AST crime unit touts successes

PALMER — “Cheddar,” one of the smaller fish, might be out of state.

The other names on the conference room marker board at the Alaska State Troopers Palmer Post under the tongue-in-cheek moniker “Operation Twisted Metal” all have mug shots hanging next to them. Nicholas A. “Cheddar” Simmons, 19, is little more than a catchy street name, a Michigan address, and a marker scrawl saying he might be gone. The eight others on the board are all relatively well known to the members of the Mat-Su Criminal Suppression Unit: Sgt. Tony Wegrzyn and troopers Andrew Ballesteros, Timothy Cronin, and Eric Taylor.

Many of the targets of the investigation attended high school together, and knew each other growing up, troopers say. Others know each other through shared addictions, and the shared Valley fish bowl. They are all in their late teens and early 20s, save for convicted burglar and big fish Michael Scott, 35, according to Wegrzyn.

The nine names on the board are all wanted in connection with about $85,000 worth of damage done to the Eklutna Tailrace Fish Hatchery building and reported Nov. 8. These nine allegedly broke holes in walls and removed wiring, plumbing, and fish tanks, and took things that weren’t nailed down, not all at once, but in twos and threes, over time, a slow-motion burglary, troopers say.

The four members of the crime suppression squad gather and joke about off-duty plans and a frequent tipster only one of them (Wegrzyn) can comprehend over the phone. Then they run down a list of places known by one-word abbreviations: Ptarmigan. The Farms. Maud. They will search each of these places tonight, looking for the fish. They warn each other about which of the nine targets was carrying a gun the last time troopers contacted them.

The home addresses for the remaining people stretch from Sutton in the north to Houston in the west — a span of 82 highway miles.

Troopers clamber into SUVs and head out into the streets in a convoy. They hope to net all of the players in one go, though many of the addresses on the board are little more than temporary stopover points. Many of the targets of Twisted Metal, like many Valley thieves, are homeless, Wegrzyn says.

It’s about 3 p.m. on the afternoon of Dec. 19, and the sun is setting when they get on the road.

For a man about to put months of investigation — much of it undertaken by Ballesteros — out onto frozen Valley streets, Wegrzyn looks relatively relaxed. However, he still anxiously eyeballs oncoming traffic, looking for Scott’s pickup.

“Part of our job is to go out and investigate the crime, and the other part is to hold people who are responsible for that crime responsible,” he says. “And today is that day.”

The fish hatchery

A power outage at the hatchery caused the alarm system to fail, which let the burglars in undetected, said Gary Fandrei, executive director with the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association. The facility is a back up — the association has another facility on the Kenai Peninsula it uses as a primary hatchery — but the damage to the building’s copper wiring delayed putting the place back online, Fandrei says.

The report came in after the caretaker spotted the open door and called the troopers, Wegrzyn remembers.

“Patrol caught this case back in early November,” he says. “Someone drove by and happened to notice that it looked like a door was ajar. We go out there with the caretaker, which is a volunteer for (the Alaska Department of Fish and Game), and determine that the place has actually been ransacked, just tons of stuff has been taken.”

Wegrzyn ticks off a list.

“Holes cut in the wall because they use braided copper wire for power, copper pipes for the plumbing, aluminum for the tanks, sheet metal for various other things,” he says.

According to an affidavit troopers filed in December, three people broke into the hatchery initially: Simmons, Ryan Armstrong, 19, and Corey Jenson, 19, of Palmer.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game officials list items stolen in the affidavit including: aluminum fish raceways worth $33,000, 14 aluminum incubator boxes valued between $8,400 and $9,800, and copper wire from “several junctions boxes,” according to the affidavit written by trooper Ballesteros.

Troopers spotted the raceways outside a local metal shop about 10 days after the break-in was reported, according to Ballesteros’s affidavit.

“I observed several large and small pieces of aluminum from the Eklutna Tailrace Fish Hatchery that had obviously been cut into smaller pieces to transport and possibly conceal the origin of the stolen metal,” Ballesteros writes.

An anonymous tipster gave troopers four names, including Armstrong, Jenson, and Simmons, according to the affidavit. Armstrong, Simmons, and Jenson, interviewed throughout November, admitted their participation, and provided still more names, according to the affidavit.

The case got legs, Wegrzyn remembers.

“Basically, this case turns into, from one person to nine pretty much overnight,” he says.

By the numbers

Palmer Post officials created the criminal suppression unit in January 2014 specifically to address property crimes in the Mat-Su Valley.

In its first year, troopers with the unit have recovered stolen property valued at $287,550, according to figures provided by Wegrzyn. They also have recovered 42 firearms, 15 all-terrain vehicles, six passenger cars, two boats and “a handful of trailers,” Wegrzyn says.

