Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 22, 1993                   TAG: 9307220336
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

`MISTAKE' BREAK-IN DOESN'T SWAY JUDGE

Alvin Clinton Mathis, 35, claimed that he tried to get even with his estranged wife in January, but broke into her neighbor's apartment by mistake.

His attorney, M. Dean Cranwell, argued that police probably would not have charged Mathis if he had gotten the right apartment. "It was an honest mistake," Cranwell said.

That argument failed to persuade Roanoke County Circuit Judge Kenneth Trabue, who said Mathis would have violated the law even if he had broken into his wife's apartment.

Trabue sentenced Mathis to four years for burglary and ordered him to serve four years of a 70-year suspended sentence stemming from a series of Salem burglary convictions in the 1980s.