Lili can barely remember a time when she wasn’t in fear of the man who stalked her.
It began when she was 4. Her mother, Allison Wieck, had invited a mutual friend’s son to their Eugene home for a visit. He was new to town and, according to his mother, looking for friends.
During the visit, the man barely spoke to Allison. He was 32 years old and only paid attention to Lili.
Allison never invited the man back to the house, but that didn’t stop him. He showed up to the house uninvited, Lili’s family moved, and he found their new house. He appeared at Lili’s school and attended her dance recitals.
Lili recalls an event at Lane Community College when she was 11. “I was doing a ballet performance on stage,” Lili says, “and I looked out, and he was in the front row.”
Fearing the man’s intentions, Allison told him to stay away from her daughter and their home.
He kept showing up. Lili lost sleep. She felt embarrassed, confused and afraid. On her 12th birthday, Lili came home from school to find the man waiting outside her house. He gave her a book as a birthday present and told her that he loved her.
Allison started digging into the man’s history online. She found an anti-stalker website that linked the man to online writings that described his sexual desire for young girls. She read poems that had been posted to a website called Butterfly Kisses describing a young girl similar to Lili.
Allison called the Eugene Police Department. Soon after, police arrested the man, and a Lane County Circuit Court judge convicted him on a single count of stalking, a misdemeanor. A judge sentenced the man to 105 days in jail and five years’ probation, ordering him to stay 1,000 feet from the family’s house. The court also issued a permanent anti-stalking order against him.
That was in 2015. Today, Lili, 23, is a University of Oregon graduate who lives and works as a receptionist in Eugene. She wishes the trauma of the experience was behind her. But it keeps returning. (Eugene Weekly is not using Lili’s last name because she is a stalking victim who asked that her name not be used.)
Over the years, starting in 2020, the man filed three petitions to have the protective stalking order lifted. The court has refused, but every time it happens, Lili is pulled back into court to recount her experiences.
In the fall of 2024, Lili learned shocking news. Her stalker, now 52 and living in the Eugene area, had gone to court to have his criminal conviction expunged.
To her horror, he succeeded.
The case exposes a troubling gap in Oregon law.
Expungements allow people to move on from their crimes by sealing any records that show the person was ever arrested, tried, convicted or jailed.
Sandi Pellikaan, an Oregon attorney specializing in expungements, says they “help people in terms of employment, housing, volunteer opportunities. Yeah, it is life changing.” She also notes her clients’ demeanor shifts, saying, “It’s this huge weight off their shoulders.”
The law forbids expunging certain crimes, including homicide, most sex crimes, DUIIs and most crimes against children.
But the crime of stalking is not on that list, even if the victim was a minor.
And that’s what Lili found so difficult to believe as she watched the man convicted of stalking her succeed in having his criminal record sealed.
“I can’t think of any other reason why he would want to have this expunged in the first place if it was not to continue to target me or to continue to target another little girl,” Lili says. “And I think that is abundantly clear.”
Lili and her mother have turned to state Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, to get the law changed. Lili and her family would like to see the stalking of a minor defined as a separate crime that could not be expunged.
Prozanski says he has brought their proposal to the Oregon State Senate Committee on Judiciary, which he chairs, for consideration. The committee meets Sept. 8 in Salem, and Allison will testify about her daughter’s case on Lili’s behalf.
Allison says that Lili “realized that she was constantly being reminded and having to relive this traumatic part of her life that she would rather never have to think of again.”
Lili says, “It shouldn’t be my burden to continue to protect the community.” She adds, “It should be the courts, and the fact that they have stepped down means that I feel like I have to step up.”
•••
The man convicted of stalking Lili declined to be interviewed for this story. In an email to Eugene Weekly, the man says that 10 years have passed since his conviction and that he had not been accused of any criminal behavior or wrongdoing since then.
“Even just mentioning that my record was expunged will affect my finding and maintaining employment and housing, which is the purpose of the expungement law in the first place,” he writes.
The man convicted of stalking Lili met all of the legal standards for expungement. He had not been arrested or convicted again, nor had he been reported to law enforcement to have violated conditions of his probation.
The conditions included a prohibition against using a computer for sexually explicit content or communicating with anyone under the age of 18. The conditions said the man could have “no contact of any kind with non-relative minors” nor “be present in any location frequented by children.”
Lane County District Attorney Chris Parosa says he supports expungement for people who, in certain cases, have been convicted of a crime and shown they have turned their lives around. “I don’t think that ultimately action from one’s past, especially very attenuated ones from our past, should forever mark them with a scarlet letter of criminal conviction,” he says.
However, his support for expungements does not apply to this case.
