The sentence closes the criminal case over a 2024 attack that killed neighbor Lyle Maske and triggered an Amber Alert for four children and their mother.
BRAINERD, Minn. — A Minnesota man was sentenced Feb. 17 to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years after pleading guilty in a 2024 killing and kidnapping case in which prosecutors said he shot a neighbor, abducted a pregnant woman and four children, and set a home on fire.
Chad Aanerud admitted guilt in December to first-degree murder, kidnapping, first-degree burglary and two counts of second-degree assault, ending a case that drew statewide attention when an Amber Alert went out after the overnight attack near Brainerd. The sentence brings formal punishment in the case, but it also closes one of the region’s most disturbing crime sprees in recent memory, one that mixed domestic violence allegations, a fatal shooting, arson claims and the forced removal of children before officers found the family hours later.
According to charging records and later court proceedings, the violence began late on Oct. 31, 2024, and spilled into the early hours of Nov. 1 on a rural property near Brainerd in Crow Wing County. Prosecutors said Aanerud went to the home where his pregnant girlfriend was staying with her four children and sexually assaulted her, threatened her and began taking guns from the property. The woman told investigators she ordered the children to run next door for help. They reached the home of neighbor Lyle Maske and his wife and reported that Aanerud was robbing them. Maske decided to go see what was happening. Family members later described him as the kind of man who stepped in when something looked wrong. Deputies were called just before 2 a.m., and when they arrived they found Maske, 62, in a driveway with gunshot wounds. He died at the scene.
The account that emerged afterward described a fast-moving and chaotic scene. A woman at the Maske home told investigators she had driven Maske partway down the driveway and then returned to stay with the children who had fled there. Roughly 10 minutes later, prosecutors said, Aanerud came to the Maske house carrying a rifle and demanding “his kids.” Authorities said he forced his way inside, threatened to kill the women there and fired the rifle in the home before forcing the children outside and into a white van. His girlfriend was already in the front seat, according to court records. The same witness later went looking for Maske and found him on the ground, covered in blood. At nearly the same time, first responders noticed that the nearby home where the woman and children had been staying was on fire. Investigators said the structure was destroyed.
The case quickly shifted from a homicide investigation to a regional search for abducted children. Authorities issued an Amber Alert after saying Aanerud had left with the pregnant woman and her four children. Sheriff Eric Klang said in the first public briefing that officers understood almost immediately that the homicide and the abduction were connected and that the situation was “very, very serious” and frightening for the family and for law enforcement. The alert spread across Minnesota phones and news broadcasts, and officials later said a resident in Morrison County recognized the vehicle description and called police. Officers found the van near Little Falls and arrested Aanerud a few hours after the killing. The woman had visible injuries to her face, neck and chest, according to reports cited in court coverage, but the children were found alive and unharmed.
Prosecutors said the woman gave investigators one of the most direct accounts of what happened between the shooting and the arrest. She said Aanerud poured gasoline or diesel on the home after removing firearms and that she saw the confrontation with Maske end in gunfire. In one statement recounted in court reporting, she said Aanerud told Maske to “shut up” before shooting him. She also told investigators he threatened to kill her if she did not get into the van. Officials did not publicly answer every question raised by the case. It remained unclear in public reports exactly how long the dispute had been building, whether the confrontation with Maske began with words or movement at the scene, and why Aanerud decided to enter the neighboring home after the shooting. But the broad outline was no longer in dispute once he entered guilty pleas to the central charges.
Maske’s death turned a neighborhood emergency into a murder case that drew strong reaction in Crow Wing County. His family told local television stations in the days after the killing that he was not a violent man and appeared to have been caught in a dangerous situation while trying to see why children had come to his door in panic. One brother said, “It was a shocker,” adding that the family would miss him. Those comments helped shape the public picture of Maske not as a participant in the conflict but as a neighbor pulled into it after children sought refuge at his home. That detail mattered because it underscored the random, widening effect of the violence: what began as an alleged attack inside one household ended with a death next door, a burned residence and a statewide alert.
As the prosecution moved forward, the charge list expanded far beyond the counts that produced the final sentence. Local reporting on the plea agreement said Aanerud originally faced more than a dozen additional counts, including other murder, kidnapping, assault, arson and criminal sexual conduct allegations. In December 2025, he pleaded guilty to five charges: first-degree murder, kidnapping, first-degree burglary and two second-degree assault counts. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to dismiss many of the remaining charges at sentencing. That kind of agreement narrowed the issues for trial and guaranteed a life sentence on the murder count under Minnesota law, while also sparing witnesses and family members from a lengthy trial over facts that had already been laid out in the criminal complaint and investigative filings.
The sentence itself was severe but not unexpected after the plea. Aanerud was ordered to serve life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years. One local report said he also received credit for the roughly year and four months he had already spent in custody since his arrest in November 2024. Court coverage identified the hearing as the final major public step in the case, with the dismissed counts formally cleared as part of the agreement. The available reporting did not describe an extended courtroom statement from Aanerud, and public summaries of the hearing focused more on the sentence and the crimes than on any argument for leniency. By the time he was sentenced, the case was no longer about whether he would be convicted. It was about how the state would formally punish a series of acts that prosecutors said unfolded over a matter of hours and left lasting damage across several households.
The details of that night also explain why the case stayed in public memory long after the Amber Alert ended. Authorities said the attack involved several different settings in quick succession: the home where the woman lived with her children, the neighboring Maske property, the driveway where Maske was killed, the burning structure first responders saw as they tried to help him, and then the van moving away from Brainerd toward Little Falls. Each step widened the danger. Witnesses inside the Maske home described a rifle, threats and shots fired indoors. Deputies arriving for a reported shooting suddenly had to deal with a homicide scene, a fire scene and a missing-family emergency all at once. Even after the children were found safe, the larger story remained one of overlapping traumas, with a killing at the center and a pregnant woman and four children forced through the rest of it.
Now that Aanerud has been sentenced, the plea deal has been carried out, and the criminal prosecution has reached its final judgment unless future appeals or post-conviction filings emerge. The next public milestone, if any, would come through those later court proceedings rather than another trial.