Yvonne Krumrey

More than eight years after 19-year-old Kake resident Jade Williams was killed at a party, a man has been sentenced for causing her death. 

On Wednesday, Superior Court Judge Marianna Carpeneti sentenced 33-year-old Isaac Friday to 20 years in prison for manslaughter. Friday has already spent several years in prison since his 2019 arrest. The judge suspended the remaining years of the sentence. 

Instead of serving more time in prison, Friday will be on probation for seven years, and if he violates his probation, he will face the remaining prison time.

Williams was found dead on August 15, 2017 at a party in her family’s house in Kake, according to court documents. Investigators from Juneau didn’t reach the scene until the next afternoon. Williams and Friday, who was 24 years old at the time, had been in a relationship, and the case was tried as a domestic violence case. 

Friday was first indicted in 2019 on four charges: two murder charges, a manslaughter charge, and a criminally negligent homicide charge. As part of a plea deal, Friday pleaded guilty to the manslaughter charge in February 2025. All other charges have since been dropped.

Jeremy Williams, Jade’s father, said at the sentencing hearing that his life hasn’t been the same since his daughter was killed. 

“I had one job — I failed — that was to protect her,” he said. “It eats at me every day.”

Williams said he believes the sentence is just a slap on the wrist, and that his family’s experience throughout the investigation and criminal proceedings has been traumatizing.

“I really don’t know what to make of this,” he said. “It’s been a nightmare”

He said Jade had plans to go to cosmetology school in Washington, and that seeing other kids graduate and go to college makes him feel her loss, even eight years later. 

But Williams said he hopes this sentencing means Jade’s family can begin to move forward. 

“I hope myself, my family, my friends, his family — we could start to heal,” Williams said.

Friday’s defense attorney Eric Hedland said at the hearing he believes it’s possible that his client didn’t kill Williams. He pointed to another man at the party, who Hedland said admitted that he had been in a fight with Jade that night and had injuries consistent with an altercation. Hedland said DNA evidence that came out years after Friday’s indictment pointed to that other man. The state never filed charges against that person in connection with Williams’ death.

“I don’t know what happened. I don’t think anybody does. I don’t think the state does,” he said. “And that troubles me.”

Friday himself took the chance to speak during the sentencing Wednesday, and said he wants to be able to serve his community again. 

“I’m ready to start giving back instead of taking,” he said. “I’m ready to help someone else rather than sitting in a room taking.”

Before delivering the sentence, Carpeneti said she also thinks the facts of the case remain muddled. 

“None of us will ever know with a lot of clarity every event that transpired that evening and all of the harm that was done to different people,” she said.

Carpeneti said she knows the legal system can’t fix the pain Williams’ death has caused.

“There is not a sentence in the world that will restore Mr. Williams, his family, Jade’s friends and the community of Kake,” she said.

But, she said, the court’s responsibility in a plea agreement is to find an outcome that both parties — the state and the defense — will accept. Friday’s sentence, which both parties agreed to, achieves that. 

Local master Chilkat and Ravenstail weaver Lily Hope has been awarded a national fellowship that bolsters culture and tradition across the United States.

She is one of the United States Artists awardees for 2026, which means she gets $50,000 toward her work with no strings attached. 

“It’s a wild gift to have somebody just hand you some money and say, ‘Do what you will,’” she said. “There is absolutely zero parameters on how it is used.”

The award is nomination-based. United States Artists partners with foundations and philanthropists to support artists and cultural practitioners of all disciplines. According to its website, Hope’s award was supported by the Rasmuson Foundation.

Hope found out about the grant a few months ago, and she’s been thinking of what she can do with it ever since. 

Hope has taught hundreds of traditional weavers, and she herself has weaved seven Chilkat and Ravenstail robes and ensembles, innumerable sets of earrings, face masks and even regalia for Labubus. 

Recently, in a conversation with another weaver, Hope had a realization – she wanted to think deeply about the work she wants to do. That weaver was Shdendootaan “Shgen” George. 

“I kind of had a coming to reality moment with Shgen,” she said. “And thank you, Shgen, for waking me up and being like, ‘hey, what if you made regalia for your clan members, your family and work that would stay in Lingít Aaní?’”

Hope is excited to find out what will come of that deep thinking. She closed her public studio downtown last fall to focus on weaving that will stay in the community.

