BANGOR – A man sentenced earlier this week to more than six years in federal prison for robbing a credit union, was sentenced to two years in prison Thursday for writing bad checks on an account from that same financial institution.

Steven Wesley Bell, 20, of Bangor and Newport pleaded guilty in Penobscot County Superior Court just before being sentenced on charges of passing bad checks about a month before he robbed a Bangor credit union of about $2,200 on April 4.

Bell was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Bangor to six years and five months in prison for robbing the University Credit Union on Union Street. His sentence on state charges is to run concurrently with his federal sentence.

The former University of Maine student was indicted in May by the Penobscot County grand jury on two counts of negotiating a worthless instrument, theft by deception, and misdemeanor drug charges. The theft charge stems from the check case.

Superior Court Justice Andrew Mead ordered Bell to pay a total of $8,253 in addition to the $2,200 he was ordered to pay the credit union by a federal judge Tuesday.

He faced up to five years in state prison for writing the bad checks.

The drug charges were dropped as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors.

Bell was under investigation by UM authorities a month before he robbed the credit union. As part of their investigation, campus police searched Bell’s Androscoggin Hall room on Feb. 24, 2005, looking for checks after it was reported he’d cashed several thousand dollars worth of bad checks or checks he’d claimed to have lost and had been reimbursed for.