An Anchorage woman was sentenced Monday to three years in prison for possessing an unregistered firearm, a charge stemming from the 2013 discovery of a large cache of stolen guns in a rented storage unit.
Megan Lindsey O'Connor, 26, was also sentenced for "being a drug user in possession of firearms," an infrequently prosecuted offense that's generally tied to more serious crimes, said assistant U.S. attorney Bryan Schroder.
O'Connor pleaded guilty to the charges June 16.
The defendant is an admitted methamphetamine user, prosecutors said, and the girlfriend of convicted drug trafficker Max Jewett.
Jewett, 38, was sentenced to 10 years in May for conspiracy to distribute meth, according to court documents. He also has ties to Sean Warner, a heroin dealer who was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Monday for injecting a 14-year-old girl with a fatal dose of the drug around Christmas 2011.
In summer 2013, O'Connor rented a storage unit at a business on Tudor Road. When she failed to pay for the unit and someone was caught on camera breaking into it, the business owners considered the property abandoned and looked inside, where they discovered a large number of firearms, according to court documents.
Officers searched the unit, which contained 77 firearms, 27 of which had been stolen in the last year, prosecutors said. Among the weapons were a 17-inch sawed-off shotgun, a fully automatic machine gun and a silenced .44 magnum rifle -- all firearms regulated through federal law.
In Jewett's case, he admitted to trading drugs for stolen property. And his name was on an emergency contact list for O'Connor's storage unit, Schroder said.
"There's no public record that says there's one particular gun that was traded to Jewett for drugs," he said. "It's more the inference of her connection to Jewett, and the amount of stolen guns."
As for the charge of being a drug user in possession of a gun, the prosecutor said it's uncommon. Generally, the charge comes about when there is a plea agreement in a case involving weapons, he said.
People can be charged for being high on drugs and possessing a gun, but prosecutors are likely to use their discretion on whether or not to pursue such a case unless there are other issues.
Having those two things "meets all the elements of the offense, and they can be charged … but we're not going to go out and look for people who aren't doing anything nefarious," Schroder said.
The firearms found in the storage unit have been forfeited as part of O'Connor's plea deal. Anyone who has a legitimate claim for a firearm can recover it.
According to court documents, the guns were stolen from homes in Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula town of Nikiski.