Woman tells of violent struggle

PALMER — A man has been formally charged with assault after Alaska State Troopers say he choked a woman and threatened to kill her.

According to an affidavit Trooper Duane Leventry filed in the case against Matthew Ross, troopers were first called to the home on Plumley Road in Butte at 1:35 a.m. Jan. 23.

The woman who initially called for help was actually the sister of the woman Ross is alleged to have choked.

The sister who called the cops told Leventry that Ross and her sister, who is Ross’ wife, had been arguing all night, so her sister came to stay with her to get out of the house. The woman told Leventry she’d gone to let the dog out and saw Ross sitting on the stairs inside her house. Ross and his wife started to argue and the wife told Ross at least 10 times to leave, then went over to the phone and said she was going to call the troopers.

“Matthew ran over to the phone and ripped the cord out of it,” Leventry wrote. Ross “told her that she didn’t need to be calling anybody.”

Leventry then interviewed Ross’ wife.

She said that after she tried to make the call she somehow wound up on her back with Ross on top of her. He had his hand around her throat.

“She could not breathe and was afraid that Matthew was going to kill her,” Leventry wrote, based on the woman’s recollections. “As Matthew was strangling her he was whispering in her ear that he was going to kill her and that he was going to kill her sister, mother and kids.”

The woman told Leventry that she started to black out, which prompted her to fight back and get Ross off of her.

“When Matthew got off of her he kicked her in the stomach, which caused physical pain and injury then he ran out of the residence,” Leventry wrote.

Leventry wrote that he noticed blood on the woman’s shirt but that she told him it came from Ross’s hand. He’d apparently cut himself punching a wall earlier in the night, the trooper wrote.

Ross was jailed, charged initially with two counts of assault and one of interfering with the reporting of a domestic violence crime. A Palmer grand jury made those charges official on Friday.

Court records show no prior offenses in Ross’ record, save a few traffic offenses, the most serious of which was a charge of leaving the scene of an accident in which property damage was involved.

The press release Leventry wrote on the night of the assault says that Ross was jailed without bail at the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility. Late Monday, jail records listed Ross as still incarcerated.

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