Pawnshop theft nets weapons

PALMER — Guns pilfered from a Wasilla-area pawnshop turned up later that day at an assisted living home in Big Lake, according to Alaska State Troopers.

At 9:16 a.m., Saturday, troopers were summonsed to Alaska Fast Cash on Fattic Drive in Wasilla.

Trooper Brandon Viator writes in court documents that when he arrived, he found a glass door had been smashed and glass was strewn across the ground.

Viator said he talked to the owner — Noel Lowe — and watched his surveillance video from around 3 a.m.

“I observed a male with a hoodie and wearing gloves accessing the shop’s pistol and knife cabinet,” Viator wrote.

Fattic Drive runs parallel to the Palmer-Wasilla Highway just east of Seward Meridian Parkway near the go-kart track. Lowe is a former Wasilla city councilman with a pending misdemeanor marijuana possession case in Palmer stemming from a traffic stop earlier this month.

Before the day was out, a tipster had helped troopers crack the case. At 6:54 p.m., the owner of an assisted living home in Big Lake called to say that one of her former clients, Todd Demoski, 21, was trying to get on the property and had given multiple guns to another client to hide for him.

The woman “advised dispatch that she located the guns and would hold them for AST,” Viator wrote.

By 9:30 p.m., Viator wrote, a trooper had driven to the assisted living home and taken in three possession of pistols — a .44 Ruger Vaquero, an H&R 923 revolver and a Stoeger Cougar .45-caliber pistol.

On Sunday, Viator tracked Demoski down to a home on Qunicy Circle off of Knik-Goose Bay Road just south of the Parks Highway.

“When asked about the pawnshop burglary, Demoski initially denied knowing about it,” Viator wrote. “Demoski later admitted to breaking into the pawnshop and stealing multiple firearms.”

The assisted living home owner called back later that day and said she’d searched the property and come up with two more guns and three pocket knives. All the guns seized from the assisted living home except a Ruger pistol were on a list of stolen guns that Lowe gave troopers.

Demoski, meanwhile, was jailed at Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility on $2,500 bail and ordered to find a third party to watch him before he could be released. As of Monday afternoon he was still listed as lodged at the facility.

Demoski has multiple burglary and theft charges on his record, according to court databases. He pleaded guilty to theft and vehicle theft in separate cases in August 2013 and to burglary in March 2013.

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