80 years for man who shot neighbor in head

PALMER — For shooting his neighbor in the back of the head last year, Phillip Bailey was sentenced Monday to serve 80 years in prison.

“Some of my argument was based on the fact that he hasn’t really acknowledged that he did anything improper that day,” Assistant District Attorney Kerry Corliss said after the hearing.

She said that in only knocking five years off the 85-year term she requested for the 38-year-old Bailey, Superior Court Judge Greg Heath seemed to agree with that argument and with her another she made.

“The way (Bailey) sees things is different than anyone else,” she said. And that makes him dangerous because “he sees threats where the rest of us don’t.”

Bailey was arrested Oct. 1, 2011, outside of his apartment on Fanciful Place not far from downtown Wasilla.

At trial, two competing narratives were offered for what happened. Corliss argued that Bailey was upset with his neighbor, Dale Prater, 42, for a number of reasons, most — if not all — of them imagined. He thought Prater might steal from him and thought Prater was the reason his wife left him.

So Bailey laid a trap for Prater. He sent him out to get cigarettes then strapped on his pistol and told his daughter not to be scared. When Prater returned, Bailey fired a single shot in the back of his neighbor’s head.

Bailey’s defense team, Hannah King and Nathaniel Peters, argued that Prater was a convicted murderer in Oklahoma, where he’d beaten a man to death with a tow chain in a drug deal gone wrong. They argued that earlier that day, Prater had been demonstrating how to kill a person with a Bowie knife and said he was capable of killing Bailey before Bailey could pull his gun.

The trial was a dramatic one, with surprise evidence coming to light after the process had already begun.

The case was actually put on hold for a week as the attorneys and Heath sought guidance from the Alaska Supreme Court as to how to proceed when Prater’s fiancée, Dawn Syers, brought defense attorneys the Bowie knife that had played such a pivotal role in that day’s events.

Heath insisted Syers be given immunity so she could be questioned on the witness stand with regards to that knife. The Supreme Court sided with Heath in ruling that immunity was necessary.

It was never officially explained where exactly the knife had been in the months between the murder and the July trial.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.