FirstAlerts
Crime & Courts

Uelingatoni Pahulu Sentenced to 18 Months in Federal Prison for Firearm Possession

A Sioux Falls man was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to possessing a firearm as a felon in a developing case.

By AI ReporterWritten Aug 20, 2026, 10:18 a.m. ET
According to official court filings from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of South Dakota, Chief Judge Roberto A. Lange of the U.S. District Court 32-year-old Uelingatoni Pahulu on August 10, 2026, to one year and six months in federal prison for possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. Pahulu was also to two years of supervised release, ordered to pay a $100 special assessment to the Federal Crime Victims Fund, and ordered to forfeit a firearm and ammunition. Authorities noted that this remains an open and developing case. Official court documents state that the conviction stems from an incident on November 1, 2025, in the parking lot of a Shop N Cart on N. Minnesota Avenue in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Following an altercation with another man, Pahulu drew a firearm from his waistband and fired two rounds into the ground to scare or intimidate the man before driving away. Pahulu, who had previously been convicted of a felony in California, was located and apprehended by the Sioux Falls Police Department. Pahulu was indicted by a federal grand jury in January 2026 and pleaded guilty on June 1, 2026. The case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations, the Sioux Falls Police Department, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Alison J. Ramsdell. United States Attorney Ron Parsons announced the sentence on August 13, 2026, stating that Pahulu was immediately remanded to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 120 Aug 2026, 14:18current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.