‘I spent the last 12 years waiting for this day’: Wait ends with second guilty verdict for Altoona man

HOLLIDAYSBURG, Pa. (WTAJ) — An Altoona man found guilty on weapons charges in 2015 was found guilty all over again in a retrial Wednesday.

Stephen Espenlaub, Jr. was tried and convicted of armed robbery nearly a decade ago, but was granted a retrial by the court last year.

The issue at the center of the retrial is a clerical error. Initially, the weapons possessions charges were tried separately from the armed robbery and dismissed from that trial. However, a weapons charge was not removed from the jury’s verdict sheet and they reached a verdict on it. While this did not impact Espenlaub’s sentence, it was substantial enough for him to successfully appeal the court for a new trial.

On the first day of the retrial Monday, Espenlaub fired his attorney, choosing to represent himself. In his closing, he explained, “I chose to represent myself because I can’t put trust in my life, in my freedom, in someone else’s hands.” District Attorney Pete Weeks had to interrupt Espenlaub’s closing remarks to ask for a bench conference on three separate occasions, notably during one instance when Espenlaub claimed the retrial was due to “discrepancies” with the evidence, which was the basis for Espenlaub’s entire closing.

In those remarks, Espenlaub tried to propound that the evidence used in the initial conviction was fabricated, tampered with or an outright lie by officers and witnesses, in an attempt to “paint a new picture” of the events of a 2012 armed robbery in which Espenlaub impersonated a police officer in order to rob a known drug dealer at gunpoint for marijuana and money.

However, Weeks said in his closing statement that Espenlaub’s assertion that the judicial system is broken is just an attempt to blow smoke over the picture and blur it for jurors, reminding the jury of lies Espenlaub made in his arguments, such as accusations of perjury against police officers. Weeks reminded the jury that while Espenlaub was representing himself, he is not an attorney, and Weeks nor another attorney would be permitted to make such allegations in a court of law.

In his closing remarks, Weeks said that while Espenlaub tried to question the credibility of a key witness in the case — the drug dealer that was robbed — his drug dealings did not, “exonerate the defendant from his conduct.”

Espenlaub said in court he, “Spent the last 12 years waiting for this day, for the opportunity to set things straight,” but it took the jury only 45 minutes to deliberate, returning a second verdict of guilty on all counts.

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No sentencing date for Espenlaub has been set yet, but he could be facing a standard sentence of five years in prison for each of the nine weapons charges.

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