Bob Selbitschka may remember May 20, 1996 more vividly than any other day in his life.

He was 17 and getting ready to start a summer job at Valleyfair the following week when he got a late call from his friend, Tabitha Juetten, asking him to come over to her house on First Street in Little Falls.

Tabitha was 19, pregnant, and worried that her estranged husband, Robert Juetten, who had just been released from prison, might return to the house despite an active order of protection against him.

“I stayed up until 3:30 in the morning,” Selbitschka said. “I didn’t want to sleep…I was scared.”

Those fears were realized just hours later when Robert Juetten broke in, stabbing Bob and Tabitha as they slept in separate rooms.

“I didn’t even know he stabbed me, it happened so fast,” Selbitschka said.

A nearly seven-hour standoff with the police ensued as Juetten held Bob and Tabitha hostage.

“I looked at him and he looked like he was possessed,” Selbitschka said.

Juetten allowed Bob to leave after hours of negotiations. Bob managed to crawl to an ambulance which rushed him to hospital with a life-threatening stab wound to his leg.

Tabitha and her unborn child did not survive.

Robert Juetten was eventually arrested, charged and convicted of murder and kidnapping.

Nearly 30 years later, Bob Selbitschka said authorities have never returned the property he was forced to leave behind at the crime scene. He reached out to 5 INVESTIGATE to share his story for the first time in hopes of finding a solution.

The “evidence” was not returned

Selbitschka says he and his mother first asked about getting his property back while he was still at a local hospital being treated for a stab wound to his leg.

“I had ID, I had my Social Security card,” Selbitschka said of the property left behind at the First Street home. “I just wanted my stuff back.”

But like everything else at the crime scene, Selbitschka says authorities told her mother it was all evidence in their criminal case against Robert Juetten.

When Selbitschka’s mother contacted the Social Security Administration about a replacement card for her son, he says they ran into another roadblock.

“They asked, ‘What happened to that?'” Selbitschka said. “My mom said, ‘They said there’s evidence in this case.’ Then they said, “Well, you have to go and bring it back.”

But Selbitschka says investigators never returned the property to him — an oversight that continued to cause him problems well into adulthood when he applied for jobs.

“They asked for my ID and then they asked for my social security card,” Selbitschka said. “When I told them ‘I haven’t’ and they asked me why … that’s always a complicated story.”

A familiar story

Selbitschka says she had long since given up hope of getting her property back when 5 INVESTIGATES’ reporting caught his attention earlier this year.

George Floyd was borrowing Sylvia Jackson’s SUV when he was killed by Minneapolis police in 2020, but state investigators continued to hold the vehicle as evidence in the case after the trials of all four officers ended and their appeals were sold out.

In April, the Minnesota Attorney General’s office ordered that Jackson’s car be returned to him, but only just after 5 INVESTIGATE they started asking questions.

“It really sounded familiar,” Selbitschka said. “Just knowing there are other people out there struggling to get their stuff back made me think – could I get my stuff back too?”

Selbitschka asked the same question when Robert Juetten’s life sentence was recently reviewed at the Minnesota Department of Corrections.

Liz Richard’s team with DOC’s Office of Victim Services and Restorative Justice offered to help.

“We have a number of cases where we get to parole review hearings and we hear that family members have never been able to secure their property back,” Richards said.

The emails show DOC staff tried to connect Selbitschka with other attorneys and referred questions about the property to the Morrison County Sheriff’s Office.

“We were able to at least talk to some local authorities, get them to go back, look through the archives,” Richards said. “The answer was that they no longer owned the property.”

Getting answers

Morrison County Sheriff Shawn Larsen declined interview requests from 5 INVESTIGATE, but said in a statement he reviewed more than “1,000 pages of reports” in the case and determined “there is no record” that his agency ever seized Bob Selbitschka’s wallet.

Larsen added that some of Selbitschka’s clothing was “shipped to BCA,” but a spokesman for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension told 5 INVESTIGATES that the same bag of evidence was later returned to Morrison County in October 1996.

The sheriff’s office granted 5 INVESTIGATE access to review the case file, which included dozens of never-before-seen crime scene photos.

Selbitschka believes a photo of the living room where he was stabbed shows an object on a coffee table that could be his wallet, but now accepts he may never know for sure what happened to it.

“My thoughts on this? It’s just a bad thing, you know what I mean? said Selbitschka. “They just didn’t do anything with it. They didn’t really pay attention to what they did with it.”

But his decision to finally talk about the ordeal was not in vain.

After 5 INVESTIGATORS began asking questions about Selbitschka’s story, he says he began receiving help that hadn’t been available before, including treatment for nerve damage in his leg.

And with confirmation that his Social Security card is officially “lost,” Selbitschka finally got a replacement.

He says he hopes his story could also lead to the kind of lasting help for young victims of violent crime that helped him when he was struggling to come to terms with the trauma he suffered as a teenager.

“I hope they’re a little more compassionate,” Selbitschka said. “Listen to some of these victims.”

Robert Juetten continues to serve a life sentence. His next review before the DOC’s Board of Supervised Release is scheduled for June 2026.