KCAW - Sitka

Municipal officials in Sitka were briefed about the repeated stun gunning of a teen in police custody, shortly after the incident occurred in September of last year.

In a press conference Tuesday morning, Sitka’s administrator and police chief said that the use of force against the 18-year-old conformed to police department policies, even though it wasn’t the only alternative available to the officers at the time — and both told about their own experience being Tased earlier in the day.

Any use of force above routine handcuffing in the Sitka Police Department is subject to review. When 18-year old Franklin Hoogendorn was arrested on multiple charges of disorderly conduct and underage drinking last year, and subsequently stripped and stun gunned in his jail cell by three Sitka police officers, the incident made it to the administrator’s desk.

“Chief Schmitt informed me of this event shortly after it happened 14 months ago. He assured me that protocols were followed. It was investigated, and corrective actions were taken. So this was not new to city hall,” said Mark Gorman, Sitka’s municipal administrator.

He said he was unable to publicly discuss the case at the time since it was in active litigation.

Gorman and police Chief Sheldon Schmitt met with local media to review the Hoogendorn case only after a video of the jail-cell stun gunning was posted on social media.

“I did make a determination that this was within policy. That the actions of the officers were within policy, despite the fact that it does not look good,” Schmitt said.

Chief Schmitt sat before reporters with a list of departmental policies. KCAW’s request for that list of the policies was denied by municipal attorney Robin Koutchak, on the grounds that its release could jeopardize police investigations.

But Schmitt did describe the procedures police follow when they take someone into custody.

“For instance, you’re going to be handcuffed behind your back. You’re going to be searched. You’re going to be brought to jail. You’re going to be strip-searched — people often don’t know that — and there are very good reasons for that procedure. We’ve had contraband smuggled into the jail several times this year,” Schmitt said.

In the video, Hoogendorn is physically stripped by the Sitka jailer and two officers. He’s forced to his knees, and then onto his belly, with his hands and feet restrained from behind. Schmitt said that most people brought into custody aren’t handled this way. They’re allowed to step behind a screen and remove their clothing. After a search, they put on a jump suit.

Hoogendorn is repeatedly stun gunned in the video, and left motionless, face-down on a plastic mat, wearing only his underwear.

Schmitt said that Hoogendorn was not being punished. He was being forced to comply with the officers.

“You can’t see that on the video tape very well. His not giving them his hands. He’s pushing off. At one point he tries to kick the officers. And having just fought with him, they’re still concerned that he’s going to fight more. Hence the use of the Taser. They’re trying to get him to comply,” Schmitt said.

All charges were subsequently dismissed against Hoogendorn. According to court records, the Public Defender Agency obtained detailed personnel records of one of the officers who arrested Hoogendorn — Jonathan Kelton — who was involved in a fatal tasering incident in Roswell, New Mexico in 2013. The victim in that incident, Cody Towler, stopped breathing after being stun gunned in a violent encounter with police. Although the death was ruled a homicide, Kelton and his fellow officers were exonerated when autopsy reports showed evidence that Towler’s health was severely impaired by drug use.

An incident report filed by state of New Mexico indicates that Towler was able to overcome the electric current, and pull the taser prongs from his chest.

Sitka administrator Mark Gorman might find that detail hard to accept.

“I was just Tased 45 minutes ago,” Gorman said. “I went up to the police department. Sheldon was on the ground before me on the ground and was Tased. And I was Tased by an officer in the leg.”

Gorman said it was very uncomfortable, and he would have complied with any request of the officer administering it.

Chief Sheldon Schmitt said Hoogendorn’s ability to withstand multiple stuns is significant.

“It’s pretty astounding that the young man was Tased multiple times and didn’t comply. Because immediately you want to … it hurts!”

Schmitt and Gorman said they both will remain available to speak to residents about the issue. They’d like to rebuild trust in the community. Although Jonathan Kelton left the department in September of this year, the others remain. “All are good officers,” Schmitt said.

And Gorman is keeping his line open to the Sitka Tribe and other cultural leaders about another significant detail in the incident. Hoogendorn is Alaska Native, and the three officers who left him stunned and motionless are not.

“There’s a national spotlight on this issue,” Gorman said. “The fact that it’s a young Native male is concerning. We want to be sensitive to that as well. Anybody looking at that video can’t come away without questions or feeling a little disturbed. …We have the responsibility to remain accountable to the public.”

Sitka police are defending their actions in the arrest of an 18-year-old man last year, who was stun gunned multiple times in his jail cell.

