Home invasions, drug heists get pair prison time

PALMER — Two men charged in a string of home invasion robberies agreed to serve three and five years in prison respectively Monday.

Adam Blodgett, 26, and Brandon Straight, 28, both pleaded guilty to assault. In return, Blodgett will serve three years in prison and Straight will serve five.

The pair were arrested in September 2008 and charged with robbery, assault and theft. Alaska State Troopers at the time of their arrest pinned three robberies on them — one in April and two in May. In all three instances, troopers say, two men, armed and usually wearing masks, entered homes and demanded prescription medications.

Prosecutor Kerry Corliss said that an eyewitness had fingered Straight and Blodgett as the robbers. But since the charges were filed that witness has passed away.

“She was perhaps our strongest eyewitness,” Corliss said.

And, lacking that testimony, the case got a little harder, though not impossible, to prove. Still, she said, prosecutors decided to take the plea bargain route instead of pushing forward to trial.

“It’s just something the state didn’t want to risk,” she said.

Straight’s attorney, Jon-Marc Petersen, said that in addition to losing the witness, the state had some other evidence problems.

“There was some DNA evidence that the defense would consider exculpatory,” Petersen said.

But, given that his client is a felon — he’d picked up drug and eluding arrest convictions prior to this case —he didn’t want to encourage his client to risk a possible new conviction on multiple and very serious charges of robbery.

“He would have been facing a substantial amount of time in prison,” Petersen said.

When it came to Straight’s turn to talk, he had little to say, besides asking Superior Court Judge Kari Kristiansen to accept his plea, which by that point in the proceeding she’d already done.

As for Blodgett, he said he was hoping to put this episode of his life behind him.

“I just want to get this resolved, get it over with, so I can get back to my family,” he said.

Kristiansen, in accepting the sentences, had little to say about Straight.

“I don’t have any discretion to go above five years for Mr. Straight,” she said.

As for Blodgett, she said she thought his prospects for rehabilitation were better than those of Straight. She allowed him an extra week to report to prison in order to give him more time to sort out his application to serve his time at home on an ankle monitor.

“If you come back in the future you will be considered presumptive, which means your sentence will be much steeper,” she said.

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