KDLG - Dillingham

Many police stations have a way of communicating their whodunits to the public, but few of them have gained as much worldwide attention as the Unalaska Police Blotter.

Soon after the Unalaska police department began publishing their weekly activities, they put Jennifer Shockley, then a staff sergeant, in charge.

“It was something that our department decided we wanted to do to basically let the public know what their police officers were busy doing on a day-to-day basis,” Shockley said.

Early on, the blotter began making waves.

Shockley received fan mail from around the country. Readers appreciated her blotter’s dry humor. It gave them a window into the lives of police officers in bustling international fishing port in the faraway Aleutians.

Aside from being published often verbatim in local weeklies like the Bristol Bay Times-Dutch Harbor Fisherman, The Unalaska Police Blotter gained national attention with articles in the LA Times, Washington Post and NPR.

Writing the blotter was time consuming.

So exercising her expansive vocabulary and comically understating the absurd situations law enforcement handles was Shockley’s way to make the chore more palatable.

“It wasn’t really so much a conscious decision. It was more just a style that developed over the years,” she said. “I enjoy creative use of words, so I peppered the blotter with a couple of interesting words. I tried to put some humor in situations where I could.”

By way of example, these are some of the records that appeared in the Bristol Bay Times over the years:

Assault

Officers investigated a report of an assault that occurred between two besotted individuals. The two had a disagreement concerning one of the sots consuming the alcohol of the other sot. Sot one, the owner of the alcohol, chased sot two, the consumer of the alcohol, down the hallway of the bunkhouse. None involved wished to pursue charges.

Suspicious Person/Activity

A drunken man phoned police and said he was naked, cold and exposing himself to passing vehicles and in need of assistance. He was unable to name or describe his location. Officers searched the common and not-so-common haunts of naked drunks but did not find the man in question.

Animal

Caller reported that someone was feeding the eagles causing a hazard as one of the eagles had flown into her truck. Officers investigated and discovered that the eagles were not being fed, but were congregating, as eagles are known to do.

Shockley was promoted to deputy chief about a year ago, and putting her witty spin on calls for service is no longer in her wheel house.

The department doesn’t have the staff to keep up the blotter, she said.

“It was something that takes about 8 to 10 hours a week to do. We’re operating at about 60 to 70 percent capacity with our staffing right now, and we just really need to spend our time focusing on law enforcement activities.”

As this staff sergeant-turned-author with an international following reflects on her years maintaining the blotter, a couple of the stories have stuck with her.

In one instance, she said, police rendered assistance to a cyclist being chased by a herd of feral horses. In another case, also involving a cyclist, police stopped a young man riding a bicycle downtown late at night.

“He had blood on himself,” she said. “When he was stopped by an officer, he told the officer that his girlfriend had turned him on to vampirism, but he wanted to get out of it. He was on his way to the Catholic church to be exorcized.”

Shockley will miss writing up the week’s shenanigans, and she knows the readers miss it too.

Calls for Unalaska Police to respond to drunken sailors, sinister eagles, and unruly horses won’t stop, but writing about them will. At least for now.

A Naknek man is being held in custody on $25,000 bail on charges that he sexually abused a young girl over a period of two years.

Benny Kevin Leon Angasan, 24, is facing two counts of second-degree sexual abuse of a minor, plus a charge of indecent exposure and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

The Bristol Bay Borough Police Department received a call around the first of the year from a family member of the young victim alleging the crimes.

Borough Police, with the assistance of the Child Advocacy Center and a state trooper in Dillingham, investigated the case carefully for more than two weeks before seeking charges.

According to the sworn affidavit, Angasan molested the girl more than a dozen times between 2013 and 2015. Police listened in to a phone call where, when confronted, Angasan appeared to own up to his crimes. He also wrote an apology letter to the victim, which police have collected as evidence.

Angasan was previously arrested in 2013 on stalking charges for allegedly peeping in windows of a woman in South Naknek.

One of five men involved in the theft of 17 firearms from a Dillingham residence has pleaded guilty and been sentenced.

Craig Schlosser pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of attempted second-degree theft and received a flat sentence of 300 days in jail.

Assistant District Attorney Pamela Dale said Schlosser was behind the Oct. 8 burglary of a house whose owner was away from town for work.

“Mr. Craig Schlosser was in the vehicle with two other juveniles, and the juveniles went into the residence and stole 17 guns and rifles,” Dale said at Thursday’s court hearing. “Twelve of those have been recovered. So they got the guns and rifles and went on to Donald Johnson and Reece Johnson and those individuals have been charged also.”

Schlosser was originally charged with three felonies, but pleading to the misdemeanor, Dale said, actually allowed for more jail time under new criminal justice rules.

“He’s doing jail time in lieu of getting a felony,” Dale said. “He’s young, and hopefully he’ll never be back, but he’s avoiding a felony charge by taking the jail, because he wouldn’t be getting this much jail time under SB 91, but he would’ve been getting a felony. So it’s a good trade-off for him.”

Magistrate Judge Tina Reigh accepted the plea, and agreed to the sentence of 300 days proposed by the prosecution and defense.

“My hope is that it’s so much time that when you’re released from jail you never, ever want to go back there again,” Reigh told Schlosser.

