Charles Rowan, a low-level cage fighter in Michigan who faked his death to escape a debt to a drug dealer, was sentenced Monday to 17 ½ to 40 years in prison after having pleaded guilty to armed robbery.

The sentencing caps one of rural Michigan’s more bizarre recent crime stories.

In August, Rowan, 26, pleaded guilty to robbing Guns and Stuff, a gun store in Gladwin County. But it was no ordinary robbery. At the time, many of Rowan’s family and friends, including many mixed-martial arts fighters, thought he had died a month earlier in a car accident.

They believed his girlfriend, Rosa Martinez, when she told them that Rowan was dead — so much so that they organized benefit fights in his memory.

But the death announcement was a hoax, part of a clumsy attempt to start a new life and escape a drug-related debt that Rowan said was as much as $80,000.