Everything was great at her White Bear Lake townhome for the first 12 years, Beverly Gutowski told a Ramsey County judge Thursday.

But then Christian Thomas Dahm entered the picture five years ago, moving into his parents’ Aspen Court townhome in the same complex. “It’s been a nightmare,” Gutowski, 73, said, adding that police were called to the four-plex dozens of times because of Dahm’s violent and lewd behavior and drug use.

Christian Thomas Dahm (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Things turned deadly the night of May 14, 2023. Dahm, while high on meth, accidentally started a fire in his parents’ garage. When responders got on scene around 11:30 p.m., the Dahms’ townhome was fully engulfed in flames, which were spreading to Gutowski’s unit and the two others.

Firefighters located Dahm’s 79-year-old mother, Patricia Dahm, in critical condition inside her townhome. She died four days later in the burn unit at Regions Hospital.

Judge Jacob Kraus sentenced Dahm to nearly eight years in prison Thursday after he pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter for the death of his mother, a retired elementary schoolteacher.

Dahm, who’s been imprisoned since June on an unrelated case, faced between 7½ years and 11 years in prison as part of a February plea agreement. Prosecutors asked for the 95-month sentence that Dahm was given.

The plea agreement also included paying restitution to the townhome owners. Kraus left restitution open for 60 days.

The sentence will run concurrent with a 5-year term Dahm received June 15 for violating his probation relating to a 2022 conviction for possessing ammunition by an ineligible person.

Patricia Dahm had taught in the White Bear Lake Area School District for 34 years, according to her obituary. In addition to her son, she is survived by her husband of 54 years, Les. On Thursday, the 83-year-old was in the courtroom gallery and wiped tears as his son read a statement before receiving his sentence.

Dahm expressed remorse for what happened to his mother — noting the fire occurred on Mother’s Day — and for what his father and neighbors have endured because of him.

“Before you pronounce your sentence,” Dahm told the judge, “I want you to know that I’ve already been sentenced forever. I am going to serve a life sentence for my actions. Every second of every day until my own life ends I will have to live with knowing what I did, not only to my mother, but what I did to my own father and the effects that my neighbors have felt.”

‘Lost everything’

Shortly after firefighters got to the townhome in the 2600 block of Aspen Court, just north of County Road D, Dahm’s father pointed at Dahm, who was on the back patio, and said, “He started the fire,” according to the criminal complaint.

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Dahm’s father said he and his wife decided to check on their son before going to bed because they believed he was high on meth and they were concerned. He said when he opened the service door to the garage, it appeared as though “everything exploded.” He saw his son run out of the garage.

When firefighters pulled Patricia Dahm from the fire, she had smoke coming from her mouth, the complaint says. An autopsy showed she died of complications of multiple burns and smoke inhalation.

Christian Dahm told police he was in the garage working on his fishing pole over a car hood before the fire started. He said he was using an oil pan and lit a cigarette with a torch and then “all of a sudden, there was a fire,” the complaint says.

The fire spread from one townhome to another, where KARE-TV anchor Rena Sarigianopoulos’ parents live, and she wrote on GoFundMe that their home was destroyed.

Another resident, Denise Cook, told Judge Kraus on Thursday that the fire displaced her and her family for nine months, that they were forced to stay in hotels and then at an apartment. She said she’s incurred out-of-pocket expenses after her insurance and will seek restitution.

Gutowski said she has “lost everything.” Before the fire her townhome was worth $300,000, she said, and now it’s estimated at $80,000. “So all the equity, everything we put into our home is gone,” she said. “And I’m angry.”

‘I created an enormous mess’

Dahm has an extensive criminal history dating back to 2005, when he got his first of five DWI convictions. He has four burglary convictions.

This week, Dahm’s attorney, Zach Van Cleve, asked Kraus for a downward departure from state sentencing guidelines, contending the offense was “less onerous” than typical second-degree manslaughter offenses, and that Dahm has shown remorse.

Van Cleve said in a court document that Dahm has struggled with substance abuse and mental health issues since his teenage years, and that he’s been in chemical dependency treatment at least seven times.

After Dahm’s brother was killed in an August 2022 motorcycle accident in North St. Paul, he turned to meth and other substances to cope, Van Cleve said. He was high on meth at the time of the fire, Van Cleve said.

