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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Jury begins deliberating in home-invasion trial

Man accused of being lookout in Ridgefield crime

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A jury began deliberations Tuesday in the trial of a Snohomish man accused of being a lookout during a home-invasion robbery Dec. 19 in Ridgefield, in which a victim was tied up and several firearms were stolen.

Jarrod A. Wiebe, 27, is charged in Clark County Superior Court with first-degree burglary, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree robbery, second-degree extortion, first-degree criminal impersonation, and 10 counts of firearm theft.

His three co-defendants, including the group’s ringleader, pleaded guilty Sept. 22 to multiple charges connected with the Ridgefield crime spree.

“The question you all must answer is this: Was the defendant, Jarrod Wiebe, an accomplice during the commission of these crimes he’s been charged with?” said Senior Deputy Prosecutor Kasey Vu.

Under the law, an accomplice is someone who promotes or facilitates the commission of a crime, aids or agrees to aid the commission of the crime by words, actions, encouragement, support or presence, Vu said.

“He was not simply an innocent bystander as he would like you to believe,” Vu said. He knew he was assisting in criminal activity, Vu said.

On the morning of Dec. 19, Wiebe and his friends, Larry C. Kyle, Ruben Vega and Regan C. Davis, traveled Interstate 5 together in a white Isuzu Trooper from the Snohomish area to Ridgefield, Vu said. On the way, they stopped at a Wal-Mart, where Kyle, Vega and Davis changed into military-style clothing, he said.

“We don’t know what exactly was said or agreed to … but in the defendant’s own words, there was talk in the car that someone had been wronged, someone needed a visit, and consequences needed to be taken care of,” Vu said.

Conflicting testimony

Testimony during Wiebe’s five-day trial conflicted over whether Wiebe was with his three friends when they forced their way inside the single-wide mobile home of a 45-year-old farmworker on a dairy farm in the 23000 block of Northwest Hillhurst Road in rural Ridgefield. However, both the farmworker, Casimiro Arellano, and his longtime partner, Manatalia Barragan, testified that Wiebe served as a lookout while Kyle, Vega and Davis restrained Arellano with disposable plastic flex cuffs and threatened to call immigration if he didn’t surrender his firearms and give them $10,000. Kyle, Vega and Davis were dressed in military-style clothes and armed with loaded pistols, Vu said.

“Just because he didn’t physically do those things he is not dissolved of criminal liability,” Vu said.

Barragan testified through an interpreter that Wiebe helped the other men steal 10 firearms from the home and pack them in the Isuzu Trooper.

Wiebe admitted that he knew that Vega was carrying a pistol in the waistband of his pants and that Davis was armed with a 1911 Springfield .45-caliber pistol, Vu said. Kyle also was armed with a firearm, which was visible, the prosecutor said.

Wiebe’s attorney, Chris Ramsay, argued that Wiebe wasn’t aware that the victims were being tied up, threatened and robbed. At one point, he invited two other farmworkers to come inside the mobile home, Ramsay said.

‘It makes no sense’

Ramsay said that if Wiebe knew what was going on, “why would he direct two other people to go inside the home when it’s his job to keep people out?”

“Why would he essentially involve the public as two more eye witnesses to a crime Jarrod Wiebe knew was occurring in that house?” Ramsay said. “It makes no sense.”

“The only thing he said he saw was that they were bringing out firearms,” Ramsay continued. “He doesn’t know whose firearms they are. They didn’t want to give him information. He wasn’t in on it.”

Vu retorted that Wiebe directed the farmworkers into the house because he and his friends wanted to question them about the whereabouts of a man named Francisco. Vu said the group attacked Arellano and Barragan because they went to the wrong house.

If convicted of all of the charges, Wiebe faces up to 80 years in prison, which would be a longer sentence than any of his co-defendants’.

Kyle, 38, of North Bend, pleaded guilty to first-degree burglary, second-degree kidnapping, first-degree robbery and second-degree extortion and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Vu said Kyle was the ringleader. Vega, 37, also of North Bend, pleaded guilty to first-degree burglary, first-degree robbery and second-degree kidnapping and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. David, 53, of Everett entered an Alford plea, acknowledging that a jury could find him guilty of first-degree robbery, first-degree burglary and theft of a firearm and was sentenced to 53 months in prison.

The jury deliberated until just before 6 p.m. Tuesday and is scheduled to resume deliberations today.

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