Wasilla man charged with murdering his neighbor

WASILLA — A 37-year-old man was jailed Saturday after police say he shot and killed his 45-year-old neighbor.

“On Oct. 1 at approximately (6:35 p.m.), Dale E. Prater, age (45), of Wasilla, died of an apparent gunshot wound in Wasilla. Phillip Bailey, age 37, of Wasilla, was arrested and charged with the death of Prater. The case is still under investigation,” reads the entirety of the police press release on the incident.

Court records Monday afternoon show Bailey was charged with a single count of murder. He’d already made one court appearance and is set for another on Oct. 12.

Dawn Syers lived with Prater in the white, two-story, four-plex on Fanciful Place with kids’ toys outside where he lived upstairs from Bailey. She said she and Prater planned to fly to Las Vegas to be married on Halloween.

“Elvis was going to walk me down the aisle. We had everything paid for. We were going to use our dividends for spending money,” she said.

She said Prater worked construction. They’d been dating for three years and he was a great guy. They were friends with Bailey, she said, and had been helping him out since his wife left him.

“They’ve been best of buddies for three years,” she said.

On Saturday, she said, she left Wasilla for Anchorage to catch a roller derby match. She said her fiancé had planned to head out for a poker game with his family but went to run an errand for Bailey. He bought him a pack of cigarettes.

Earlier that day, she said, they went out to grab Bailey a gallon of milk. It was just something they’d been doing for their neighbor to try and help him out. She said police didn’t want to share the graphic details with her, but she later talked to a friend who was in the room when Prater was shot.

She said her fiancé brought the cigarettes into Bailey’s apartment and handed them to him.

“He said, ‘Just put what you owe me on the tab,’ and he turned around to leave and Phil shot him in the back of the head,” Syers said.

As far as what might have led him to do that, Syers said she wasn’t sure.

“The only thing that I know of is he thought Dale was sleeping with his wife, which he was not,” Syers said. At any rate, she came home at 10 p.m. to find the apartment building cordoned off by police tape.

A neighbor said police and emergency responders arrived in force, but information was scarce that night about where Bailey was and if he’d been arrested. Later in the evening neighbors called 911 worried that perhaps the cops had to shoot Bailey, but were told the flashes they saw were from cameras, not from gun muzzles.

Syers said the news hit her hard.

“They proceeded to inform me that he had passed away. I lost it. I broke my cellphone,” she said. “I’d just seen him. I don’t know. It’s just devastating.”

She said Monday she was still in shock, not sure what to do with herself. She’s trying to get a new phone so she has a way to talk to people about it.

“I keep expecting him to come home and it’s just, it’s not going to happen. I don’t know. It’s so hard,” she said.

Jail records Monday afternoon showed Bailey was still residing in the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility. A call to the jail confirmed that as of Monday afternoon he did not have a bail amount set.

A search into his criminal record shows one felony assault case in 2002 and a relatively clean record going all the way back to the early 1990s when Bailey was apparently convicted in a handful of burglary cases in the Kenai Peninsula area.