Of the 84 cases troopers with the unit have pursued, only three remain unsolved — a high success rate, according to Wegrzyn. That’s largely because the unit is somewhat removed from interaction with the general public. Patrol officers provide most of their intake, Wegrzyn says.

“That’s an extremely high number of solved cases, and I attribute that directly to the fact that us four, we don’t have to respond to non-emergency calls for service,” he says. “We can actually go out, track the folks down, follow up leads, and then go recover these folks’ stolen property, sometimes the day it gets stolen sometimes a day later, sometimes a week later. Nevertheless, these people are getting their property back.”

The biggest case they’ve broken was likely the multiple-count conviction of serial burglar Dawson J. Sult, for a series of thefts from Big Lake cabins, Wegrzyn says. Sult faces sentencing in February for his crimes. The oddest thing they’ve recovered was a taxidermy wolverine, pilfered from a cabin in Sutton, Wegrzyn says.

Beyond the individual crimes, property theft ties in to another social ill: the rise of heroin use and abuse in the Valley, Wegrzyn says.

“I can tell you without a doubt that — if I could put a percentage on it — I’d say probably close to 75 percent or 80 percent of the people that go out and burglarize and steal stuff on a regular basis have an addiction to (most of the time) heroin, but also some times methamphetamine or pills,” he says.

That’s in part because of addiction’s continual push, but also because users of hard drugs are less likely to be able to hold jobs, Wegrzyn says. Heroin, once a novelty in the Mat-Su, has become commonplace in recent years.

“We’re seeing a huge increase in heroin use and abuse here. I can tell you firsthand, 10 years ago, most of the cops in the Valley didn’t know what heroin looked like,” he says. “We get it more often than any other drug, including, sometimes, marijuana. There is without a doubt a direct correlation between drug use and theft and burglary.”

The drug connection includes the fish hatchery theft. Troopers believe the two big fish, Scott and Jenson, are known users, Wegrzyn says.

Just because the unit can choose its own cases to a degree doesn’t mean they get much downtime.

While Wegrzyn pulls up numbers at his workstation, a patrol officer brings him a hand-written list scrawled on the blank side of a real-estate printout. Somewhere in the Valley in the last 24 hours, someone has stolen several thousands of dollars worth of personal belongings out of a house, including several game consoles, firearms, and speaker systems, all within a five-hour window when the owners were out of the house.

The big fish

The first place they check, a two-story house in a sea of snow-covered abandoned-looking cars on Ptarmigan Road, yields no property and no people. At least, not the people troopers seek. One of the troopers sits on the location, and the rest get back on the road, heading to a second location in a neighborhood on Maud Road, then a third, then a fourth. It’s about 4:30 p.m.

Then they spot Jenson’s white pickup parked outside a one-story white house in a residential neighborhood just off the Glenn Highway in Palmer. The rear passenger side taillight lens has been shattered.

“Corey’s home!” Wegrzyn says, with obvious glee. “That truck is going to truck jail.”

He and Ballesteros pull off the road, and then approach the house. Wegrzyn knocks on a window, and moments later, Jenson emerges and is placed in handcuffs. While they are arresting Jenson, a pickup pulls up to the house with another suspect and the property owner inside, groceries in hand. They decide to leave the little fish on the streets for now.

“Corey … he gets to go to jail,” Wegrzyn says. The other suspect “has a good story. For right now, he’s saying all the right things.”

Two more stops remain, but while Wegrzyn is sitting on the last of the places near the post that evening, a farmhouse about a half-mile down the road from a gated community near the Springer Loop system, they get an anonymous phone tip that Scott, the other big fish, is in Glacier View.

While they’re heading back to the Palmer Post to get lunch, before they head up to Glacier View, Ballesteros phones in with an update: Jenson has been placed in the Mat-Su Pretrial Facility on $100,000 bail.

Wegrzyn is ecstatic.

“I think that’s the record!” he says.

By about 9:30 p.m. that night, Scott is in handcuffs.

By Dec. 29, four of the nine — Armstrong, Jenson, Scott, and Simmons — faced one count each of first-degree theft, three counts each of second degree burglary, and one count of criminal mischief in the third degree. Jenson and Simmons have bonded out, but Scott and Armstrong remain in Mat-Su Pretrial, court records show. All face arraignments this afternoon.

Two additional suspects were turned over to the juvenile court system, and three other suspects remain at large, according to Wegrzyn.

Officials anticipate the hatchery will be back online before a planned Fish and Game program to release 400,000 smolt from the area, Fandrei says.

The outcome isn’t ideal — transience plays a large factor in the inability to locate the remaining suspects — but it’s something of a victory, Wegrzyn says.

“One down,” he says. “Like, 4,582 to go.”

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269 or brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com.