A Sitka teacher over the weekend posted a video showing the arrest of a Native high school student. The video has circulated widely in social media.

It’s not pretty to watch. Sitka police chief Sheldon Schmitt is candid about that.

“I think anytime the police are using force, it can be upsetting.”

Schmitt said he reviewed the video shortly after the arrest of Franklin Hoogendorn in September 2014. It shows two officers and a jailer escorting Hoogendorn into a Sitka jail cell, handcuffed behind his back, stripping him down to his underwear, and stun gunned him multiple times in the thigh while holding his arms and legs together behind his back in a move that is sometimes called “hog tying.”

But Schmitt said this isn’t the whole story.

“What you’re seeing in the video is the culmination of a longer contact,” he said.

Schmitt said the scene in the jail cell began earlier in the evening, on the sidewalk in front of a Sitka bar, where the underage Hoogendorn had been trying to buy drinks. Schmitt said Hoogendorn was combative when officers initially approached him, and the struggle continued as he was taken into custody.

“You can’t see him fighting back,” Schmitt siad. “According to the officers, he was resisting in the jail cell. He was using his arms and legs to not comply. And he was doing so with force. The officer mentions several times that he was a very strong young man.”

The video was posted by Alexander Allison, a middle-school teacher in Sitka, who obtained it from Hoogendorn. The treatment of Hoogendorn struck a nerve, because he had a similar encounter with Sitka police a few months later.

Allison submitted a commentary to KCAW, describing his arrest in February while observing officers conduct a drunk driving investigation on an acquaintance, also outside a bar.

“Without being charged, without being read my rights, without being given a phone call, I was handcuffed, taken into custody, placed in a cell, stripped naked, given a concussion, and held until late the following morning. After being released, I was not arraigned for seven weeks. My arrest wasn’t reported in the local police blotter. Appearing in court, the district attorney pulled me aside, apologized for the circumstances, and offered to dismiss my charges of drunk and disorderly conduct, and criminal mischief for my behavior after my arrest. Though not physically resisting, I did not go quietly.”

Allison posted the proposed radio commentary along with the video in social media. The commentary is under review by a broadcasting attorney, because it alleges that two of the three officers involved in the Hoogendorn arrest had been involved in disciplinary action for excessive use of force. Sitka Police Chief Sheldon Schmitt said that one officer disciplined for using a Taser against a man in Roswell, New Mexico, who subsequently died, was cleared of any wrongdoing along with his fellow officers at the time. Schmitt said the allegations against the second Sitka officer — involved in a shooting — have also been taken out of context.

But context doesn’t necessarily resolve one other aspect of this incident. In the video, after the three officers leave Hoogendorn prone and immobile on a plastic pad, stripped to his underwear, one of them utters a slur. It’s not racial, but it’s unprofessional.

“It is. And we don’t want guys to say stuff like that, but it will give you insight into how he’s feeling at the time. That this is uncomfortable for them, and the guy is not cooperating at all with them. In fact, he’s fighting with them,” Schmitt said.

KCAW attempted to reach Franklin Hoogendorn, but his phone wasn’t taking messages.

Alexander Allison, again in his commentary, said he thinks police in Sitka have crossed a line.

“But it is precisely because I care so deeply that I raise this alarm. If a teacher and a Native teenager can have their constitutional rights so grievously violated, it can happen to anyone: Your son or daughter, your husband or wife, your best friend who might have been out at a bar, or was pulled over for a failure to signal a turn. I know there are many good law enforcement officers, and they play an important and necessary role. I’m proud to say I have taught their children. But there has been a dangerous shift in department protocol, and this needs to be addressed.”

Chief Schmitt said his department has worked ceaselessly to build bridges in the community. He’s willing to talk about this topic with anyone. He also concedes that things could have been different.

“I think this video and the feedback has been negative, but I’m willing to dialogue and explain what we were trying to do that night. We’re not perfect, but in this instance the cops were trying to do the best they could,” Schmitt said. “Could they have handled it differently? Yes. And in a way that wasn’t so negative-looking. I think they could have just simply backed out of the jail cell at that point, when he’s refusing to comply with what they wanted him to do.”

Schmitt said he’s been considering body cameras, long before they became a high-profile subject nationally. “More video will help us,” he said.

For nearly a decade, Alaska Bulk Water Incorporated has been setting up shop in Sitka – at the site of the city’s once pulp mill. The former bottling company is trying to send raw water to customers around the world, from drought-stricken California to beer manufacturers in Mexico.

