Botched robbery, killing a tangled tale

PALMER — Two people have been arrested in connection with the death of Jeremy Ewing.

Ewing, Borough Assemblyman Mark Ewing’s son, was killed in what appeared to be a botched home invasion Aug. 29 in the Butte. On Thursday, Jerome Capps, 33, and Dana Sanders, 33, appeared in court charged with criminally negligent homicide, robbery, burglary and conspiracy to commit theft, burglary and robbery.

According to an Alaska State Troopers affidavit filed in the case against Sanders, troopers were called to the Butte home at 9:50 a.m. where a man, Michael Hill, reported his father-in-law, Thomas Chapman, had shot a burglar.

Chapman told troopers he was asleep in bed when he awoke to see a man wearing ski goggles, a camouflage hooded sweatshirt and a balaclava holding a gun, rifling through business papers. The man pointed the gun at Chapman and told him to get down on the floor. Chapman complied.

“Chapman saw the male put the gun down, on the floor, and lean over Chapman. Chapman said he knocked the male down and grabbed the gun,” trooper David M. Bower wrote in the affidavit.

A fight ensued, Chapman told troopers. He told the man to let go of the gun.

“The male did not and Chapman said he fired three times and the male stopped fighting,” Bower wrote.

In an interview with the Frontiersman, Hill laid out almost exactly the same story of that night. He said the gun was his. He’d put it on the end table beside the couch Chapman was sleeping on that night. The table was near the door. He thinks Ewing probably picked it up as he entered.

He said after the shots were fired, his father-in-law started shouting for him and he ran into the living room from the bedroom of the house.

“There he is, buck naked, with my gun in his hand,” Hill said. He recalls his father-in-law’s first words to him were, “’Someone just tried to kill me, Mike, someone just tried to kill me.’”

In Thursday’s hearings, Chapman was only referred to as a victim. Court records Thursday afternoon showed no charges have been filed against him.

Still, troopers ay they did seize 50 marijuana plants.

Hill, when he spoke with the Frontiersman, said the marijuana was strictly for personal use.

“My father-in-law is not a dope dealer,” he said.

In Bower’s affidavit, the trooper says that a search of Ewing turned up four cell phones. Three belonged to Chapman, Hill and Hill’s wife. The fourth was Ewing’s.

“After reviewing the text messages from the decedent’s telephone, it was determined that the robbery had been planned for at least a week,” Bower wrote.

A lot of those messages were signed, “Stunner.” Bower wrote that Chapman told them the name is one Sanders often uses. Texts continued to come to the phone even after troopers had seized it,” Bower wrote.

So troopers tracked Sanders down.

According to Bower’s affidavit, Sanders told them she was upset with Chapman and wanted to get back at him. Capps was, and still is, in prison.

Though Sanders told troopers she later got cold feet, Capps pressed ahead with plans to burglarize Chapman’s house.

According to Bower’s affidavit, Sanders said she was at least partially coerced. She said Capps, with whom she has a child, told her, “I wonder what the kids will do without a mom.”

Sanders told troopers, according to the affidavit, that her role in the whole thing was to round up participants and coordinate the robbery. Bower quotes text messages from Sanders to Ewing:

“3 til 9 itz got 2 b done by force the earlier we do it the better chance of just 1 person there”

And:

“This is life or death for me doggie real talk!! This is me and jays meal ticket”

The affidavit ends without any explanation of how or why Capps and Sanders roped Ewing into the plan.

In a previous interview, Ewing’s father said he wasn’t entirely sure either, but he’s heard rumors that his son might have owed Capps money.

Of the two hearings Thursday, Capps’ was the shortest. He appeared only long enough to enter a not guilty plea.

Sanders, however, was there to ask for a reduction in her bail amount and to be released to the custody of her mother, Juanita Dwyer.

Sanders has spondylolysis, according to medical records filed with the court. The condition causes her severe back and leg pain and she’d planned to have surgery to correct it Monday.

Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler eventually denied her request, saying that from what she could tell from tapes played at the hearing, the surgery was only a secondary concern for Sanders and was an elective procedure. She also noted that her impression of Sanders’ mother was of someone involved enough in her daughter’s life that she would have trouble doing third-party-custodian duty objectively.

After court, Dwyer said she very much wanted to apologize to Mark Ewing and that she’d given him her phone number. She said she didn’t know all the facts of her daughter’s case.

“If she has any involvement in this she needs to pay for what she’s done,” she said.

As for asking the judge to let her out of jail, she said she only wanted to do it so her daughter could have her back fixed.

“As soon as she got that I was sending her straight back to jail.”

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