Yvonne Krumrey

Juneau Animal Rescue has too many cats. To be exact, 142 cats have come in over 111 days.

The town’s shelter is asking people to consider taking in a new family member — temporarily or forever — and urging people to spay and neuter the cats they already have.

Executive Director Samantha Blankenship said the community stepped up after the shelter started posting to social media, but more help is still needed.

“We have been doing our best to get cats out to foster care and adopted as quickly as we can,” Blankenship said. 

She said this is the highest number of cats — and especially kittens — in need of homes that Juneau Animal Rescue has seen in two decades.

“I think we’ve had 12 or 13 litters in the past three months come in,” she said. “We also have other people with litters that we’re working with that haven’t even come into the shelter yet.”

This could be due in part to the lack of vets impacting the rates of spay and neuter procedures here in town, she said. 

“There is a nationwide veterinary shortage. So Juneau is being hit incredibly hard by that,” Blankenship said.

One of Juneau’s three vets, Southeast Alaska Animal Medical Center, is closing at the end of the month. 

Historically, the shelter has been able to offer low cost spay and neuter services to those who qualify as low income, but they don’t have an in-house vet right now, and local vets have been very busy.

Laura Stats and granddaughter, Keltah Daughtery, stopped into Juneau Animal Rescue to adopt a kitten Thursday. 

Stats said it was a coincidence that they came in when the shelter was in need of more cat adopters.

“Well, today we’re thinking we want to adopt a kitten just because we think it would be a nice addition to our family,” Stats said.

Keltah was looking at a tortoiseshell kitten named Twilight Moon — or as she calls her, the Tiny One.

Blankenship said she hopes more families like Keltah’s will decide this is the right time to take in a cat. 

In the meantime, she wants Juneau residents to neuter and spay their pets as soon as they can. 

She also encourages people to keep them inside and away from other mature animals if they aren’t yet altered. 

Those interested in adopting can also visit juneauanimalrescue.org.

At 4 a.m. Wednesday morning, missing person Lucas Schneider turned himself in to Juneau police.

Police say Schneider walked into the station downtown, where he was arrested for pre-trial probation and parole violations and then taken to Lemon Creek Correctional Center.

Schneider, a resident of Juneau’s Glory Hall for several months, was reported missing last Friday.

On June 22, Schneider told Glory Hall staff he was going camping at Echo Cove. He was expected back at the drop-off point a week later.

Glory Hall staff first tried to report Schneider missing early last week, but Juneau Police waited to file the report until he had missed a Thursday appointment.

Last week, Glory Hall staff and residents searched for Schneider in the Echo Cove area several times without finding him. It’s not clear how he got from Echo Cove back to Juneau.

The Glory Hall is working to contact Schneider’s family to let them know he is safe.

The window to file to run for local government in Juneau opens on Friday.

Anyone who is a qualified voter and has been a Juneau resident for at least a year can run for a seat on the Juneau Assembly or the school board. The application deadline is July 25. 

Positions up for grabs include two school board seats and three assembly seats — one areawide and one each in districts 1 and 2. All seats have staggered, three-year terms. 

The terms of Assembly Members Carole Triem, Greg Smith, and Wade Bryson are up this fall. Triem has declared an intent to run again. Bryson and Smith told KTOO they plan to run again as well. 

School Board members Deedie Sorensen and Emil Mackey are also up for reelection, if they chose to run again.

People who want to run must fill out declarations of candidacy forms and collect 25 signatures from registered voters on a nominating petition. An official candidate statement is also required, which includes questions about personal history and the candidate’s position on municipal issues.

The required forms can be found at the Municipal Clerk’s Office or the CBJ elections webpage.

Ballots for local elections will be mailed out in September. Juneau’s election is Oct. 4.

This story has been updated to reflect that Greg Smith says he does intend to run for reelection.

Update — July 13, 2022

Juneau police announced Wednesday that Lucas Schneider had been arrested on outstanding warrants and taken to Lemon Creek Correctional Center after contacting a police officer early in the morning.

Original story

A resident of Juneau’s Glory Hall has been reported missing. Lucas Schneider had been staying at the shelter for several months.

On June 22, he told Glory Hall staff he was going camping at Echo Cove. He doesn’t have a vehicle, and it was unclear how he would get there.

“We’re very worried about where Lucas might be,” Glory Hall Deputy Director Luke Vroman said.

Facebook posts about Schneider say he was due back a week later, but the Glory Hall didn’t have any information about a return date.

When Schneider had been gone for a week, Glory Hall staff reported him to Juneau police as a missing person. But Vroman said police did not take the report because it didn’t come from a family member.

