Man sentenced to five years for strangling neighbor

An Evergreen man convicted of strangling his neighbor during a fight over damage to a fence has been sentenced to the Montana Department of Corrections for five years.

"I wish it never would have happened, but it did and I'm sorry," 35-year-old Michael Gerald Cuchine said during his sentencing hearing Monday in Flathead County District Court.

His formal sentence is 15 years with 10 years suspended.

Cuchine put 47-year-old Steven Guy Maycumber in a fatal choke hold after a May argument in front of Maycumber's Evergreen home escalated into violence.

The altercation began while Cuchine and Maycumber were discussing damage done to Maycumber's fence by a third neighbor's children.

"I was trying to tell him… that I don't think a 3-year-old could do something like that," Cuchine said from the witness stand. "As I was turning away from him, he reached over and hit me."

As the argument intensified, Cuchine said he crossed the fence line and Maycumber struck him with a wood-splitting maul.

"He confronted me with that ax… I didn't want to kill him," said Cuchine. "It just got out of hand."

After trading punches, the pair began grappling and Cuchine applied the choke hold.

"I'm sorry that this happened," said Cuchine, who has claimed self defense. "It shakes me… I can't put into words how I feel."

But the motorist who reported the May 26 fight - which occurred on the shoulder of U.S. 2 just north of Evergreen Drive - later told investigators she saw Cuchine with Maycumber in a choke hold with his left arm while he repeatedly punched Maycumber's head with his right fist.

A second witness told detectives Cuchine had Maycumber in a choke hold from behind and was punching Maycumber in the face nonstop. According to the witness, Maycumber appeared completely helpless and was not moving as Cuchine continued to choke and punch him.

Flathead County Attorney Ed Corrigan has called the beating "merciless' and argued that Cuchine had flown into a "blind rage."

State medical examiners determined that Maycumber would have lost consciousness in three to four seconds while it would have been necessary to continue the choke hold for one to five minutes to cause death, according to court documents.

Maycumber, who died at the scene, also suffered several cuts, bruises and some trauma in the fight, but strangulation was ruled the cause of death.

"It was a senseless murder," said Maycumber's sister, Sharon Walker, who asked District Court Judge Stewart E. Stadler for a harsher sentence. "Our lives are destroyed now because of what happened."

Family members described Maycumber as a "gentle giant." He lived with his 84-year-old mother and helped her around the house.

"You should never have attacked my son," Maycumber's mother told Cuchine from the witness stand. Cuchine "came over the fence and was the aggressor," she said.

Maycumber's niece, Sharene Ahlin, asked Stadler to impose as harsh a sentence as possible.

"There's an empty spot in our lives without him," she said. "There's nothing that can replace him."

In exchange for Cuchine's guilty plea to the lesser crime of negligent homicide, prosecutors dismissed a mitigated deliberate homicide charge and agreed to recommend the sentence Cuchine ultimately received.

Family members testified they signed on to the plea bargain to avoid the rigors and potential risks of going to a trial.

During his October change-of-plea hearing, Cuchine testified that he held Maycumber in the choke hold for longer than was needed to protect himself, thus meeting the standard for negligence.

Reporter Nicholas Ledden can be reached at 758-4441 or by e-mail at nledden@dailyinterlake.com