HOMER, ALASKA – A Duluth man sought on methamphetamine trafficking charges was killed and his 2-year-old son critically wounded in a dramatic shootout with law enforcement officers Wednesday in an airport parking lot in Homer.
Jason Carlo Jacob Anderson, 31, had been living under an alias in Alaska with his girlfriend and their two young children for nearly a year, according to the girlfriend, Cherry Dietzmann.
She said doctors gave her son only a small chance of survival.
Authorities in Minnesota had contacted marshals in Alaska last week after learning that Anderson may have fled there, said Chris Connolly, warrants supervisor with the marshals’ Minnesota district.
The injured boy, Jason Anderson, was in intensive care at Providence Hospital in Anchorage on Thursday after reconstructive surgery, according to Dietzmann.
She said he had been shot in the back of his head while sitting in a car seat in the back of his father’s rented Jeep.
Dietzmann, 20, who said she had fled from Anderson repeatedly because of physical abuse, said she helped marshals track him down. “I told them if you do it this way, he’s going to freak and people are going to be hurt,” she said. “They didn’t take me seriously.”
Her daughter, 6-month-old Darla, survived the shooting in a car seat and was placed in foster care, she said.
Dietzmann’s aunt, Colleen Murray of Duluth, said in a telephone interview Thursday that Dietzmann had told her by phone a week ago that she had left Anderson and had gone to authorities because she wanted their help in getting their kids away from him.
“She was cooperating [with authorities] because they were supposed to help her, and no one was supposed to get hurt,” Murray said. “They were supposed to arrest him and get the kids. … They knew there were babies in that car, and they still opened fire.”
Randy Johnson, U.S. marshal for the Alaska district, confirmed Thursday that Dietzmann had been cooperating with his agency.
Investigators working with Dietzmann had tracked Anderson under his alias — he was using the name of Cherry Dietzmann’s brother Brandon Dietzmann — to the Homer area this week.
Anderson was lured to the Homer airport about 6 p.m. Wednesday, supposedly to exchange his rental Jeep, which had a broken windshield. Plainclothes officers with the federal marshal’s office and Homer police were waiting in the terminal and planned to stun him with a Taser gun when he went to the rental counter, according to Ty Gifford, the rental agent involved in the plan.
As it happened, the terminal was filled with high school choir members and their parents preparing to fly out on a trip to Italy.
Anderson pulled up in the rental lot about 100 feet from the terminal and called the agent on his cell phone, asking him to bring out the keys for the new car because he had his children with him. Officers in the parking lot then drove up on both sides of the Jeep and gunfire broke out.
Homer police officers were placed on administrative leave, according to the Alaska State Patrol, which is investigating the incident.
Unproven Drug Charges
In Minnesota, a federal grand jury indicted Anderson and three other Duluth men in December on charges of conspiracy to sell methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana in Minnesota and elsewhere from the mid-1990s through about Dec. 12, 2005, according to court records.
Anderson’s co-defendants — Cherry Dietzmann’s brother Bret Allan Dietzmann, their cousin Terry Todd Dietzmann and Darrel Lamar Fredrickson — were arrested and await an April 24 trial, said Karen Bailey, spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office. Bret Dietzmann was in custody and Terry Dietzmann and Fredrickson were free on $25,000 bail each, Bailey said.
Reached at his Duluth home Thursday, Fredrickson said he didn’t know Anderson. “If he walked by me on the street, I wouldn’t have even known who he was,” Fredrickson said. “I’ve never met him and never spoken to him. They’re saying I was in a conspiracy with guys I don’t even know.”
Fredrickson acknowledged knowing the other two, saying they are relatives of his. But he denied that they or he were involved in a drug conspiracy.