Hope joins fellow Chilkat weaver Sainteen Anna Brown Ehlers, who was awarded the fellowship in 2006. Several other Southeast Alaska artists have received the grant over the years, including writer Shaankaláx̱t’ Ernestine Hayes, Perseverance Theatre Artistic Director Leslie Ishii and carver Nathan Jackson.

The business arm of Southeast Alaska’s largest tribe has earned nearly $40 million from U.S. Navy contracts in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba – money some tribal members are concerned comes from supporting immigrant detention. 

While tribal corporation leadership says their operations are separate from the detention center on the military base, what’s happening on the ground may tell a different story.

Guantánamo Bay is the site of an active U.S. Navy base with about 6,000 military personnel living and working there. It also houses a detention facility. That facility’s main purpose was to detain people accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. 

The Trump administration has been using the detention facility to detain migrants as part of its aggressive deportation policies that many deem inhumane and unconstitutional.

Tlingit Haida Tribal Business Corporation is the business arm of the Southeast Alaska tribal  government — the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. The corporation currently has a contract in Guantánamo Bay.

In 2018, the corporation’s subsidiary, KIRA, announced a contract with the U.S. Navy to provide maintenance services, port operations and waterfront administration for the base. That contract lasted until 2022. According to a government website that tracks contracts, a similar contract started two months before it ended and is set to last until February 2028. The value of the two contracts together has so far reached just under $40 million.

Tlingit and Haida said the corporation’s contract provides services to the Navy base; it does not support detention operations at the base. But some tribal members, like Clarice Johnson, have doubts about that.

Tribal involvement in Trump’s detention operations

Johnson said she’s been concerned about the contract since it began seven years ago. But when the Trump administration vowed to hold thousands of immigrants in Guantánamo, it brought new urgency to her concerns.

“It makes me ill to think of Tlingit and Haida making money off the abuse of other people,” Johnson said. “Especially those who are just looking for a better life.” 

Guantánamo Bay’s detention center has been known for human rights violations for decades. It’s also notoriously secretive.

In 2023, a United Nations investigator researched the facility and reported “ongoing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.” The report suggested that the facility be closed. But two years later, the second Trump administration pledged to use it for migrant detention. 

In other parts of the state, Alaska Native tribal members have protested their corporations’ investments in immigration detention centers. NANA Regional Corporation’s subsidiary, Akima, has been directly investing in ICE detention operations, including in Guantánamo Bay, for years. 

In the rest of the United States, Indigenous people are questioning their own tribal governments’ involvement in detention centers.

When stories about inhumane conditions at Akima-run detention centers surfaced this fall, Johnson said she started posting in a Facebook group called “Shareholders of Sealaska,” to make sure tribal members like her knew Tlingit and Haida also had connections to Guantánamo Bay. 

“I didn’t want people to forget that whenever they’re criticizing other corporations for doing this, that our own tribe was also participating,” she said.

Her posts garnered discussion with other tribal members, who posted their own concerns. In response to public criticism, Tlingit and Haida posted a statement in early December saying the contract is “strictly limited to the operation and maintenance of multiple watercraft and port facilities,” and that the corporation is obligated to continue the work until the contract ends. 

What Tlingit Haida Tribal Business Corporation is doing in Guantánamo Bay

But Johnson is worried that some of those watercraft transport migrants to the detention center in Guantánamo Bay.

Richard Rinehart is the CEO of Tlingit Haida Tribal Business Corporation. He said it’s against taking on contracts that assist in immigration detention. 

“We don’t have anything to do with that,” Rinehart said.

Instead, the corporation contract relates to vessel operation and maintenance, he said. 

“We run a ferry that goes from the leeward side, which is where the airport is, to the windward side, which is where the naval base is,” he said. “Goes back and forth.”

However, Rinehart said he’s heard that the ferry the corporation operates is used to transport detainees. But, he said, he and his staff aren’t involved with that process. 

“There are times — I hear, I’ve not seen this — but my manager there tells me that they do come across and they’ll put somebody on the ferry. It’s usually late at night, and it’s all just their vehicles, all their staff,” he said. “They move across and they go to the airport, but we have the only ferry going from the airport to the windward side, where everything is.” 

