Wild West in Alaska: how some villages in the state turned into safe havens for dangerous criminals - ForumDaily
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The Wild West in Alaska: How Some of the State's Villages Turned into Hazards for Dangerous Criminals

In Alaska, in remote areas, there is an acute shortage of law enforcement officers, according to AnchorageDailyNews.

Photo: Shutterstock

The summer months turned into autumn, and Justin Edwards occasionally ran into a man wanted for attempted murder.

On the street, near a school or village store.

"He said, 'Hey,' and acted like nothing happened," said Edwards, 46, whose body was covered in shot fragments from his forearm to the bicep of his right arm.

Edwards used to say hello.

“I know he was on the run,” Edwards said. “But I couldn’t do anything about it.”

This Yukon River village of 330 residents has long said that if someone is wanted for a serious crime, all they have to do is hide.

The soldiers of the state of Alaska could fly in to look for them, but after a few hours the officers were gone, and even someone who became the object of the wanted list could return home as if nothing had happened.

It took military personnel 110 days to catch 20-year-old Tyler Howsler, one of three people accused of ambushing Edwards on the outskirts of the village on July 28.

Before Hausler was caught in November, neighbors revealed that they slept with rifles under the beds and shotgun cartridges on the windowsill, ready for anything.

It shouldn't have been this way

Two years ago, Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica documented serious law enforcement gaps in rural Alaska.

Attorney General William P. Barr has declared the public safety crisis in Alaska's villages a federal emergency, and Gov. Mike Dunleavy has proposed a cost plan to transport 15 more troops to rural areas that cannot be reached by road.

Standing in front of the largest annual gathering of Alaska Native leaders on October 17, 2019, Dunleavy specifically pledged to station state soldiers in the villages of St. Michael and Ambler and add officers to the countryside next year.

After that, he said that the state, for the first time in modern history, would add soldiers in four more villages: Stebbins, Kobuk, Ek and Chevak.

His promises made two years ago have not come true.

Instead of increasing the number of troops stationed in isolated villages of Alaska Natives by one third in one year, as promised in the budget documents, their number has only doubled in the past two years.

In addition, less than $ 100 of the $ 000 million that the Justice Department allocated to the government to combat the lack of public safety infrastructure has been approved for reimbursement to the villages.

Months of turmoil and episodes of terror in the Russian Mission highlight how little has changed in some isolated communities and show the government's half-fulfilled promises.

At the time of the declaration of the state of emergency in 2019, the rate of sexual assault in Alaska was the highest in the country, almost four times higher than the national average.

Since then, while the pandemic has forced people to isolate and reduced the crime rate in all other categories, the number of reported rapes in Alaska has increased.

“I’m obviously very disappointed,” said Joel Jackson, president of Organized Village of Kake.

A community in southeastern Alaska reported an active shooter last month and waited hours for the soldiers to arrive.

“This is an ongoing problem for rural communities everywhere,” Jackson said.

Russian Mission, a Yupik village 112 kilometers from the central city of Bethel in western Alaska, has not had a permanent certified police officer since a village public security officer died by suicide in 2005.

It took a full week for officers to arrive in April to investigate reports of a child who was beaten on the head, abducted, tied up with duct tape and sexually assaulted.

Law enforcement agencies did not come to the village until the offender tried to take another child.

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According to a July 2020 study by the Alaska Justice Information Center at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, the Western Alaska region is understaffed, with sergeants based there responding very late to calls for help and sometimes not responding at all.

A spokesman said Dunleavy was unable to answer questions about his promises in 2019.

The Governor's Office referred questions to Public Safety Commissioner James Cockrell.

Cockrell said in an interview on December 10 that he can only talk about personnel decisions made since he became department head in April.

Finding local housing is one of the biggest obstacles to placing soldiers in villages and towns, he said.

The agency is working to repurpose old National Guard arsenals and FAA housing rentals in some areas, he said, but was likely unable to provide housing in Ambler and St. Michael.

“In August, the state added a $ 20 bonus for recruits, which resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of applications,” he said.

He said the department is still recovering from budget cuts that have led to staff cuts and forced job closings since 2015.

Cockrell said that in his next budget request, he is making a "substantial request" to the governor.

In Western Alaska, the department is adding an investigative unit at Bethel and investigators at Nome, Dillingham and Kotzebue, he said.

