell of 14 counts of voyeurism for filming the girls, then 9 and 8, during 2006 and 2007. Powell lived in an adjacent house at the time and used a zoom lens to peer inside his neighbors’ second-story window. He was sentenced to two years, six months in prison in June.
Josh Powell killed his two sons and himself in February.
adam.lynn@thenewstribune.com 253-597-8644 blog.thenewstribune.com/crime @TNTadam
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