Jerry Wetle’s trials: Cases energize critics of Stevens prosecutor

COLVILLE – After more than a quarter-century as a prosecutor in Stevens County, John G. “Jerry” Wetle has learned to live on the hot seat.

But the 60-year-old prosecutor admits he has been taken aback by some of the criticism of his work in the past year.

“I got one anonymous call that just burned your ears off,” Wetle said in an interview at his office last month. “People get very emotional.”

The past year has brought intense scrutiny of the mild-mannered prosecutor for his handling of two high-profile cases, including a plea agreement with a high school teacher who impregnated a 15-year-old student.

The teacher, who later married the student and moved to Wyoming, received a six-month jail sentence.

“People were furious with Jerry,” said Cathy Cogdell, a foster parent who led a petition drive for a harsher penalty against Robert M. Swalstad, a 31-year-old history teacher. “If we can’t get a prosecutor who decides he’s going to uphold the law, then we’ve got a problem.”

Wetle, who faces an election battle this year, has also been criticized for a lingering investigation into the death of a 7-year-old boy nearly 16 months ago.

Wetle has steadfastly refused to comment on the investigation, saying he does not want to jeopardize any potential case.

“I’m here to do the job,” Wetle said. “Hopefully, I do it OK. If I don’t make too many people mad, maybe they’ll let me come back.”

Praised and pilloried

In rural Stevens County, where the crimes sometimes seem ripped from the headlines of a supermarket tabloid, Wetle juggles the roles of prosecutor, politician and community leader.

For years, until the county’s population topped 40,000, he also served as the county coroner. A graduate of Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., Wetle took office in 1980.

Through the years, he has consistently found himself in the spotlight and, as a result, open to criticism.

In the late 1980s, law enforcement officials publicly complained that Wetle had failed to act on several cases that had been forwarded to him – some more than two years old.

A detective grumbled that cases went to Wetle and were ignored. Wetle countered that his small office was swamped with time-consuming cases. Even now, the prosecutor’s budget is only about $800,000, or less than one-tenth the budget for his Spokane County counterpart.

Nancy Foll, the director of a children’s advocacy center, is a former critic. In the late 1990s, Foll and others complained to Wetle that the county was not successfully prosecuting child sex abuse case.

“We weren’t winning trials, we weren’t helping kids, and Jerry stepped up to the plate and started handling those cases himself,” said Foll, director of the Kids First Children’s Advocacy Center in Colville. “Since then, there’s been a major turnaround in this county.”

Last year, in recognition of Wetle’s work, the nonprofit named him its community person of the year.

“Things are much better,” Foll said. “The prosecutor is certainly one player in that. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than it was? Yes.”

The criticism has re-emerged this year, just in time for the election season. In letters to the editor and public meetings, some residents have attacked Wetle for what they see as his failure to aggressively pursue cases.

Tim Rasmussen, a deputy prosecutor for Spokane County who has announced his plan to run for the office, said that the longer cases linger, the more memories fade and the more difficult prosecution becomes.

“Delay most often aids the defendant,” Rasmussen said. “My personal belief is that justice delayed is justice denied.”

Wetle, who narrowly defeated a challenger in 1998 but won re-election more easily in 2002, has urged patience.

“People may say I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. “But I know exactly what I’m doing.”

For a longtime politician facing re-election, Wetle is surprisingly wary of cameras.

On two separate occasions in the past month, Wetle has refused to be photographed. He invited a Spokesman-Review photographer to take pictures of him in public court, but when a photographer arrived Wetle declined to come out of his office.

Wetle said he did not want to waste “the public’s time” by being photographed, although he did consent to an interview.

“The last thing I want is a big picture of anything,” he said.

Swalstad case

For many residents, one case last year seemed particularly outrageous: A history teacher in tiny Hunters, Wash., impregnated a 15-year-old student, moved to Wyoming and married her.

According to records from the school, Robert Swalstad had “bragged” to male students about his affairs with teen girls, and the school documented several complaints of inappropriate behavior.

At a community meeting, residents pushed Wetle to seek the harshest possible sentence.

“(Wetle) was talking about evidentiary problems, and we had a baby sitting right outside the courtroom,” said Cogdell, who helped organize the meeting. “It was outrageous.”

Wetle said the case was more complicated than it appeared. The teen mother refused to submit to a DNA test and asked him not to imprison her husband.

“The girl wasn’t going to testify,” he said. “The mother wouldn’t even talk to us.”

Swalstad pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of communicating with a minor for immoral purpose and was sentenced to six months in jail. He also must register as a sex offender.

Some residents were furious.

Letters to the Statesman-Examiner, a weekly paper in Colville, chastised the prosecutor. One called the actions of the judge and Wetle “infuriating.” Another asked, “Just what the heck is (Wetle) doing for a living?”

In another letter, Swalstad’s attorney countered that the public “should be grateful that politics and private agendas stop at the door of the Stevens County Courthouse.”

But for Wetle, the criticism has taken a toll – both personally and publicly.

“How many arrows can I take before I’m gone?” he asked rhetorically in an interview last month. “I’ve taken a few.”

Investigation drags on

Nine months pregnant, Kenda Bradford speaks in a whisper when she discusses her firstborn son, Tyler.

“I was really young, and he deserved more than what I could give him at the time,” Bradford said. “I felt he would be better off somewhere else.”

Bradford is the biological mother of Tyler DeLeon, a 7-year-old foster child whose tragic death remains the subject of a Stevens County investigation that has dragged on for more than a year.

Adopted by a foster mother named Carole Ann DeLeon, Tyler went from a chubby baby to a tiny, almost skeletal child, Bradford said.

At his autopsy, DeLeon weighed only 28 pounds – the same amount he had weighed three years prior.

“I don’t think it’s right to me,” Bradford said. “Food and fluid are not a privilege. It’s how you stay alive.”

Yet nearly 16 months after the boy’s death, Wetle has not announced a decision on whether to charge the ex-foster mother in the case. At the end of April, Wetle charged Carole DeLeon with second-degree criminal mistreatment of another young boy in her care – a charge that carries a penalty of up to five years in prison.

According to records from Stevens County Superior Court, DeLeon said that both boys suffered from a bizarre disorder that led them to drink until they became bloated.

DeLeon, a former paralegal with the U.S. attorney’s office in Spokane, instructed school officials to strictly limit Tyler’s fluid intake, and the boy suffered a “significant pattern of suspicious injuries,” a state panel found.

The Stevens County Sheriff’s Office first forwarded charging documents to Wetle last year, and three months ago, a panel convened by the state’s child welfare agency concluded that DeLeon had provided “misinformation … (that) set the groundwork for others to minimize or ignore the fact that Tyler’s growth declined over the last four years of his life.”

Yet Wetle will say only that the case remains under investigation.

“I understand the fervor and the interest,” Wetle said. “I also understand that I have a job to do. It still has to be done right.”

Pamela Reed, Tyler’s biological grandmother, said the ongoing investigation has added to the stress of the boy’s death. Reed and her daughter both said they hope charges will be filed in Tyler’s death.

“We’d just like some kind of closure,” Reed said. “We either want her charged or just have it dropped. There is no closure for my daughter.”