Candidate’s son arrested on drug charges

PALMER — The son of a Mat-Su Borough School District board member seeking election to the state House of Representatives is facing drug charges.

Robin Gattis, 18, was charged Feb. 6 with drug misconduct after Alaska State Troopers investigators intercepted a package of the popular club drug ecstasy heading to his Wasilla address.

Gattis is the son of Lynn Gattis, a local businesswoman and school board member who is also running to represent a newly created Wasilla-area district in the state House. In a brief emailed statement Thursday, Gattis responded to the charges.

“My son Robin is an adult,” she wrote. “His father and I support Robin in all of his GOOD choice(s).”

In a conversation last week, she noted that this was not a good decision, but her son is a young man and that she hopes he can turn things around.

According to an affidavit filed in court by Dwayne Shelton, a Palmer police officer stationed with AST, the package arriving via DHL contained 22 grams of the drug MDMA, for which the street name is ecstasy. An AST investigator posing as a delivery driver brought it to Robin Gattis’ home. Once it was opened, troopers swooped in.

“The package and MDMA was found opened on the kitchen counter,” Shelton wrote.

Troopers talked to Robin Gattis and to his now-co-defendant, Bren Marx.

“Bren Marx stated to me that the DHL package belonged to Robin Gattis and he was excited and had been waiting for it,” Shelton says in the affidavit.

For his part, Robin Gattis said he thought the drug was MDMC, not MDMA. That other acronym — MDMC — refers to a synthetic drug of a type that occupy something of a legal gray area in Alaska and elsewhere as drug enforcement advocates try to find ways to make them illegal.

Robin Gattis and Bren Marx were jailed at the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility on $10,000 bail. Robin Gattis has since made bail and been released.

Lynn Gattis is running against two opponents for state House in this year’s election.

Other candidates for the state House seat are Blake Merrifield and Mark Ewing.

In the fall of 2009, Jeremy Ewing, Mark Ewing’s son, who had suffered with mental health issues for a good portion of his adult life, was shot to death in what troopers described as a home invasion robbery gone wrong.

Jeremy Ewing, troopers asserted, had been sent to a home in Butte to rob its owner of money and marijuana. The homeowner shot and killed Jeremy Ewing. The people alleged to have put him up to the robbery — Dana Sanders and Jerome Capps — were charged with negligent homicide. Capps is awaiting trial. Sanders accepted a plea agreement and is awaiting sentencing.

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