Adelyn Baxter

Juneau-based writer Vera Starbard, T’set Kwei, will be Alaska’s next writer laureate.

Starbard is a playwright, magazine editor and Emmy-nominated television writer. She’s Lingít and Dena’ina and grew up all over the state before moving to Juneau two years ago.

State Writer Laureates serve for two years. They focus on a project that promotes literary arts in Alaska. Starbard said she’s looking forward to figuring out what hers will be. She especially wants to uplift Alaska Native storytelling.

“I’m, at the heart of it, just a book nerd,” Starbard said. “I could get people creating more books, or poetry, or plays or TV scripts. That’s fun to think about.”

She said she’s wanted to be a writer since kindergarten. She started out in theater, staging several of her plays at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau before moving into television writing. She also finished a novel that she has yet to publish.

Starbard is possibly most known for her writing on TV shows. She received several Emmy nominations for her work on the PBS Kids show “Molly of Denali” and was a staff writer for ABC’s “Alaska Daily.”

She said people sometimes don’t take television writing as seriously as other types of writing.

“I haven’t found that to be true in Alaska, and I think it’s kind of a big statement to make, coming from Alaska, that we value all forms of art and writing,” she said.

In fact, Starbard feels that writing scripts has a lot in common with traditional Indigenous storytelling, where there’s more emphasis on dramatic moments.

“I love that about whether it’s stage or television, I feel like those are in some ways even closer than books to what Lingít storytelling was, so that’s kind of fun,” she said.

The Alaska State Writer Laureate program was originally for poets, but expanded to include more genres in the 90s. Starbard replaces outgoing State Writer Laureate Heather Lende.

Starbard will be honored at the 2024 Governor’s Arts and Humanities Awards at the Anchorage Museum on Oct. 29, along with other award recipients, including University of Alaska Southeast Professor X̱’unei Lance Twitchell.

Two Juneau residents hunting on Admiralty Island at the end of September ended up face-to-face with a brown bear. Luckily, everyone walked away from the encounter – but not without some battle scars.

Amanda Compton and her friend Nicholas Orr have been hunting together for years. Last weekend, they took Compton’s boat to Glass Peninsula on Admiralty Island, across from Port Snettisham.

A few miles into their deer hunt, they were walking single file through open muskeg with Compton in the front. As they stopped by a grove of trees, a brown bear rushed them without warning.

“I would say it was two seconds of seeing the bear, seeing and registering that it was charging full force for me, and also determining that I had no time to pull a shot off,” Compton said.

The bear was on Compton immediately. It grabbed her head in its jaws and shook her for several seconds – it’s hard to know exactly how long it lasted.

“I was lucid through the whole thing,” she said. “There just wasn’t enough time to be terrorized.”

Then, just as quickly, the bear released her and moved away. But it didn’t leave. It watched from several yards away. Orr had fallen to the ground when the bear charged, but managed to get back to his feet.

“By the time I got one loaded, the bear turned around and I shot and then it ran off,” Orr said.

He’s not sure if he hit the bear, but he’s convinced he was the original target when it started charging. Compton was closer.

When the bear ran back into the trees, they noticed a cub for the first time.

Meanwhile, Compton’s head was bleeding – a lot. Her hand was also injured. But she could walk and her mind felt pretty clear. She just couldn’t believe she was alive.

“I just didn’t anticipate that having a large brown bear on me would do anything but the most extensive damage,” she said.

Though they had a radio, Compton and Orr decided to hike back out to the boat instead of call for help. In retrospect, she admits that may not have been the best call.

“I didn’t know the extent of her injuries at the time,” Orr said. “I just saw the superficial one up front, and I was like, ‘Well, maybe you got lucky on this one, and it just got your hand.’ But no, it got her more than that.”

After more than an hour, they made it back to her boat. On their way back to town, the Coast Guard showed up for an unannounced vessel inspection. They radioed their situation and the Coast Guard vessel ended up accompanying them to Douglas Boat Harbor, where a friend met them to take Compton to the hospital.

At Bartlett Regional Hospital, doctors cleaned and stapled gashes in Compton’s scalp. She also received a few stitches, an x-ray and a CT scan. Her hand is in a brace, and she doesn’t have full use of it yet.

“I’ve got my Halloween costume put together early,” Compton said. “I look like a hybrid between Chucky and Frankenstein right now.”

The sow also left something behind – a shard of tooth was embedded in Compton’s scalp.

Even with her injuries, she knows she’s lucky.

“It is more amazing to me that it literally gnawed on my head and used its paws and teeth to the point where it got a piece of tooth stuck in my head. And I, with the exception of a few staples, don’t have much to show for it,” she said.

