Bounty hunter found not guilty of trespassing charge
COEUR d’ALENE — A bounty hunter accused of terrorizing a Coeur d’Alene family by threatening to break into their house to find a fugitive who wasn’t there was acquitted by a jury in First District Magistrate Court.
A jury took less than two hours Thursday to find Reed J. Alefteras, 24, not guilty of trespassing and disturbing the peace after he and two other bounty hunters attempted to recover a woman in April 2017 from a home on the 7200 block of N. Courcelles Parkway.
In a two-day trial in Coeur d’Alene last week, homeowner Dalen Gunn said he and his wife, Mary, were in bed around 9 p.m. when someone pounded on the door.
Gunn went to the front door to find a man “in full regalia of some sort” with what appeared to be a sidearm and an official-looking jacket or vest.
“I believed to be looking at a federal marshal or sheriff,” Dunn, who owns a Hayden-based manufacturing company, said.
Instead he was looking at Reed Alefteras, a Spokane recovery agent — or bounty hunter — who in turn was looking for Sarah Strickler, a 46-year-old transient who skipped bail a couple weeks earlier after being charged with felony burglary and theft.
Strickler had provided a version of Gunn’s address as her official residence because the Gunns, through their church, had helped the down-and-out woman and her boyfriend. Strickler had never visited the Courcelles Parkway home, Gunn told the court.
As the bounty hunters pounded on the door, Gunn did not realize they were after the woman the Gunns had helped a year earlier, and whose name they had since forgotten.
Strickler had used their address although she thought the home was in Hayden and had misspelled the street name.
Gunn said his family was terrorized by Alefteras and the two other agents, who refused to provide identification or to show a warrant, and who shined flashlights into the front door and a glass slider in back of the house, telling Gunn they would enter the home “one way or another.”
“I felt defenseless,” Gunn told the court. “I felt trapped in my own home.”
Gunn said he was pinned between the two flashlight beams, and that bounty hunters had dented the door with their boot kicks.
“I was terrorized. I was completely upset,” he said. “What if he mistook my wife for Sarah.”
Coeur d’Alene Police Sgt. Joshua Schneider, who responded to the Gunns’ call for help, said his department is not trained in the laws overseeing bounty hunters and that his purpose was to make sure things didn’t get out of hand after Gunn told him he would defend himself against Alefteras with a handgun if the bounty hunter tried entering his home or didn’t leave his property.
“My goal there was to mediate, and de-escalate,” Schneider said. “So we wouldn’t leave and come back later to a shooting.”
Laws for fugitive recovery agents — or bounty hunters — are grounded in an 1872 law that allows bounty hunters to enter a premises if they have reason to believe a fugitive is there.
“The privilege to enter land for the purpose of taking into custody a fugitive carries with it the privilege to use force to enter a dwelling even if the fugitive sought is not in the dwelling,” according to Idaho law. “Such force may be used only after explanation and demand for admittance.”
Idaho case law, including a Shoshone County case, supports the means necessary for a recovery agent to apprehend a fugitive “with reasonable and necessary force to effect the arrest but may not use unnecessary force,” according to a 2003 analysis by the Idaho Supreme Court.
Deputy public defender Adrien L. Fox said his client was acting within his rights when he attempted to break in to Gunn’s residence.
Scott Gribble, a Washington bounty hunter and trainer who operates IFAST, the Interstate Fugitive Apprehension Strike Team, said Alefteras followed the procedures he teaches to recovery agents, although he may have used a different tack.
“I think the situation could have been handled better by both the defendant and Mr. Gunn,” Gribble said. “It went bad so fast.”