Tesoro stick-up artist also a burglar

PALMER — A man charged last week with robbing the Big Lake Tesoro in March is apparently the same man a Talkeetna homeowner chased down in May after surprising him in the act of stealing her guns.

Shayne Anselm, 18, of Willow was charged with the robbery July 27. As a Class A felony, it’s a much more serious crime than the Class B and C felonies he faced in the May burglary.

According to an affidavit Alaska State Trooper Shayne Calt filed in the robbery case against Anselm, the initial call from the store’s clerk came in at 12:22 a.m., March 27. The clerk said that when a man walked in with a bandana over his face and aviator sunglasses and said, “I need money,” she thought he was joking.

“I need you to take that garb off,” she replied, according to Calt.

The man said he wasn’t kidding, though, and flashed her a gun. The clerk pulled the till out of the cash register and handed it over. The man in the bandana took cash out of it — $170, according to store accounting — and left.

Two people shopping at the store said they saw him get into a Ford Ranger pickup as a passenger. After a description of what surveillance cameras caught — basically what the witnesses reported — Calt’s affidavit drops off until April 24, when a woman called to report she believed Anselm was the robber.

She said she and Anslem and another woman had gone to the Tuesday Night Fights in Wasilla the day before the robbery and that they’d gone in Anselm’s Ford Ranger. She found a pistol on the seat and stashed it in the console to be safe.

Later, they went back to the woman’s apartment and then Anselm left with a man to go buy cigarettes.

He came back acting strangely, the woman reported, and had a stack of cash with him.

Troopers then started building their case. Calt writes that on April 16, a trooper flew over Anselm’s house and saw a pickup matching the description of the getaway truck. On May 9, they got a search warrant to look at Anselm’s phone records and found he was in the area at the time of the robbery.

By July 25, they had tracked down the man who drove Anselm to the store, who has not been charged with a crime in the case. The driver said he took Anselm to the Tesoro and then drove to a friend’s house. He went back to pick Anselm up five minutes later and found him running down the road.

“Go, go, go!” Anselm reportedly shouted when he got in the pickup.

The driver was going the speed limit so Anselm told him to step on it and pulled some cash out of his pocket and threw it on the seat, and then Calt’s affidavit contains this bit of dialogue.

“Did you really just rob that (expletive) store?” the driver asked Anselm.

“Yeah. You didn’t think I’d do it,” Anselm replied.

“How the (expletive) was I supposed to know? You said you were going to get cigarettes,” the driver said.

“You should have known better,” Anselm replied.

In her interview, the woman who tipped troopers to Anselm in April said she later confronted him about the robbery, asking why he did it.

“Anselm told her it was because ‘everybody thinks I’m a pussy,’” Calt wrote based on the woman’s account.

On July 26, troopers interviewed Anselm, who told him he’d robbed the store but claimed the driver had put him up to it and taken all the cash.

Calt writes that the interview with Anselm took place at his home, which would mean that he had been released on bail after his May burglary case.

In that case, an affidavit Trooper Kevin Blanchette filed details how a man and a woman returned home to a place on the Talkeetna Spur Road to find three people taking guns from the home and piling them up by the front door.

Three people — one of whom told troopers he and Anselm were tripping on bath salts at the time — were charged in the case, which has not yet made it to trial.

As of Monday afternoon, Anselm was listed as lodged in the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility. His criminal history besides the burglary and the robbery is short. In 2011, he was given the chance to plead guilty to underage drinking and have the conviction expunged if he stayed out of trouble. He did not, though, picking up a drunken driving charge in 2012, to which he pleaded guilty.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.