“What everyone in this room knows,” Van Cleve said, “is that the punishment that Mr. Dahm is going to receive for the rest of his life, knowing that he started this fire that caused his mom’s death, is worse than anything that our court system can hand him.”

Dahm told Kraus that he now realizes how he’s been negligent throughout most of his adult life and created risk to others, whether it was with his DWIs or the fire.

“My actions have created victims directly and indirectly,” he said. “My mom is the primary victim here. There is nothing that I, nor anyone else can do to help her now. The real victim today is my father, who’s in court today. … I created an enormous mess everywhere. Complete destruction.”

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“Creating a citywide cultural festival of global proportions would give locals and visitors a powerful new reason to explore the five boroughs each year, while sharpening the city’s creative edge amid an increasingly packed international calendar of must-do experiences.”

Adi Talwar

The Mazarte Dance Company practicing in Central Park in December 2020.

CityViews are readers’ opinions, not those of City Limits. Add your voice today!

New York is home to a rich diversity of annual arts and culture events, from Lunar New Year festivals and the West Indian Day Parade to the Tribeca Film Festival and the Armory Show art fair. But New York still doesn’t have a globally renowned citywide arts and culture festival on the scale of South by Southwest in Austin, the Venice Biennale, or the Edinburgh Fringe Festival—the latter of which generates as many as 3 million ticket sales annually and $630 million in economic impact in the small city of Edinburgh alone.

New York City deserves its own turn in the global spotlight. Now is the time for the Adams administration to launch the city’s first annual five-borough cultural festival—helping the city tackle several challenges at once.

Even viewed through the optimistic glow of spring, one key facet of the city’s economic and social fabric has struggled to regain its former strength: the city’s arts and culture sector. New York City is home to fewer actors, dancers, and musicians now than before the pandemic. Broadway attendance this season is 16 percent below where it was pre-COVID, several arts and nightlife venues have shut down, and numerous working artists have left for more affordable locations. Indeed, the broader arts and entertainment industry has only recovered 84 percent of its pre-pandemic jobs.

There’s a lot that city leaders should do to strengthen the city’s cultural sector, from boosting investment in affordable spaces for artists to live and work to fully funding the Department of Cultural Affairs. But the city also needs fresh ideas that can breathe new life into its arts ecosystem—and help create a more vibrant and resilient post-pandemic economy.

New York City’s first annual five-borough cultural festival can help achieve this, boosting international tourism and regional visitation, and giving New Yorkers an exciting new reason to celebrate.

One of New York City’s greatest competitive advantages in the hybrid work era is the magnetic pull of culture and the arts. This festival would build on these advantages by enlisting hundreds of venues across all five boroughs and open streets, parks, plazas, historic buildings, city-owned properties, and other spaces for music, dance, theater, visual art, cultural performances, and immersive experiences.

Creating a citywide cultural festival of global proportions would give locals and visitors a powerful new reason to explore the five boroughs each year, while sharpening the city’s creative edge amid an increasingly packed international calendar of must-do experiences. By attracting new audiences, facilitating collaboration, easing red tape, and directly supporting artists, this major new festival could also help nurture a full recovery for the arts and culture sector and demonstrate a new level of support going forward.

Inspired by citywide arts events around the globe, New York policymakers should work with cultural and community partners citywide to cultivate an annual cultural festival of unprecedented size, scale, and significance. The key first step is mayoral leadership to make this idea a priority, identify a target week in the annual calendar, and enlist a small group of cultural leaders and civic-minded entrepreneurs to help develop the festival’s operational structure, agenda, and logistics.

While much of the costs of programming the festival could be offset by corporate sponsorships, sales of individual tickets and week-long passes, as is the case in Edinburgh and Austin, the city can help in other ways. For instance, it can offer up city-owned buildings and public spaces for concerts, performances, installations, and parades—closing streets to traffic and allowing performances to take place in parks, plazas, and other public land. The city should also coordinate preparations for a festival of this scale with partners at the state level, with a focus on leveraging state capital grants to help support accessibility and facilities upgrades for cultural venues across all five boroughs. 

New York still has work to do to keep pace with a vastly changed post-pandemic landscape. Creating an annual five-borough cultural festival would help bring the city together around the shared language of creative expression—and strengthen the city’s magnetism for people seeking experiences and connection.

Eli Dvorkin is the editorial and policy director of the Center for an Urban Future. Winston Fisher is a partner at Fisher Brothers and CEO of AREA15.