The Lewisburg man convicted in January on assault charges for his aggressive recovery of a stripper's dog from a courthouse square apartment was on Wednesday sentenced to split confinement for a total of five years.

Sixty days in the Marshall County Jail and then five years of probation under house arrest in his mother's home is the sentence handed down by Circuit Court Judge Robert Crigler for Jason Crabtree who still maintains that he's innocent.

Nevertheless, Crabtree, 29, acknowledges his trial jury's verdict that he's guilty of assaulting David Follman and his adopted brother, David Lampley, in their apartment above what was a Chinese restaurant at West Commerce Street and Second Avenue North.

Crabtree had been drafted in the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 21, 2006 by nightclub disk Jockey Adam Edgar Combs after he and his exotic dancer girlfriend, Amy Nicole Chamble, 31, realized that her pet dog, Taebo, had been taken to the apartment with a couple of runaway teenage girls.

See Friday's Tribune for the complete story.