These additional specialized military personnel could focus on, say, a complex murder investigation in the region, while patrol soldiers handle daily calls in the villages.

A 2019 investigation found that despite a shortage of soldiers in remote villages, the Public Security Department dispatched more than 50 officers to patrol the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, where a predominantly white, partly suburban population resisted paying property taxes for police services.

The population relies on the military, who act as the de facto local police force.

The Military Program was created in 1953 to provide basic law and order in areas too small or too remote for the local police to use.

Photo: Shutterstock

“I think Mat-Su County, Fairbanks and the Kenai Peninsula owe us something. We provide services essentially free to areas of the state that can afford to pay for them,” Cockrell said.

“Also, we can direct some of the state funds to rural Alaska because, you know, the heart and soul of the Alaska State Troopers is not urban Alaska, it's rural Alaska,” he said.

Taking care of ourselves

As the pandemic has made travel to villages even more difficult, some communities whose residents have long desired reliable local law enforcement have fought on their own with active gunmen, deaths from domestic violence and jailbreaks.

Alaska state leaders have said the Department of Public Safety will never be able to place soldiers in every village.

Local village police and tribal police often maintain order by serving their friends and neighbors.

And the Village Public Security Officer Program, designed to recruit recruits from rural communities, could provide life-saving officers led by regional tribal consortia.

But each year, the state of Alaska has the opportunity to send some of the best trained and highest paid law enforcement officials to any particular community.

According to local residents, when two or three troublemakers can hold a village hostage by forcing people to live in enclosed spaces, a nearby officer will make a huge difference.

Daisy Lockwood Katcheak, acting city administrator in Stebbins, said that after Dunleavy's speech, locals believed the soldiers would soon be accommodated in the 612-member community, or at least nearby St. Michael.

They worked to find housing in the village of Norton Sound, she said, and thought it was government-funded, but no one came.

Cockrell, the state's public safety commissioner, said on Dec. 10 that he had heard nothing about affordable housing in Stebbins and will reach out to the community to find out more.

“We had three people walking through the city with bats and clubs. Swinging them at people,” Lockwood Cutcheak said of the incident last year.

“Our community members had to force themselves to become police officers and detain them,” he says.

Stebbins has a small squad of VPO (Volunteer probation officers) who were able to arrest one of three people who attacked people in May 2020, but the rest armed with steel pipes and broke into the prison.

They detained a local police officer and freed their friend, according to charges that were later filed in state courts.

The community had to catch all three.

Lockwood Atcheak said the attacked officer, her nephew Troy Lockwood, later suffered severe depression and anxiety.

He was also arrested in October on attempted murder charges.

Lockwood worked as a tribal police officer, according to his aunt, receiving money from CARES Act funds. He pleaded not guilty.

When no other options are available, communities like Stebbins sometimes resort to hiring people with a criminal background to serve as local police, or simply deal with troublemakers themselves.

Lockwood, for example, worked as an officer in 2020, despite being convicted of domestic violence in 2016 and 2018.

The difference between rural police and soldiers is enormous.

VPOs are hired by local governments to enforce city laws such as curfews, but often end up responding to all kinds of public safety emergencies.

They are unarmed and paid little: $ 15 an hour in Stebbins and only $ 10 an hour in some villages.

Police officers, soldiers, and officers are highly qualified government employees whose salaries start at $75 thousand per year.

Stebbins is not the only town that was promised soldiers but was not given.

320 kilometers north, between the Kobuk River and the Brooks Ridge, the state supports a proposal to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on private roads and bridges to facilitate the region's copper, zinc and gold mining.

In the nearby village of Ambler, in the early morning of July, a man called state military personnel to report that someone was shooting at his home.

Forty minutes later, another caller said that the same shooter had put the barrel of a rifle to the caller's face and threatened to kill him.

The officer flew 200 km to the village and arrived four hours later to investigate. The man was at home, asleep in his bed, when the soldier appeared.

In St. Michael, population 383, another year ends without arrest or explanation of the 19-year-old woman's death in 2017.

She was preparing to leave for college before her body was found on the beach - a local mystery that didn't make national headlines, even though her family believes she was beaten to death and the killer or killers are all still live nearby.

"It's like an open wound that can't be closed," said Lockwood to Katcheak, who said the young woman, Overcoat "Pretty" Lockwood, was her niece.

