Two suspected accomplices have been charged with robbing a Spokane clinic of prescription drugs in December.

 Shawn Savynjo Struck, 41, was arrested this weekend on a second-degree robbery charge for allegedly helping Brian Lee “Rowdy” Riley rob the Spokane Falls Family Clinic, 120 W. Mission Ave. on Dec. 29. He remains in jail on $25,000 bond after appearing in court today.

Riley (pictured) was armed with a paintball gun when he robbed the clinic, police say. Struck held the door open for him, police say, and suspect Mary Jane Eilliot, 30, is accused of driving the getaway car. Elliot is wanted on a $30,000 warrant for second-degree robbery.

Riley pleaded guilty earlier this month to attempted second-degree robbery and second-degree robbery for the December case and for a gunpoint home-invasion robbery last August. He was sentenced to 27 months in prison.

Riley told Elliott he shot the pharmacist with his paintball gun and someone threw a bottle of Hydrocodone at him, according to court documents. Elliott said she drove Riley to the clinic in exchange for 45 pills, police say.

Riley's girlfriend, Erica M. Solberg, is charged with witness tampering for allegedly intimidating a witness in the case.
  

A Spokane man who stockpiled what federal prosecutors described as a “troubling” arsenal of illegal weapons will spend the next four years in prison.

Ronald L. Struve, 67, was also sentenced today in Seattle to two years probation and ordered to undergo mental health treatment. U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman said his arsenal posed “a huge danger to the community,” according to the Associated Press.

Struve, a legal stenographer, was arrested in Spokane in January after federal agents raided a storage locker in Bellevue, seizing 37 machine guns, 54 grenades, two grenade launchers and 7.5 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives.

The arsenal was discovered when rent wasn’t paid and the Bellevue unit’s contents were auctioned last November.

The agents also searched a stored vehicle and two rental units at 2814 N. Napa St. in Spokane leased by Struve, seizing seven machine guns, a Russian sniper rifle, an AK-47 assault rifle, and a host of machine gun parts that are illegal to own without proper federal licenses.

Agents also seized 33 other legal firearms for safekeeping from the north Spokane location, according to court documents. Prosecutors say many of the weapons had been stolen from the military.

The arsenal was discovered when rent wasn’t paid and the unit’s contents were auctioned last November. Struve was born in Los Angeles and worked as a court reporter in Eugene, Ore; King County Superior Court and as a freelance court reporter in Spokane, according to Stansell.

Struve’s lawyer, Jay Stansell, has described his client as “nothing more than a loner-type person with some unusual political ideas.”

In a sentencing memorandum, Stansell said Struve collected the weapons back in the 1970s for fear of a Cold War threat.

He bought the weapons over several years from a man he met at a gun show who claimed to be a Navy SEAL, Stansell wrote, as was “chagrined and embarrassed” to be facing prison time now.

“As time passed, and as the perceived imminent threat of communist invasion never materialized, Mr. Struve found himself encumbered by this long ago acquired arsenal,” Stransell wrote. “But he never attempted to dispose of it, because of the obvious, practical difficulties of doing so, as well as his personal inclination to never get rid of anything.”

A Mexican man will spend more than six years in prison for operating a large marijuana grow that did more than $10,000 damage to the Okanogan National Forest, according to the U.S attorney’s office.

Moyses Mesa-Barajas, 43, was arrested last August after federal and state officials found him in a grow complex with more than 10,000 plants.

Mesa-Barajas claimed ownership of more than 3,000 of the plants, according to federal court documents, and he pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to manufacture more than 1,000 marijuana plants and to destruction of government property wroth more than $1,000.

His arrest came after federal agents spotted grow operations in the forest connected by trails.

A search warrant served at the site resulted in Mesa-Barajas’ arrest, though several people escaped and were never found, according to a news release. There, federal agents found empty containers of fertilizer, pesticides and rat poison and determined the growers had re-routed streams, terraced mountain slopes, and generally just trashed the place.

On Tuesday, Judge Fred Van Sickle sentenced Mesa-Barajas to 75 months in prison.

He’s to pay about $7,300 in restitution. If he’s able to gain United States citizenship before he’s released, he’ll be on probation for five years, records show.

James McDevitt, U.S attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, praised the sentence in a prepared statement.

“Since no single agency has the manpower or resources to detect and dismantle large scale grow operations on public land, this case highlights the success that can be achieved with cooperative investigations by multiple state and federal agencies. Marijuana traffickers cause significant environmental damage to our public lands each year, not to mention the risk they pose to the public and recreationalists,” the statement reads.

The investigation was conducted by the U.S. Forest Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the North Central Washington Narcotics Task Force, the Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office, the Washington State Patrol, the Twisp Police Department, the Winthrop Marshal’s Office, North Central Washington Special Response Team, the U.S. Border Patrol, the Washington National Guard, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This case was prosecuted by Tim Ohms, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Washington.