This wasn’t Compton and Orr’s first close encounter with a bear on Admiralty. A few years ago, they were deer hunting in early November. Usually by that time of year, most of the bears are settling down for winter. But Compton says it had been a bad salmon and berry year.

But on that day, a predatory bear approached them, coming within 10 feet before Compton fired a warning shot to scare it off. 

Even as an active outdoorsman, she can’t believe she’s had two extremely close calls with brown bears in the span of a few years.

“There are people that hunt way harder than I do that have been in Juneau for eight times as long as I have, and have never had something remotely close to this happen,” she said.

Still, both Compton and Orr feel like there’s nothing they could have done to avoid the situation. Alaska Department of Fish and Game Wildlife Biologist Carl Koch agrees.

“They’re doing what hunters do, and they surprised a bear,” he said. “It sounded like [it was] very close by, too close to to use a deterrent. So, yeah, I’m not judging anything that they did.”

Koch said Admiralty is home to some of the highest concentrations of brown bears in the world. And this time of year is when they’re especially active as they prepare for hibernation.

“If you think about all the hunters that are out on the landscape and how uncommon something like this is, it’s reassuring,” Koch said.

In this case, the bear was able to walk away from the encounter. But Koch said when a bear is killed, Alaska Wildlife Troopers will investigate to make sure the death was legal. The people involved are required to skin the animal and provide the hide and skull to Fish and Game for inspection.

Orr said their encounter comes down to bad luck. He’s been to that area and many others on Admiralty countless times without issue.

“If we had gone to the lower part of the muskeg instead of the middle, we would have walked right by it,” he said.

Orr said he’ll be back out hunting later this fall. For now, Compton isn’t in any rush to head back into brown bear territory.

“I feel like I’ve had my fair share of brown bear encounters, and I really — I don’t need anymore,” she said. “Am I going to take up knitting and like, I don’t know, painting rocks? Probably not.”

It’s going to take some time for her to heal and to process what happened. She still has the tiny shard of tooth. Maybe, she says, she’ll put it in a locket.

This story has been updated.

A storm moving through Southeast Alaska is causing high winds and waves for the outer coast and inner channels Monday and will continue into Tuesday. That’s causing at least one cruise line to cancel some port calls in the region. 

Meteorologist Nathan Compton with the National Weather Service Office in Juneau says waves of 5 to 6 feet were expected in inner channels like Icy Strait and Stevens Passage near Juneau as wind speeds increased Monday. 

“We’re currently already seeing storm force winds with occasional dust up to hurricane force in particular, Cape Decision has seen gusts up to 67 knots, which is very, very high,” Compton said. 

Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska confirmed that Holland America Line decided to keep its Eurodam and Koningsdam cruise ships ported in Juneau overnight and into Tuesday evening. Both ships have capacities of more than 2,000 passengers.

The Norwegian Bliss also arrived in port Monday. As of the afternoon, it was still scheduled to leave later in the evening. 

High Wind Warnings are in effect for the southern panhandle and Baranof Island. 

Compton says rain will be heavy at times Monday night into Tuesday, but it’s not expected to cause major hazards. 

“It’s not the typical atmospheric river that would cause any sort of flooding concerns,” he said. 

Wind and rain will continue Tuesday before decreasing Wednesday.

The Juneau Police Department announced Friday that it will release the body camera footage from a deadly July shooting next week at the same time that the Alaska Office of Special Prosecutions will deliver its findings from the investigation into the incident. 

The announcement comes more than 50 days after law enforcement officers shot and killed Steven Kissack, a man who lived on the streets downtown. Police say he had lunged at officers while holding a knife and made violent threats during a confrontation on July 15. 

The shooting happened on a busy downtown street in the middle of the day, with dozens of witnesses. Cell phone footage taken by bystanders at the time showed various angles of the incident from a distance. 

According to the Alaska State Troopers and JPD, only two of the officers involved in the confrontation fired their guns during the incident – Alaska Wildlife Trooper Sergeant Branden Forst and Juneau Sergeant Chris Gifford. Gifford was also involved in a non-fatal police shooting in 2016. 

All of the officers involved were placed on administrative leave after the shooting before returning to active duty.

JPD hadn’t previously given a date when they would make the body camera footage public. Then, on Friday, JPD said that it would release the footage later that day. In an 11:57 a.m. email to local media, JPD Public Safety Manager Erann Kalwara wrote that the department would release the footage along with a press release “late this afternoon or early evening.”

Kalwara emailed again at 2:36 p.m., saying the department had decided to postpone the release to coincide with the state Office of Special Prosecutions report on the shooting. 

