An 18-year-old Kalispell man was given a three-year deferred sentence Thursday in Flathead District Court after pleading guilty to assaulting a police officer.

A pair of Kalispell police officers responded to the parking lot of Smith’s on Aug. 19, 2012, after receiving a report of an intoxicated pedestrian who had been seen lying in the road. When they arrived, they found Dawson Baer sitting on a pallet of water bottles.

When one of the officers asked Baer if he was okay, Baer did not look at him but continued to sit, clenching his jaw, flexing his jaw muscles and clenching his fists. According to a court document, Baer used an expletive, then said he was planning on going inside the store to sleep.

One of the officers then asked his name and Baer replied “we aren’t going there.”

After getting Baer to stand up, they tried to perform a pat search, but he began to tense up and pull away. When they tried to handcuff him, he ran into one of the officers before being forced to the ground.

The officers used a Taser on Baer multiple times, but it had no effect on him, and he tried to head-butt the officers before finally being handcuffed.

One of the officers hit his left elbow and head on the ground during the struggle and believed at the time that his elbow could be broken, while Baer suffered a cut above his left eye. Both were treated at the Kalispell Regional Healthcare and discharged.

Despite the report by one of the officers that Baer appeared to be under the influence of drugs at the time of the incident, Baer claimed in subsequent interviews that he was not on drugs or drunk at the time, but had been in a state of rage and blacked out, saying he did not remember anything.

During Thursday’s hearing, Deputy Flathead County Attorney Travis Ahner said the possibility of Baer’s story being true was highly unlikely due to the ineffectiveness of the Tasers and the fact that the officer who sustained the injury said he was close to drawing his firearm before they were finally able to subdue Baer.

District Judge David Ortley also indicated he believed Baer had either told outright lies during his interviews or had issues he was not able to come to terms with. He rejected a request from Baer’s attorney to remove stipulations of Baer’s sentence that he complete a chemical dependency screening and or a mental health screening at the request of his probation officer.

Ortley indicated his main reason for following the plea agreement, which stipulated the three-year deferred sentence, was because of Baer’s age and that his only prior offense of any kind was being underage in possession of tobacco.