At least 700 migrants were detained at Guantánamo Bay in the past year, and were initially flown there, according to previous reporting by NPR and the New York Times. 

In an email to KTOO in response to follow-up questions, Rinehart said he could not speak to how many migrants have been transported via the ferry the tribal corporation maintains and operates. 

KTOO could not confirm whether or not there is another way migrant detainees are transported from the airport to the facilities they are held in. 

From the corporation’s perspective, he said involvement in migrant transport is “outside our visibility and control and is not tracked, directed, or managed by [Tlingit Haida Tribal Business Corporation] as part of our contractual duties.” 

Though Guantánamo Bay is often linked with the detention facility, Rinehart says he doesn’t think a lot of people realize it’s primarily a naval base with about 6,000 military personnel. And that’s who Rinehart said the contract serves. 

Johnson said even incidental involvement in migrant detention is still too close for her comfort. 

“I understand why they want to claim six degrees of separation from ICE,” she said. “But I think that their actions at Guantánamo Bay place them in much closer proximity than many tribal citizens realize.”

And she wants to know if the tribal corporation will take a stance on migrant detention as more opportunities to profit from it arise. 

“Will Tlingit and Haida jump on the money train?” Johnson said. “Or will they actually have guidelines on which contracts they will bid on, as some corporations have?”

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that Tlingit Haida Tribal Business Corporation has earned nearly $40 million from U.S. Navy contracts in Guantánamo Bay. 

Avalanche risk rose over the weekend as more snow and then rain pounded Juneau. Meanwhile, staff at the city’s emergency warming shelter for unhoused residents relocated operations three times in two days.

When the city issued evacuation advisories for high risk areas of town on Friday, it said the shelter along Thane Road was too close to historic avalanche paths to stay put, said St. Vincent de Paul Director Jennifer Skinner. 

The warehouse the city and the nonprofit use for the shelter is right below the red zone on the city’s avalanche risk map. 

“It was intense to realize that we were going to have to relocate our operations to, at that point, an undisclosed location,” she said. “And we were on standby.”

The shelter serves an average of 45 people who don’t have another place to sleep each night.

Shelter staff packed up everything they could — including a refrigerator — in an hour and a half. Skinner said she was preparing for an avalanche to prevent them from accessing the building ever again. 

First, the city told them to move to the Marie Drake building between the high school and Harborview Elementary School.

“And we completely 100% reset there, and as we were finishing, we’re hearing the roof, and we’re hearing all these cracks and creaks and such,” Skinner said. “And so we contacted our city officials again and said, ‘Hey, is this safe?’ And he said, ‘You know what? Get out. Let’s err on the side of caution.’”

So warming shelter staff evacuated that building, too. They had to make a safety plan with the fire department to go back in and get all the equipment they’d moved in.

The city and Red Cross of Alaska has made Centennial Hall available for residents in avalanche slide zones. 

But city Emergency Programs Manager Ryan O’Shaughnessy said the city wanted to avoid housing the two groups together, citing concerns over potential drug use and hygiene. 

So the city identified Sít’ Eetí Shaanáx — Glacier Valley Elementary as the only available building for the warming shelter. The school had closed for part of the school week so crews could shovel snow off the roof. 

With the help of a moving company, Skinner said they were able to set up at the school. They finished setting up an hour before the shelter opened at 9 p.m.   

“So that was a huge success for us — we didn’t skip a beat,” she said. “Our patrons were not impacted at all by having to reset.”

The warming shelter operated out of the school for just one night, and 44 people came to stay. 

Then, on Saturday, city officials determined the Thane warehouse to be safe enough for Skinner and her staff to move back in. 

Some Juneau residents raised concerns on social media about temporarily housing the unhoused population in an elementary school. 

City Manager Katie Koester spoke to some of those concerns at Monday’s Juneau Assembly meeting.

“We had a thorough inspection, a thorough cleaning of the facility,” she said. “But really for life safety of those residents, we had to make that decision, and we had to make that decision quickly.”

But Skinner said she mostly saw support from Juneau residents during the crisis. 

“I can’t express my gratitude to community members and community businesses that are so willing to step in and step up when we have a hard time,” she said. “And help us problem solve and just be like ‘we got you.’”

The emergency warming shelter is once again operating out of its usual location in Thane, with transportation to and from the Glory Hall, which provides meals and other day services. 