JPD did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

City Attorney Emily Wright said the city had been communicating with the Alaska Department of Law about its plan for the footage. The department informed the city on Friday that it planned to release the report on Tuesday. 

“The decision was made to wait and release the video at the same time as the report from the Office of Special Prosecutions. That way the most amount of information can come out all at once,” Wright said. 

Wright did not know whether there would be a press conference on Tuesday, but said Steven Kissack’s family will be given the opportunity to watch the footage before it is released publicly. She said JPD Chief Derek Bos spoke with the family on Friday.

Tuesday will mark 57 days between Kissack’s death and the footage being released. The Anchorage Police Department, which has had a string of officer-involved shootings, recently announced a new policy that body camera footage of police shootings must be released within 45 days. 

Wright said the timeline for releasing body camera footage from past Juneau police shootings has been varied. In some cases it took as long as six months. 

“CBJ, we don’t have an official policy, and that may be something we need to look at,” she said. 

The report from the Office of Special Prosecutions will include analysis of the Alaska Bureau of Investigations’ findings about the incident and if use of force was justified.

Bartlett Regional Hospital’s nationwide search for a new CEO has narrowed down to three candidates. 

As Juneau’s hospital faces a multimillion-dollar deficit, it announced Thursday that the finalists are Jon Friedenberg, Melanee Tiura and Joe Wanner. 

Friedenberg runs his own health care consulting business. He previously served in leadership roles at hospitals in California and at a research facility in Texas. 

Tiura is the administrator of Providence Valdez Medical Center and previously worked at health care facilities in Unalaska, Dillingham and Michigan. 

Wanner already works at Bartlett. He was appointed as chief financial officer last year, and had held the same role at Bartlett in 2017, between stints as CFO for a hospital in Oregon. 

The finalists will be in town over the next two weeks for final interviews with the hospital board and to meet staff. There will also be opportunities for the public to get to know them. Meet and greets will be held on Bartlett’s campus starting at 4 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 26 with Tiura, Wanner on Wednesday, Aug. 28 and Friedenberg on Friday, Sept. 6. 

Ian Worden is Bartlett’s current interim CEO. He was appointed last fall.

The hospital board is currently seeking financial help for a handful of services it says are draining money. It’s also locked in a contract stalemate with the employee union over wages. 

The Juneau Police Department has released the names of four officers involved in last week’s deadly shooting downtown. 

A standoff between law enforcement and Steven Kissack, an unhoused man, on Front Street on July 15 ended when Kissack made a sudden movement and officers shot him. Police say he was lunging at an officer while holding a knife. 

Kissack was later pronounced dead at Bartlett Regional Hospital. 

According to a release, Sergeant Chris Gifford is the only JPD officer who shot at Kissack. Officers Terry Allen, Lee Phelps and Tim Kissner were also present. 

Gifford is a 23-year veteran with JPD. Allen has also been with the department 23 years, Phelps 15 years and Kissner 2.5 years. The department’s Public Safety Manager Erann Kalwara said all of the officers are back on duty after being placed on administrative leave following the shooting. 

Alaska State Troopers released the name of Alaska Wildlife Trooper Sergeant Branden Forst last week. He also fired his weapon during the incident. 

According to JPD, a Juneau officer first approached Kissack shortly after 1 p.m. as he was sitting in a doorway on Front Street. The officer was there to talk about an assault that allegedly took place the day before when Kissack punched someone on South Franklin Street and then left the area. Police say Kissack was holding a knife when the officer started speaking to him, and refused to drop the weapon when ordered to and walked toward the officer, who then called for backup. 

“The officer told Kissack that he was under arrest and repeatedly told Kissack to put the knife down,” the release says. “Kissack responded by saying he would die first and that he would kill the officer.”

Three more Juneau police officers arrived, as well as the Alaska Wildlife Trooper. The release says officers continued trying to convince Kissack to drop his weapon, but he continued to threaten them and walk toward. After hitting Kissack with “less lethal munitions”, he continued walking toward them. That’s when police say he lunged and two officers opened fire.

Kissack had lived outside in Juneau for several years. He was relatively well known downtown thanks to his canine companion, Juno. He had also had previous interactions with the police. 

Community members protested Kissack’s death over the weekend, saying officers should have better handled the situation to avoid shooting him. Multiple bystander videos from the extremely public incident show various angles of what happened, often from a distance or inside a building or car. Police body camera footage has not been released. 

The shooting is being investigated by the Alaska Bureau of Investigations to determine if lethal force was necessary. The Alaska Office of Special Prosecutions will then independently review the findings.