photo by: Kansas Department of Corrections

Steven Carl Drake II

Additional charges were added Thursday to a criminal complaint against a repeat felon accused of arson and other crimes.

The arson case arose just a few weeks after Steven Drake Jr. had been granted extraordinary leniency at his sentencing for other crimes.

Drake, who has an extensive criminal history, is now facing two counts of violating a protective order in connection with the arson case that was filed in June. In that case, Drake, 51, is accused of throwing an explosive device into a woman’s yard near 10th Street and Kasold Drive. Lawrence detectives said they believed it was a “targeted attack,” as the Journal-World reported. Drake, though, told a judge that the charges were “ridiculous” and downplayed the incident as “a firework in a yard.”

In the new charges Drake is accused of twice violating a protective order against the alleged victim in the arson case, once on Aug. 7 and again on Aug. 16. He had explicitly been ordered to have no contact with her.

Drake has been in custody since his arrest in June on a bond of $1 million. At his first appearance in that case, prosecutor Eve Kemple requested that he be held on that unusually high amount and that he have no contact with the alleged victim both as a condition of bond and as a general court order.

In support of her request, Kemple told Judge Blake Glover that Drake, with nine person felonies, was a public safety risk and a flight risk, having chalked up 10 failures to appear in court and multiple flee-and-elude convictions. She noted that his criminal history score is “A,” the worst possible, and that the new alleged crimes occurred while he was on felony probation — a probation that the state had opposed but that a Douglas County judge granted after Drake’s lawyer, Angela Keck, assured her that Drake was a “new man.”

Senior Judge Nancy Parrish opted for probation at Drake’s sentencing in May for attempted aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer, felony fleeing and eluding and misdemeanor criminal damage. As the Journal-World has reported, those convictions were the result of a deal with the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office in which Drake pleaded no contest to the two felonies and one misdemeanor in exchange for the state dropping all the other charges in a 13-count complaint of nine felony charges, including methamphetamine possession, and four misdemeanors.

In granting probation, Parrish said she had never done so for someone with so many felonies but that she did so because Drake appeared to be on a “good path.”

While Parrish granted probation, she told Drake that he had a serious underlying sentence “hanging over your head” should he violate probation — namely 46 months for the attempted aggravated assault, 11 months for the flee and elude felony, to run consecutively, and six months in jail for the criminal damage misdemeanor.

The case for probation violation has been filed alongside the arson case. If his probation is revoked, he could be ordered to serve the underlying term ordered by Parrish.

Drake was supposed to have a preliminary hearing in the arson case on Friday, but it was continued at the request of his attorney after the parties discovered that evidence testing had not been completed. A new hearing in the arson and probation-violation cases has been scheduled for Nov. 17.