Not a single drop has been exported so far, but the Sitka Assembly is offering the company another chance to deliver on their promises. At the company’s request, the Sitka Assembly last week agreed to extend their contract for the sixth time.

With this extension, Alaska Bulk will have 36 more months to export Sitka’s most abundant natural resource. The company, formerly called True Alaska Bottling, drew up a purchase agreement with the city in 2006. As the venture slowly took shape, the company requested and was awarded five deadline extensions. And last week, Terry Trapp, the CEO of Alaska Bulk Water, asked the assembly for yet another grace period.

“Moving water from Alaska to other parts of the world sounds easy. But it isn’t,” Trapp said before the assembly. “We’ve spent nine years in a learning curve, in understanding the things that we have to do in order to make this happen.”

And a lot of the grunt work, at least on the supply side, has happened in the last three years. Alaska Bulk spent $1.5 million on a new water station on the tidelands of the Gary Paxton Industrial Park. The company has also bought 12,000 feet of floating pipeline, purchased a tidelands lease to allow ships into Silver Bay, and installed a dual mooring buoy system for anchoring those ships, which are too large to dock.

Over the years, Alaska Bulk has also paid the city $1.35 million dollars in non-refundable credits to hold on to the contract. With this latest extension, the company is shelling out another million.

Assembly member Matthew Hunter said that swayed his vote three years ago, and clinches his vote now.

“We’re looking at another million dollars we get, whether you ship water or not. That’s a lot of pressure on you. You’re already $1.3 million, plus your infrastructure and all the other stuff for marketing. It’s got to be a big investment, so I trust that your goal here is to ship water and to pay us for it. So, sounds good,” Hunter said.  Right now it’s pouring over the dam, so it’s not doing us any good.”

Hunter said the worst case scenario was that Alaska Bulk asked for another extension in three years. Best case scenario? In three years, water business is booming.

Assembly member Bob Potrzuski was more skeptical. He thought it wasn’t prudent to lock out competitors. With the contract amendment, Alaska Bulk will have access to 92 percent of Sitka’s commercial water and plans to sell it for one cent a gallon.

“Personally I would like to see this contract for significantly less water,” Potrzuski said. “I would get rid of the whole idea of exclusivity and I would give others the opportunity and see what they could do with Sitka’s water.”

Trapp responded by saying that there wasn’t enough space in Silver Bay for multiple companies to build their own loading stations, and that when it comes to marketing water, customers prefer to see one salesman.

“You have one product to sell. That’s water. You can’t differentiate it. It’s bulk water,” Trapp said. “If you introduce competition, it’s going to wind up in a competitive battle and a downward pressure on price. We’re holding the line at  a penny a gallon, as to what we have to pay the city. And I know that other people would like to come in here and offer you less and promise you they can deliver the whole world. And that’s just not reality.”

The assembly seemed convinced, throwing their weight behind the company in the hope they will literally deliver. Trapp said he’ll be shifting gears these next three years to focus on the demand side of bulk water. He claims the company has potential customers in Mexico, the Middle East, China, and South America. Alaska Bulk also has a corporate office in Seattle and is marketing directly to Southern California.

Debbie Reeder is leaving her post as executive director of the Alaska Raptor Center in a few short weeks. During her decade-plus career, she saw the center expand and develop into a world-class attraction.

Reeder sometimes loses track of time in the raptor center’s bald eagle flight training aviary. Like other staffers, she’ll check on something and then become entranced watching rehabilitating birds eat and play.

“We’ll find that half-hour or 45 minutes have gone by and we’re still standing there watching birds.”

It wasn’t always like that. The bookkeeper-turned- executive director gained an appreciation for the winged creatures while on the job the past 13 years.

“I’ve always thought they’re beautiful, but you take them for granted. In the sky, you don’t have interactions with them but they’re really pretty interesting. They’re really pretty individual they all have their own personality just like people or other animals and so they’re kind of fun to observe.”

The center has some 20 resident birds, which cannot survive in the wild. It also rehabilitates hundreds more each year. Reeder started at the nonprofit, full-service avian hospital as the operations manager in 2002.

“I was actually hired because they needed a bookkeeper here,” she said. “My husband and I had sold a small business and I was so excited to go to work for somebody else and not have to be so responsible and take work home with me and here I am.”

During her tenure, Reeder oversaw the center’s expansion and numerous other projects that made it a must-see attraction. One of her biggest accomplishments was creating an endowment fund to ensure the continuation of education, research and raptor rehabilitation.