Oregon lawmakers approved a 2021 bill sponsored by Prozanski that shortened the waiting periods. The law also made expungements automatic, assuming the petitions meet all the other legal standards. The only thing that can halt an automatic expungement is an objection by a district attorney’s office.
Parosa calls this automatic approval “highly problematic.” He says, “I think this statute went way too far in ultimately making it presumptive that a person’s going to get an expungement, and I think it needs to be, from my perspective, rolled back significantly.”
Parosa says that before the 2021 legislation changed the waiting period, about 330 people a year filed for expungement in Lane County. Last year, the DA’s office received 1,337 expungement petitions. He says the Lane County DA’s office only objects to 5 to 10 percent of the expungement petitions that come in.
“Prior to the law’s change, we had the ability to object and more ground to object from. Since the law changed, we have very limited grounds upon which to object to expungements,” Parosa says.
The DA’s office objected to the man’s expungement petition, triggering a hearing in which the DA’s office and the man’s attorney were allowed to bring evidence before a judge.
In the June 2025 hearing, Lili expressed her worries about the court granting the petition. “With it not being out there readily available to the public,” Lili said, “he can just go do whatever he wants. And then the same thing will happen to the next family.”
Because the man convicted of stalking Lili had not been arrested or convicted of another crime, the DA’s office did not have documentation to use against his petition. State law allows the judge to consider the petitioner’s “criminal behavior.” Lane County Deputy District Attorney Ryan Leal, who represented the DA’s office, argued that “criminal behavior” did not necessarily mean an arrest or conviction.
At the hearing, Lili made her case regarding an encounter with the man, despite the court’s anti-stalking order. She described an instance in 2025 when the man approached her on the University of Oregon campus while she sat outside with her boyfriend. Lili says the man turned and walked away when he saw her boyfriend.
But Lili says she didn’t call the police to report a violation of the anti-stalking order because she was with her boyfriend at the time, who made her feel safe from the man. But this meant she was unable to provide proof of the incident at the hearing.
Another witness, Matrisha Armitage, said the man frequently attended children’s musical performances, including Music Education and Performing Artists Association shows and sat in the front row. Armitage, the group’s executive director, became so concerned that she posted a warning on Facebook about the man, and included his photo.
Leal acknowledges he lacked hard evidence to establish “criminal behavior.”
“Because it doesn’t specifically say ‘criminal convictions,’ the statute says ‘criminal behavior,’ we argued that that violation of contact of the stalking order, even though it wasn’t convicted or reported to the police, was criminal behavior that the court should consider when making their decision,” Leal says.
For a moment, Leal, Lili and others in the courtroom thought his argument objecting to the expungement had prevailed.
Lane County Circuit Court Judge Robert Conover, after hearing the evidence, said he would deny the petition to expunge the record of stalking because he had concluded the man posed a safety risk to the public.
Jesse Lohrke, the man’s attorney, objected to the ruling. In a motion contesting it, Lohrke wrote that the man had “complied fully with the conditions of his probation, had no probation violations and engaged in no further prohibited contacts since the conviction date.”
Lohrke argued the ruling relied on claims of “criminal behavior,” which were “neither factually supported nor consistent with the Court’s oral ruling.”
On July 24, 2025, Conover reversed his decision and ordered that the conviction be expunged. Neither Conover nor Lohrke responded to requests for an interview.
According to Leal, a judge reversing a decision announced in court is “extremely rare.” Parosa says he was “astonished.”
The expungement does not remove the protective stalking order against the man, just any traces that he was convicted of stalking. Leal says if re-convicted of the same crime, his past conviction would not affect his sentence. Therefore, the crime would again be charged as a Class A misdemeanor, rather than the typical Class C felony for a stalking reoffense.
Prozanski acknowledges Oregon’s current expungement statutes could have “unintended consequences.” He says they “may give an individual with those types of [child stalking] charges the ability to expunge their record to the point where it could, in fact, be inappropriate for them to be able to, say, go back into environments or settings of the underlying crimes.”
Prozanski says he expects a measure to address the concerns raised in Lili’s case will pass in the 2027 Legislative session.
“I’m hopeful that if the Oregon Legislature takes a closer look, those holes will be patched and people like him won’t be able to get by so easily next time,” Allison says.
The Oregon State Legislature’s Senate Interim Committee on Judiciary convenes 11:30 am, Sept. 8, at 900 Court Street NE, in Salem.
Editor’s note: Eugene Weekly is not using the man’s name because he has not committed any other crimes since then, and naming him would effectively reverse the expungement he obtained legally through the court. He was identified in news reports at the time of his conviction.
This story was developed as part of the Catalyst Journalism Project at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. Catalyst brings together investigative reporting and solutions journalism to spark action and response to Oregon’s most perplexing issues. To learn more, visit CatalystJournalism.uoregon.edu.