Domestic violence preceded shooting

PALMER — Court filings in the case of a Houston man charged with firing a round at his girlfriend provide more details on what led up to the alleged shooting.

According to an affidavit Alaska State Trooper investigator Curtis Vik filed in the case against Albert Escholt, 43, the case begins with an argument. It first came to troopers’ attention at 2:18 a.m. on Wednesday when the woman, identified in Vik’s affidavit only by her initials, called for help.

The 30-year-old woman said she went to Escholt’s house to talk to him. They were dating, she told troopers, and she wanted to tell him she was tired of him calling her nasty names.

“I had made him dinner and then got on my snow pants and went outside to start up the vehicle,” Vik writes, quoting the woman, before reverting to his own voice. “She came back into the residence and sat (with) Escholt on the bed while they talked. Escholt told (her) that he couldn’t love her the way that she wanted to be loved, because he was in love with his previous girlfriend.”

With that, Vik writes, the woman started to get up to leave. But Escholt rolled on top of her and put his knee in her chest. The two started brawling, knocking over a table and a lamp.

“(The woman) stated that they wrestled all the way out the door,” Vik wrote.

Now outside, Vik wrote, Escholt put his knee in the small of the woman’s back and pulled back on her arms. The woman told Vik that Escholt knows she has back problems.

The woman pulled away and got in her Suburban. Escholt told her to turn it off, then ducked briefly back inside the house. As the woman tried to call her cousin, Vik wrote, Escholt fired a round through the Suburban’s front passenger window and out the rear driver’s side passenger window.

“(The woman) stated that she was trying to dial a number when, suddenly, she had glass shards flying into her face,” Vik wrote.

The woman described the gun as a rifle, probably a .30-06. She told Vik that Escholt used the barrel of the gun to break out the remaining glass from her window, then trained the gun on her, at one point telling her she should call her parents to tell them she loved them.

“(She) didn’t think she was going to leave the property alive,” Vik wrote.

But she did get out, Vik wrote, by capitalizing on a brief second in which Escholt’s attention was drawn back to the house.

Once away from the house, she called for help. By that afternoon, Escholt was in jail, charged with attempted murder, criminal mischief and assault. Jail records Monday afternoon showed he was still housed at the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility.

Vik writes that Escholt has two prior assault convictions on his record and his property on Armstrong Road was, in 2008, the site of an ominous incident in which an unknown person “aimed a shotgun at a trooper. The unknown individual evaded capture at the time.”

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