Krister Evertson is in jail in an absurdly convoluted legal saga that began with a misunderstanding of the most basic sort: He didn’t know that shipping by “ground” transportation from Alaska still usually entails an airplane flight.
In the early years of the current decade, Evertson was splitting his time between Wasilla, Alaska, where his aging mother lived and where he mined for gold, and Salmon, Idaho, where his sister lived.
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In Salmon, Evertson spent $100,000 of his family’s money seeking to create a fuel cell that would use pure sodium, mixed with borax (yes, the detergent ingredient), to create clean energy without polluting the environment.
Pure sodium is a metal that, when in direct contact with a certain amount of water, can explode. But it can be easily bought online when it is packaged correctly, that is, surrounded by an oil solution that protects against water.
Evertson had legally purchased 10 metric tons of sodium from a dealer in China.
But he ran out of money in Idaho before his experiments bore fruit, so he carefully stored all of his materials, machines, and byproduct in stainless steel tanks, with much of the sodium either surrounded by oil and plastic or in its original, legal packaging from China.
He then moved his materials half a mile down the road to the Steel and Ranch Supply Facility, an industrial supply company in Salmon owned by a friend, and paid rent in the form of two sacks of 1,000 pounds each of borax, which his friend could re-sell for a profit.
Evertson said he planned to return once he raised enough money to re-start his experiments. He moved to his mother’s house in Wasilla, Alaska, taking a few dozen pounds of sodium with him, and began selling the sodium on E-bay to raise funds to finance a new gold-mining expedition.
Then on May 27, 2004, federal agents in black SUVs and waving assault rifles, appeared out of nowhere, forced Evertson’s truck off the road, and arrested him. He was charged for shipping sodium he had sold on E-Bay by air, which is understandably forbidden as a result of its potential explosiveness.
Evertson knew it was illegal to ship the material by air, which is why he had packaged it according to all available guidelines, and he had even checked the “ground transportation” box on the bill.
What he didn’t know was that in the UPS system, ground transportation from Alaska actually is carried by air. That meant Evertson should have put a special sticker on the package of sodium routing it for special “ground” treatment.
Federal authorities could have treated the incident as a simple civil violation, but instead chose to charge Evertson with a serious criminal offense.
Two years later, an Alaska jury aquitted Evertson of all charges. — Quin Hillyer
