Homeowner nabs burglar

TALKEETNA — Two people who surprised a group of burglars in the act of stealing their guns wound up chasing one of them down.

According to affidavits Alaska State Trooper Kevin Blanchette filed in the case against the four people eventually arrested, one of the homeowners reported the burglary at Mile 2.5, Talkeetna Spur Road around 7:20 p.m., May 10 while giving chase.

“He advised (dispatchers) that he was in pursuit of one of the suspects who had been picked up by a vehicle that had been waiting nearby,” the affidavit says. “The dispatcher advised him to stop the pursuit and to return to his residence to wait for troopers.”

Apparently, the man had walked in on the burglars piling up guns by the front door. He and the woman he was with — both are identified as owners of the home in Blanchette’s affidavit — took off after the thieves.

The man got in a pickup, the woman wound up in the woods where one of the burglars surrendered.

“The female waved frantically at me as I approached. I observed the male (suspect) had fresh blood on his hands and shirt,” Blanchette wrote.

That suspect was identified as Shayne Anselm, 18, and Blanchette wrote that a second trooper tracked a second suspect, Jourdan Avila, 20, to Sunshine Road and arrested him there.

Troopers then searched the house and found a pile of guns by the front door and another pile of guns in another part of the house. The homeowner said when he chased the burglars, one of them dropped two other guns taken from the house in the front yard.

They gave troopers descriptions of the pickup and the two people who fled the scene in it.

A third trooper spotted that pickup the next day at a Tesoro station in Willow. When he tried to pull it over, it sped off down the highway, making a high-speed turn onto Nancy Lake Parkway and “raising a cloud of dust.” They found it farther up the road stopped at the end of a trail of engine oil. The driver was Matthew Lundy, 23, and matched the homeowners’ descriptions. A female passenger likewise matched their descriptions.

Lundy was the only one of the four not to speak with troopers.

The woman, who was not charged in the case, told troopers that she wasn’t involved, but then said she’d rode in the pickup to Talkeetna from a house on King Arthur Drive and waited in the pickup for them to return.

“Stephanie didn’t know what the others were up to, but she knew it wasn’t good,” Blanchette wrote.

Lundy eventually showed up, running. She drove to pick him up and as they left a man in a big truck tried to hit them, she said.

Finally, here’s what Avila had to say, according to Blanchette’s affidavit:

“Avila reported he and his friend, Shayne Anselm, had been abducted by a male with a black bandana and blindfolded. They were dropped off at the house and told to do things or they would be killed. The owners came home and he ran out of the house because he did not want to be shot. He admitted to being on the property and in the house with Anselm. He admitted he and Anselm were ‘tripping’ on bath salts.”

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