The burglary victim was in court and said he’s be putting a no trespassing order in place on the suspects.

Dale gave credit to Dillingham police for a throughout investigation.

“I just have to say, hats off to the Dillingham Police Department,” she said. “They pounded the pavement for two weeks, resolving this very convoluted, important case. And all of the individuals involved are going to be held accountable through the judicial system.”

Dale said the five guns not recovered were worth more than $2,100, adding that she intends for the two juveniles to be required to pay that back to the victim as restitution.

Last week, Representatives Scott Kawasaki, Zach Fansler, and Chris Tuck introduced a bill to create a statewide, voluntary Pre-Kindergarten program. The bill was referred to the education committee.

Zach Fansler is the representative from Bethel. This is his first term in the Alaska legislature. Fansler emphasizes the importance of early childhood education and notes that the proposed legislation could have secondary benefits.

“It is definitely focused on education,” Fansler says, “but the childcare portion is another nice part of that because, especially in western Alaska, we have limited access to childcare.”

Fansler didn’t say what money would be used to fund the bill, but he did say that it would save money over time.

“Investing in quality pre-K programs is going to save Alaskans in the long run from paying for anything from remedial and special education, public assistance, things like that.”

The idea of universal pre-K for Alaska isn’t new. Kawasaki has sponsored similar bills in past legislative sessions that have died in committee. The program this session’s bill proposes would operate within a school district and would provide early childhood education to students three through five years old.

 

A man from Egegik was sentenced to 20 months in jail after he pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute more than 3 pounds of methamphetamine.

Jason Corey Vincent Alto, 21, was caught May 30 last year while he was traveling on the ferry vessel MV Kennicott from Washington State toward Whittier.

The U.S. Coast Guard and state trooper drug enforcement cooperated on the bust, which happened in Ketchikan.

Jack Schmidt, assistant U.S. attorney in the Juneau office, prosecuted the case in federal court.

“Mr. Alto had been carrying in excess of 3 pounds of methamphetamine on the Alaska state ferry,” Schmidt said. “Just happenstance that when he disembarked in Ketchikan, he exhibited signs that he was potentially a drug trafficker. He was contacted, and they got a warrant, and a dog hit on his luggage which contained the 3 pounds of methamphetamine.”

Depending on how it was cut, that could have been more than 5,000 doses, and the street value depended on what part of the state it was bound for, which Schmidt said was determined in the investigation.

It was the largest meth bust ever in Southeast Alaska, Schmidt said.

“Typically we have people dealing in ounces, maybe in the half-pound range. It’s highly unusual to see anything above a kilo, which is about 2.2 pounds, and here it was nearly 3 pounds,” he said.

Alto, then a 20-year-old with substance abuse problems, was classified as a drug mule, responsible for trafficking the narcotics, but likely not for dealing them.

Schmidt had asked for nearly three times the jail sentence that U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Burgess handed down.

“I thought that sending a message was an important aspect of the case, given the quantity of the amount of drugs,” Schmidt said. “But the defendant had a fairly minimal criminal history, and he was young, and I think those were the things the judge had taken into consideration in fashioning the sentence the way he did.”

According to reporting in the Juneau Empire, Alto told the judge he plans to return to Egegik and study to become a commercial pilot.

He is in custody and will serve the remainder of his 20 months in jail before beginning five years of supervised release.

The Kokhanok community is grieving the loss of 17-year-old Alex Nielsen, who was killed Thursday in an ATV accident north of the village.

In a tragic coincidence, Nielsen’s father, Niel, was killed in an ATV accident 11 years ago on the same day, according to Anchorage Daily News reports. The elder Nielsen and James Hester, 13, encountered severe weather and died of drowning or exposure 20 miles outside of the village. That happened on Jan. 19, 2006.

On Thursday afternoon, Alex Nielsen and a friend were riding an ATV on on Iliamna Lake about 12 miles north of Kokhanok, according to Alaska State Troopers.

They were traveling at an estimated 40 mph when the ATV struck a snow bank.

Both riders were thrown from the ATV as it flipped.

Community members and the health aide responded to the scene.

Nielsen was killed in the crash, apparently struck in the head by the handlebar of the ATV when it flipped, troopers said.

The other rider sustained minor injuries. The boys were not wearing helmets at the time of the accident, said AST.

Condolences poured in to the Nielsen family Friday, and a fundraising effort was started online to help cover travel costs for the funeral.

Kokhanok head teacher Linda Richter said Nielsen was a promising young man and natural leader.

“Natural born, yep. It was not a role he wanted, but he was a natural leader,” Richter said. “He was never aggressive in any of his leadership roles, people just followed him because he was just a great, a kind person.”

She admired his passion for expressing himself through writing, and his love of the outdoors.

“He was outside every time he could be outside,” she said. “Riding around, learning. Through Gary and his great grandad he learned history. He loved learning about his culture.”

The young man made an appearance in the 2011 short film “Day in Our Bay: Views and Voices from Bristol Bay Alaska.”

“My name is Alex Nielsen. I’m from Kokhanok, Alaska, and I’m going to be showing you some of the ways we hunt for subsistence food,” he told the camera before felling a grouse from a tree with his shotgun.