Tennessee man to prison; wife pleads guilty to kidnapping plot

Friday, September 15, 2017

COVINGTON, Tenn. — In January 2017, a felon from Tennessee was at the airport north of Arapahoe, Neb., instead of appearing in court in Tennessee. On Sept. 1, back in Tennessee, 55-year-old Mike Parsons of Arlington, Tenn., was sentenced to three years in prison for missing that court date.

Also on Sept. 1, Parsons’ wife Pat pleaded guilty to attempting to kidnap a Tennessee judge and the Nebraska sheriff who helped arrest her husband.

After serving this failure to appear sentence, Mike Parsons will be released to federal authorities to face a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. The firearms charge is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine, or both.

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In January, law enforcement officials tracked Parsons and his cell phone to the airport five miles north of Arapahoe, and arrested him after finding him inside a locked airport office.

Furnas County Sheriff Kurt Kapperman said at the time that FBI agents had alerted his office that Parsons may be in the Arapahoe area, and that he was wanted on the failure to appear and firearms charges. His record includes theft, burglary, aggravated kidnapping and aggravated assault.

Following Parsons’ arrest, another individual, identified then as “S.H.,” issued orders demanding his release from jail. S.H. indicated she was “The Chief Justice of the Universal Court of the T’shilhqot’n Nation” in British Columbia, Canada. Parsons claimed he was an ambassador and associate chief justice of the “country of Chilcotin.”

Pat Parsons is believed to have been involved in a plan after Parsons’ arrest to kidnap Sheriff Kapperman and Judge Joe Walker III, the presiding judge in Tipton County, Tenn., and transport them to Canada to face “criminal charges.”

Pat Parsons faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, a $125,000 fine and five years of supervised release. She’ll be scheduled Dec. 1.

The investigation of the Parsonses has involved Sheriff Kapperman’s department, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Nebraska State Patrol, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the FBI.

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In a related case, the trial for 55-year-old Anthony Todd Weverka of Arapahoe has been delayed from Sept. 25 until Nov. 27, at 9 a.m., in U.S. District Court in Lincoln.

Weverka was the president of the Arapahoe Airport Board in January 2017 and is charged with knowing about the Parsonses’ plans and not alerting law enforcement. The official charge is misprision of felony (the deliberate concealment of one’s knowledge of a felony or treasonable act), alleging that Weverka knew of the existence of Parsons’ felony offenses and the plans to kidnap Sheriff Kapperman, and provided assistance to those planning the abduction.

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