Wasilla man stops burglar

WASILLA — Charles Hayes said he had a small hint that something was wrong when he came home Tuesday afternoon.

His wife had called him while he was out to say the burglar alarm had gone off, which was particularly strange because it was a motion sensor inside the home that had tripped the alarm.

But he looked around and everything seemed fine.

“There wasn’t any problems anywhere so I came in the house and I had my television on,” Hayes said. “I had it on mute and I was reading but I walked down to the bathroom and started washing my face.”

When he finished up, Hayes — a published author of works of philosophy who also writes for Valley Voices column on the Frontiersman’s Opinion pages — then headed to the spot in his house where he writes.

“I walk in there and there was this guy sitting there at my desk dressed in camouflage with a cap pulled own over his eyes,” Hayes said. “It was the creepiest sight.”

Hayes had a few sharp words for the man, who replied that he didn’t want any trouble. The man was holding one of Hayes’ pistols and had it pointed at him.

In addition to his work as a philosopher, Hayes has police training from his days as a beat cop in Dallas in the mid-1960s.

“I ran as fast as I could into the bedroom and grabbed the pump shotgun that I keep in the corner,” Hayes said.

Meanwhile, the man opened Hayes’ garage door and ran outside. Hayes caught up with him. The man swung around and again pointed the pistol at Hayes.

“I leveled the shotgun on him and told him I was going to blow him to pieces and to drop the gun,” Hayes said. “He didn’t have too many more times I would have shot him.”

The man put the gun down. He said he was going to run. Hayes told the man he’d shoot if he did.

He said he was kind of bluffing and he kind of wasn’t. The shotgun had stood so long in the corner he’d actually forgotten which button to push to free it up so you can rack a shell into the chamber. As he tried to figure that out with one hand, with the other he called 911. His conversation with dispatchers ran simultaneous to his conversation with the intruder.

“They’re hearing me tell this guy I’m going to shoot him and they’re saying, ‘Don’t shoot!’” Hayes recalled.

That’s about when troopers arrived. Hayes said he was lucky there was one just a mile away. The trooper arrested the burglar.

During his time in Hayes’ house, the man seemed mostly focused on valuables, Hayes said.

“He had a number of things out of my desk and had some of my wife’s jewelry. He had a hard drive backup to my computer that I didn’t miss until a while after the troopers left,” Hayes said. “I called the troopers and he said that this guy had tried to hide it in the backseat.”

He said the guy had also piled up tools from the garage.

“I didn’t get a sense that he was high on anything,” Hayes said.

A trooper press release recounting the episode leaves out the part where Hayes is in the driveway with his shotgun trained on the intruder but does say that’s where troopers found the man.

Troopers identify him as Devin J. Rudolph, 25, of Wasilla. They say he’d broken into the house on Begich Drive. Because of the part of the story where he pointed Hayes’ own pistol at him, troopers charged Rudolph with robbery, a much more serious crime than just burglary or theft, though he faces both of those charges as well.

He was jailed at the Mat-Su Pretrial Facility on $20,000 bail with an order that he find a third party to watch him before he can be released.

Court records show an open assault case for Rudolph filed in December 2014. The rest of his record contains just minor offenses and civil cases. He made his first court appearance in the robbery case on Wednesday.

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