Court appeal nets shooter shorter sentence

PALMER — A man convicted of taking shots at Alaska State Troopers and at his neighbors won a new sentence on appeal Sept. 10.

The change to his sentence for Caswell Lakes resident Siegfried Pedersen, will, at most, knock a year off of his sentence.

Siegfried Pederson, a resident of Caswell Lakes, first came to the attention of law enforcement in May 2009 after a confrontation with a man who was renting a cabin from Pedersen.

“(The renter) saw Pedersen using a backhoe to dig a ditch across (the renter’s) driveway — a ditch that would effectively prevent (the renter) from using the driveway to leave his home,” Judge David Mannheimer writes in a ruling handed down by the Alaska Court of Appeals.

In talking to his renter, Pedersen fingered a pistol on his hip. The renter summoned troopers who found Pedersen standing on a balcony with a gun yelling at them about trespassing.

“The troopers ducked behind the house, and then they heard the gun go off,” Mannheimer writes. Pedersen yelled at them in response. “Rather than engage in a firefight with Pedersen, the troopers made their way back to (the renter’s) cabin.”

A few months later, in September 2009, Pedersen was taking down a “Slow, Kids at Play” sign his neighbors had erected and tossing it into the woods when his neighbors confronted him.

One of the neighbors went to confront Pedersen and Pedersen fired a round from a pistol. The neighbor went to go get his own gun but by the time he got back outside Pedersen was gone. When he got home, he found a bullet had been fired through his window, breaking his blinds and lodging itself in a stairwell.

Pedersen’s case ran a twisted course through the legal system. The two shooting incidents were filed as separate cases but combined for trial and split again for sentencing.

Pedersen has made multiple trips to appellate courts over various issues, at one point winning an appeal after a judge threw out the case in which he tried to sue for trespassing the neighbors he took a shot out in the September incident.

Judge Bill Estelle had very few good things to say about Pedersen at sentencing, ruling he was in the worst class of offenders for his particular crime.

“The defendant needs to be isolated. There is no indication that he’s going to change his behavior. There’s no indication that he’s not going to continue to escalate, and require ambulances and hearses to be sent to accompany law enforcement when they responded to his behavior,” Estelle is quoted as saying in Mannheimer’s ruling.

The current ruling from Mannheimer has to do with how he was sentenced. In the September shooting he was handed a sentence of four years. Statutorily, though, he had to receive a sentence of three years or less.

Estelle was entitled to go above that maximum if he found that there was some kind of aggravating factor. He did, but the specific aggravator he found — that Pedersen’s actions were directed at law enforcement — only applied to the May incident.

So, Mannheimer wrote, Pedersen needs to be re-sentenced. But, he said, the Estelle could choose to also re-sentence Pedersen on the charges from the May incident and thus not actually change the amount of time Pedersen was required to serve in prison.

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