Public defender requests more time to review case
A hearing on the case of a North Pole man charged with fatally shooting two people at a Delta Junction drug-rehab facility in January has again been postponed. That means the double-murder trial of Daniel Serkov won’t be held until March, at the earliest.
It took only about a minute-and-a-half for Superior Court Judge Patricia Haines to grant a request Tuesday from the public defender’s office to reschedule the hearing for February.
“Your honor, Mr. Yff is reporting that he’s received 348 pages of paper and numerous items of digital discovery, which he is still in the process of reviewing,” said Assistant Public Defender Mary Kennedy. She sat in on the omnibus hearing in lieu of Eric Yff, the public defender assigned to the case who was unable to attend the proceeding.
“He’s not yet ready for trial and is requesting a … continuance,” Kennedy said.
Prosecutor Dominic Plantamura agreed to the defense’s request, and Haines then continued the hearing and set a tentative trial date.
“We’ll set this omnibus hearing (for) February 22nd, at 1:30; trial, the week of March 11th.”
Haines also granted Yff’s request to bring Serkov back to Fairbanks Correctional Center, where he was originally held on $2 million bail after being arrested January 20th for the shootings. He was later moved to Anchorage Correctional Center. Plantamura referred questions about when that happened, and why, to the public defender’s office, which didn’t respond to queries.
Serkov is charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of second-degree murder, and two counts of evidence tampering. He’s admitted to shooting 44-year-old Andrey Dorozhin and 35-year-old Dmitriy Sergiyenko at the Alaska Rehabilitation Center in Delta Junction.
Serkov told an investigator that he checked-in to the facility for drug addiction treatment.
If convicted, he faces up to 99 years in prison for each of the first-degree murder charges.