Avalanche risk remains high, and the city’s evacuation advisory is still in place for residents living in the Behrends slide path. 

Dozens of Thunder Mountain Mobile Park residents weren’t able to use their showers or do laundry over the holidays and during recent snowstorms. 

Wright Services, the company that owns the park, said it won’t be able to repair the main water line until temperatures warm. And warm weather isn’t in the forecast any time soon. 

Tammy Jablonski said it’s making it hard to live her life. 

“I had, like, just a trickle come out,” she said. “Not enough to flush the toilet, not enough to, obviously, to take a shower or wash dishes or do anything else. Laundry, nothing.”

Jablonski has lived at the mobile park for more than 10 years. In 2020, the park lost water pressure during a cold spell, but it was resolved after a few days. This time, she said her water has been nothing but a trickle since Dec. 20. 

Wright Services General Manager David Crocker said some of the pipes that connect the main city water line to individual mobile homes are frozen. 

“Once it happens up at the top, where the connection is that the residents are responsible for, it can freeze them down into the main line and cause issues with people, other people in the park, other than just that one unit,” he said. “So we’ve been working diligently to try to identify where those issues are and take care of them.”

But, Crocker said, they can’t reach the main line with construction equipment because the ground is frozen. Instead, they are trying to trace the blockage by investigating each report. 

According to survey results Crocker shared, out of 89 residences, 60 initially had issues with low water pressure, and as of Monday, people in 11 residences reported the pressure had improved. 

When the pressure issues started, the company provided each resident with cases of water, two day passes to Juneau’s pools for showers, and portable toilets in the park.

But Jablonski said that the cases of water are long gone, the local pools have been closed sporadically, and the porta-potties immediately froze and are unusable.

She said she called Wright Services before the New Year to ask if there would be a rent reduction. Instead, she was charged the full amount, plus a rent increase that the company informed residents of before the water issues started.

“I never got a phone call back, and I have an auto payment for the park on my bank account, and it came out big as you please,” Jablonski said. “And it went up.” 

She said she hasn’t been hearing much from the company as this problem persists. When asked about rent reduction, Crocker told KTOO the company is focused on repairing the issue and declined to answer the question.  

The Alaska Landlords and Tenants Act says tenants can seek damages via lawsuits if services that should be provided in their leases aren’t. 

Jablonski said she and other residents just want running water again. 

“We are asking for help. We’re not trying to be demanding. We’re not being ugly,” she said. “We’re asking for basic services.”

In the meantime, the lack of water has taken a toll, Jablonski said. Especially on top of the historic amounts of snow. 

“I love a good snowstorm. But this one has handed my tail to me. The amount of money I’ve had to spend to get dug out, to help dig out myself, to get my roof cleaned off, to not be able to come in and take a hot shower and cook a good hot meal with hot water,” she said. “It’s like are you kidding me?” 

With another snowstorm descending, she worries that a fix won’t come any time soon. 

Two Juneau artists spent this snowy Friday framing and mounting 18 block prints that correlate with myths — ones they wrote themselves. 

The prints are a part of a show titled “My Mother’s Bones,” opening Friday at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center.

Rachel Levy said thinking about folktales and their morals inspired the series. 

“Things you wouldn’t even consider mythology, just like certain truths we hear over and over again and all the stories that are told to us growing up,” she said. “And stories we tell each other as adults.”

She wanted to write her own — ones that reflect themes she holds dear: the gifts that our mothers give us, both the ones who birth us and Mother Earth. 

One print shows a heart with a dagger through it. 

“This is about a mom and a daughter who kind of like grow up in this garden together, and the daughter never appreciates life, is never content,” Levy said. “And so the mother decides to slowly cut out her heart and feed it to her daughter piece by piece, so that way she can enjoy life.” 

Levy said it represents her gratitude to her own mother, and the sacrifices she made raising her. 

Alex Bookless was also inspired by her own family for her prints, including the four-legged kind. She pointed to a print of a dog shooting through the darkness with the sun in its teeth. 

“Basically, it’s a story about how much I love my dog,” she said. “And how much I think that loving my dog teaches me how to love myself.” 

That story — and 17 other new folktales — can be found at the JACC Friday from 4 to 7 p.m. The show runs through January.