“Ignorance is what is killing us. Not knowing and that person is still there,” she said.

A spokesman for the Public Security Department said the servicemen had investigated the case as a murder and sent their findings to the prosecutor's office.

A spokesman for that agency said the Department of Law had decided not to press charges, citing insufficient evidence.

Dunleavy told the 2019 Alaska Native Federation conference that the state expects to hire 35 new military personnel in 2020 to fill positions in rural Alaska.

As of October 2021, the number of serving military personnel, excluding vacancies, increased by only 10 people across the state.

Funding for troops in St. Michael and Ambler was included in each of the Governor's last two budgets, but posts remained vacant, which meant that troops were not actually stationed in the villages.

Public Security officials said the money earmarked for these soldiers was most likely spent on pay, such as overtime.

The number of active soldiers fell by two in the fall, when a soldier from Soldotna was arrested on 13 October on seven charges of sexual assault against a minor, and a soldier from Palmer was arrested on 15 November on multiple charges of assault and domestic violence.

Both pleaded not guilty.

In a state where flu epidemics nearly wiped out entire Alaska Native communities a century ago, one of Dunleavy's attempts to recruit more law enforcement officials was to invite police officers who had been fired for refusing to receive the coronavirus vaccine to work in Alaska.

Meanwhile, communities continue to resist active gunmen, waiting for the arrival of soldiers for hours or days.

In the early morning of November 2, in the village of Kake, a man fired a pistol, and people saw him walking towards the school with a rifle.

Jackson, the tribal president, said one of the soldiers over the phone asked him to grab several more men and check the condition of the shooter's mother.

Jackson said no.

“I wouldn't do that. I would not risk the lives of other people, ”he said.

That morning, he thought that instead of the soldiers, he would call the Fish and Game Department and tell them that someone had illegally shot a moose in the village.

“They would be here at dawn or even earlier,” he said.

The soldier talked to several people in Kakey that morning, a spokesman for the Public Security Department said.

“The soldiers advised residents to take action to detain a person only if necessary to protect themselves or others,” the Department said.

Regarding the suggestion that the soldiers might have responded more quickly, the spokesman wrote that the officers had chartered a flight to the village in the first rays of the sun from Juneau, the nearest outpost for the soldiers.

“Neither the Alaska Wildlife Troopers nor the Alaska State Troopers had a faster way to respond to this incident,” the spokesperson said.

Cockrell said he plans to travel to Kakey soon to discuss public safety with residents.

"I have firearms and edged weapons at the ready"

The monthly Russian Mission hunt began with a hunt for painkillers.

Edwards, a survivor of the shooting, believes Tyler Huesler and two others hunted him early on the morning of July 28.

“They thought I had painkillers. Tramadols,” Edwards said, referring to the prescription painkiller that is sometimes ordered online and received by mail in rural Alaska.

“They tried to rob us,” he says.

Charges filed in a state court say Howsler, Jalen Minock, who was 20 at the time, and a 14-year-old boy ambushed 6 people along the trail that leads to the village.

Edwards stood next to his 8-year-old daughter when he was shot.

Another ambushed person, Simeon Askoak II, said that as soon as the shooting began, he and the others ran to their home at the end of the trail.

The house was also shot at, while the children lay huddled on the floor inside.

The fraction is stuck in the wall.

The chimney from the wood-burning stove in the center of the room is dotted with holes.

Whenever the family cleans up the living room, they find new pieces of shot.

Askoak is the son of the last VPSO working for the Russian Mission.

Simeon Askoak testified before a commission set up by Congress to investigate a police shortage in rural Alaska in 2005, and two days later he shot himself next to the same trail where the ambush took place.

“I have guns and knives ready, I’m thinking about protecting my family,” his son said recently.

Despite being wanted for attempted assassination, Howsler was at large on the Russian Mission.

At the time, Russian Mission residents said they never knew what to expect from him.

In November, Howsler and others were charged with terrorism in the village, home trespassing, beating a man, and threatening to kill residents.

One family fled to Bethel.

According to residents, the village medical staff quit their jobs and left.

The soldiers stated that they visited the village and neighboring communities, looking for Husler and other accused of attempted murder on several occasions.

“AST returned to the village multiple times in an attempt to arrest the suspects,” the agency wrote in an online letter.

