Fairchild serviceman sentenced to six months for stealing ammunition from base
Jun. 22—The first of six service members charged in a scheme of stealing thousands of rounds of ammunition from Fairchild Air Force Base was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Spokane to six months in prison.
Eric Eagleton, 30, pleaded guilty to possessing stolen ammunition.
He was a staff sergeant at Fairchild Air Force Base.
In March 2022, an undercover Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent accompanied Eagleton and fellow staff sergeant John Sanger to a shooting range at Fishtrap Lake, where they fired green tip 5.56 M855 ammunition that had been stolen from the Combat Arms Training and Maintenance center on the base.
While executing a search warrant at Eagleton's residence, agents located approximately 1,600 rounds of stolen U.S. Air Force ammunition, a crate containing ammunition labeled "US-DOD" and a firearm suppressor.
As part of the plea deal, Eagleton agreed to surrender the "gold/bronze firearm silencer of unknown origin" to the FBI.
Charges of conspiracy to commit theft of government property and possession of an unregistered firearm were dismissed.
The scheme was discovered after authorities, including members of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, began investigating Sanger for anti-government posts made on social media between the 2020 presidential election and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The indictment accused four other men working at the base of helping to falsify documents allowing the theft.
James Hanlon's reporting for The Spokesman-Review is funded in part by Report for America and by members of the Spokane community. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