So the Glory Hall contacted Schneider’s father, who filed a missing persons report with the police department on Tuesday.

But Lt. Krag Campbell said police waited to file a report because Schneider wasn’t expected to be anywhere.

“It would start to be kind of unusual if someone starts missing their due date back. But he didn’t have a due date that anybody was aware of, or at least that we have received information about,” Campbell said.

Schneider was expected at an appointment on Thursday. And when he missed that, the police filed a report. It’s unclear what the appointment was for or who was expecting to see him and where.

An information release about Schneider was issued on Friday.

Vroman said Schneider is roughly 5’9 and 200 pounds. He is white with short hair and is 43 years old.

It’s not known what Schneider was wearing when he left the Glory Hall.

On Friday, two arrest warrants were issued for Schneider. And an information release suggests that police think Schneider may still be camping north of Echo Cove.

Anyone with information about him can reach the Juneau Police Department at 907-586-0600 or make anonymous tips through Juneau Crime Line.

This story was updated on July 9 with additional information from the Juneau Police Department.

This story was updated on July 13 with the Juneau Police announcement that Schneider had been arrested.

A 13-year-old Juneau girl is at a Seattle hospital after she was hit by a driver and severely injured while riding her bike.

It happened on Saturday on Egan Drive, where it crosses Gold Creek near the entrance to the Seawalk. According to police, the girl was taken to Bartlett Regional Hospital and then transported to Seattle “due to the severity of her injuries.”

“She sustained extensive trauma to her legs, pelvis and her head,” said Erann Kalwara from the Juneau Police Department.

According to police, emergency dispatchers received several calls when the collision happened. There were many people at the scene.

“They provided aid to the 13-year-old and directed traffic until responders got on scene to make sure there were no additional injuries,” Kalwara said. “So that was really awesome that those folks stopped and helped out.”

The incident happened on Egan Drive, a busy road on the waterfront through downtown Juneau. The road was closed for about four hours after the incident, and the girl’s bike and helmet lay in the road after she was taken to the hospital.

Exactly how the collision happened is still being investigated.

“It appears that the Jeep was driving inbound on Egan in the right lane, and it looks like the collision occurred in or near the crosswalk right there near Gold Creek,” Kalwara said. “So we’re still working on the details of that.”

The two people in the Jeep were uninjured.

The girl’s family asked that her name be kept private.

From the hospital in Seattle, a family member said that the girl is improving, and there’s hope for a full recovery.

“She said her name last night. She answered a question yesterday,” she said. “So those are all really good signs.”

The family member says that she’s a social and athletic girl.

“She has lots of friends,” she said. “She hit 1,200 messages yesterday on her phone. She’s got an amazing support group.”

This post has been updated with the family’s request to keep the girl’s name and her relatives’ identities private.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs held an oversight hearing Wednesday on the first volume of the Federal Boarding School Initiative’s investigative report. The report was released to the public in May. It detailed the initial findings of the Department of the Interior’s investigation into Indian boarding schools. 

There were 408 residential schools across the United States created to assimilate Native American children with “systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies,” according to the report.

La Quen Náay Liz Medicine Crow, President of the First Alaskans Institute, testified at the hearing.

“I sit here before you as the granddaughter of a survivor. Her name was Mona Jackson. I wear her regalia here today because I wanted to bring her with me. And I wanted to become a vessel for her voice,” Medicine Crow said.

At the hearing, Sen. Lisa Murkowski asked Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland about resources for those attempting to have loved ones’ remains repatriated back to Alaska. 

She said the report highlights schools across 37 states, including 21 in Alaska.

“Twenty-one of those schools were located in Alaska. The sexual abuse, violence, malnutrition, solitary confinement, forced manual labor, untreated diseases, unreported deaths, and disappearances documented in this report, make it very, very difficult to read. And we know it just scratches the surface, unfortunately, of what actually happened,” Murkowski said.

The report included schools run or funded by the United States government and left out different programs run by religious organizations. There were thousands of other assimilation programs like orphanages and day schools, according to the report. 

Murkowski asked Medicine Crow whether she thought the scope was too narrow.

“I do not think that we have an accurate number yet of the institutions that were in Alaska,” Medicine Crow said.

Medicine Crow pointed to the history of Alaska Native youth being sent out of state to boarding schools and to punitive asylums, like the Morningside Institute in the Lower 48. 

“And so figuring out this entire kind of ecosystem of assimilative process is really critical. And I think that a very strict and narrow definition will limit our ability to really know the full story,” she said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, proposed the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding Schools Policies Act in response to the committee’s work.