“Tyler Howsler has been spotted on several occasions boarding a boat and fleeing in extremely hazardous weather conditions on the Yukon River. The AST once rented a boat and driver and went upriver to check fish camps and marshes, but was unable to locate suspects. AST also used the rented ATVs to check the fishing camps and the vicinity of the village, ”the agency said.

US soldiers and marshals arrested Minoc on August 4 when they arrived at the Russian Mission and surrounded his home.

"Jalen ended up jumping out the window and we apprehended him," said Trooper Lt. Lonnie Gonzalez, who lives in Bethel.

Minok pleaded not guilty to 15 felony charges, including attempted murder, robbery and assault.

“The 14-year-old suspect was also detained at his home,” the servicemen said.

The woman, who identified herself as an acquaintance of Husler's and asked to remain anonymous to protect her, said he took refuge in the hills and rocks around the villages when the soldiers approached.

She said that one of Howsler's friends, Stefan "Blackie" Duffy, would monitor the arriving troops using an aircraft app or website.

The situation escalated on November 10 when, police said, Tyler Howsler, his brother Bryce Howsler and Duffy "were involved in assaulting and strangling at least three victims in separate events."

One young woman said the three ambushed her and her boyfriend and threatened to kill her.

"Tyler said he would hunt me like an animal," she told the troopers.

Another pregnant woman said that Tyler Howsler crashed into her family's home in a snowmobile and told her to look him in the eye, threatening to shoot her.

During the house invasion, about 50 people gathered at the nearby home of a local teacher who was planning memorial events.

The adults huddled under the windows in case gunfire began and placed the children away from the walls, around dining tables filled with spaghetti, Mongolian elk and akutak.

The teacher said that that night two young men with rifles were standing outside the house.

“The Russian Mission school locked its doors for several days while the shooters were free,” said another school teacher, Steve Jennett.

“One of the teenagers who was arrested was a student here last year and threatened to kill me,” Gennett said.
He said the boy was angry that his phone was taken away at school.

“He pointed his hand at us as if he was shooting a pistol. He said, 'I'll come to your house,'" Gennett said.

The soldiers arrived in the village at 18:00.

Tyler Howsler, Bryce Howsler and Duffy were arrested on November 15th.

Tyler Howsler pleaded not guilty to more than 40 counts, including a new attempted murder charge linked to the November attacks.

Duffy pleaded not guilty to 10 felony charges, including assault, robbery and burglary.

Bryce Howsler pleaded not guilty to attempted murder, robbery, assault and harassment.

Unspent money

A 2019 investigation found that 1 in 3 communities in Alaska did not have any local law enforcement.

Photo: Shutterstock

By the end of that year, the Justice Department had pledged to spend tens of millions to fund public safety in Alaska.

When asked to report on these expenditures, a Justice Department spokesman provided a two-page list of grants and awards for the state, tribes and individual villages, including money for victim services, building renovations, and VPSO hiring.

Most of the funding, $ 42 million, went to federal grant programs that were in place before the state of emergency, but which the Justice Department described as additional funding for Alaska.

An additional $ 7 million was channeled through the Justice Department's Crime Victims' Office and transferred to the Denali Commission, an independent federal agency that was to distribute the money through a micro-grant program.

The commission, created by then Senator Ted Stevenson, who died in 2010, has an annual budget of about $ 20 million and allocates money to improve infrastructure in rural Alaska.

The head of the commission resigned in April 2020 after four female employees filed civil rights complaints against him.

As of November 30, the commission has allocated only $ 978 of the $ 000 million in emergency federal funding for crime victims in Alaska, and another $ 7 in pending grants.

About $ 525 of the $ 000 million will go towards grant allocation overhead costs.

To date, only 13 communities or tribes have applied.

The villages of Russian Mission, St. Michael and Stebbins were eligible for the competition at the request of the Denali Commission, but did not apply.

An additional $ 6 million in emergency rural public safety funds was donated through the Federal Emergency Law Enforcement Assistance Program directly to the State Department of Public Safety.

The state allocated the money to tribal consortia and villages to pay for projects such as installing prefabricated public safety buildings in 30 communities.

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But as of December, only about $ 93 of the $ 000 million had been approved for reimbursement.

“Projects are behind schedule due to multiple requirements in the pre-construction environmental review process,” said Nicole Tham, operations manager for the Alaska Division of Community and Regional Affairs.

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