She’s also seen some curious and upsetting things when it comes to the eagles, owls, hawks and falcons the center helps. More than 80 percent of their injuries have to do with human interaction. One eagle, Volta, collided with a powerline. Others were hit by cars or ingested poison. One time, she says, a man came running into the center with an injured eagle tucked under his arm like a football.

“Now we don’t recommend anybody ever, ever do that again, but we looked up and there was a man in running shorts and a tank top with a bald eagle under his arm running through the building it was pretty funny,” Reeder said.

Established in 1980, Reeder has been at the center nearly half of that time. She’s ready to step down for herself and the organization.

“When you get to the point and you come to work and somebody suggests or requests you do something and you think, ‘Oh, darn, I don’t want to do that,’ instead of ‘Hey, great idea, let’s go do it,’ I think that it’s probably time to move on,” she said.

While Reeder is leaving the center, she’s not quite retiring. She plans to continue bookkeeping. She will also work for the railroad in Skagway next summer. And she’s going to spend some time in a much drier climate – Arizona.

Reeder is leaving a big nest to fill, the center’s new director Peter Colson said.

“All’s you have to do is go to trip adviser or talk to anybody who has been here and they just rave about how compassionate and professional the staff is here with the mission that they’re doing,” he said.

A career administrator, Colson used to travel around the nation to see raptors. He has big visions for the future of the center –things that could not have taken flight without Reeder’s leadership in the last decade.

Reeder’s last day is Nov. 7, the date of the Alaska Raptor Center’s fundraiser Raptoberfest.

A 200-year old Sitka cemetery was severely vandalized by an unknown party last weekend. It’s the third time the Russian Orthodox Cemetery was targeted in the past two months. In this most recent incident, one or more individuals knocked over 25 headstones.

Lance Ewers, the Sitka Police Lieutenant who has been working on the case since the first report in September, is at a loss for words. “I cannot wrap my mind around why somebody would be compelled to tip over a tombstone repeatedly. over and over, on many occasions. It’s sickening,” he said.

Alaska State Law designates cemetery desecration a Class C felony.

Bob Sam, who has spent the last 30 years restoring the cemetery, declined to comment at this time. Sam reported the first two vandalisms to the police on Sept. 13 and Sept. 22. Both times, cadets from the Public Safety Training Academy volunteered to set the headstones upright within 48 hours. At the time, Sam told KCAW he was very touched by their actions.

With this most recent attack, Ewers estimates that one-third of the toppled tombstones are now permanently damaged to the tune of several thousand dollars.

“A number of the tombstones we put up last time were put together with rebar or had a cross on top. [Now] the cross is broken or pulled out of the rebar,” he said.

Ewers says the Police Department is intent on catching the vandals and wants to take steps to prevent future episodes. That includes offering a reward to those with information and setting up night vision cameras that detect motion with infrared.

Cameras were set up in the aftermath of the second vandalism, to catch perpetrators in the act, but taken down by the Police Department when the footage turned up blank. Ewers regrets not keeping them up.

“Not only are we going to put them back up, we’re going to put them up permanently,” he said. “We’re always going to be filming now. This isn’t going to happen again with nobody getting caught.”

 

If you’ve ever watched salmon merge at the mouth of the river, it’s similar to the scene at Baranof Elementary School. The buses unloaded a school of students, dressed in bright coats with reflective patches, flashing silver. The kids had reason to be excited: Regular class would be suspended for a day of learning.

The school has been hosting a Salmon Celebration Day for the past 9 years.

Each class moves from room to room in 20 minute increments, taking part in different activities. Mark Lee, the principal at Baranof Elementary, said it can be pretty hectic.

“But it’s controlled chaos.” Lee said.

The kids listened to Tlingit stories, built a habitat out of construction paper and played a game about the salmon life cycle.

“It’s nice because the different types of learners that there are, there’s something that appeal to them in one way or another throughout the stations,” Lee said.

One way to do that is by appealing to the kids’ appetites. Teacher Jeffrey Hole wore a tie shaped like a salmon and showed the students how to make salmon dip in four easy steps. The classroom was stocked with boxes of Ritz crackers and several pounds of fish, all donated by Baranof parents.

Dylan Radziukinas, a student, wasn’t a fan of Step #1, which involved separating salmon from the bones.

“When we touched it it felt all gooey and mushy,” Radziukinas said.

But he was a fan of the final product.

Hole says that the goal of his workshop, like all the workshops, is to make this critical resource familiar and fun to first graders–even if that means making a bit of a mess.