Southcentral

The three Anchorage police officers who shot and killed a man they say drew a gun on them last month will not face criminal charges after body camera footage corroborated their accounts, according to the state.

The state Office of Special Prosecutions released a letter Thursday clearing Sgt. Jesse Frey and Officers Isaac Kimball and Nicholas Flechsing in the June 3 shooting of 21-year-old Tyler May.

The letter comes just days after the state cleared two Anchorage police officers who shot and wounded murder suspect Kaleb Bourdokofsky on June 1. State prosecutors say they are working to speed up reviews of officer-involved shootings, with Anchorage police shooting five people – three of them fatally – since mid-May.

The letter on the June 3 fatal shooting, sent to APD Chief Sean Case by Assistant Attorney General Dan Shorey, also included new details about what happened.

According to the letter, 911 calls to police at about 9:30 p.m reported two men who had fired shots and were walking toward the Anchorage Senior Activity Center in Fairview. One caller said that one of the men had previously “pulled a gun on children in the neighborhood and tried to take the children’s scooter.”

Frey, Kimball and Flechsing all responded to the area within five minutes of the first call, armed with .223-caliber rifles, and were soon joined by K-9 Officer Timothy Dorsey and his dog, Ray. When they encountered a man matching callers’ descriptions of one suspect, they ordered him to sit on the ground and he complied – just as another man, later identified as May, ran into the senior center’s north parking lot.

“Officers observed a pistol in May’s right hand,” Shorey said in the letter. “Officers immediately commanded May to drop the gun and get on the ground. May put the pistol in his front waistband, raised his hands above his shoulders, and turned away from the officers.”

May then ran from the officers, but the K-9 unit was released and bit him in the upper back, knocking him to the ground. As Frey, Kimball and Flechsing approached, they saw May roll onto his back as he struggled with the K-9 and reach into his waistband, Shorey said in the letter.

“May pulled the pistol out and pointed it in the direction of officers,” Shorey said. “At that time Sergeant Frey, Officer Kimball and Officer Flechsing each fired their rifle, striking and killing May.”

According to Shorey, May was shot during two seconds of gunfire from the officers at 9:38 p.m. Flechsing’s rifle obscured his camera’s view during the shooting, but both Frey and Kimball’s cameras recorded the shooting, in Kimball’s case capturing the shots he fired.

“May is heard screaming in distress as K-9 Ray bites him,” Shorey said. “May’s right hand raises up and he has a pistol in his hand. An officer commands May to ‘drop the gun!’ Nearly simultaneously, at 9:38:41 p.m., Officer Kimball shoots May and the pistol drops from May’s right hand.”

Sixteen .223 shell casings were recovered from the site of the shooting. The rifles were each loaded with 30-round magazines, with 21 rounds remaining in Frey’s rifle and 25 each in Kimball’s and Flechsing’s.

Police recovered an unfired pistol from the detained man. They also found May’s Glock .40-caliber pistol in parts near him, including an extended magazine and slide that appeared to have been struck by gunfire. The weapon’s grip, trigger and lower frame were found under May’s right thigh.

“(T)here was a Federal brand .40 (Smith & Wesson) cartridge in the barrel, and 12 additional cartridges in the 22-round .40-caliber Glock magazine,” Shorey said.

Shorey said an autopsy on May discovered alcohol in his blood at a level of .194, just over twice Alaska’s legal limit for driving. Traces of marijuana were also found in his system.

Police spoke with May’s girlfriend, who said she and May had been arguing earlier that day.

“(She) told detectives May was usually calm but he would lose control when he drank and that he had been drinking that day,” Shorey said.

May’s mother, who lived in the area, told police she last saw him about three and a half hours before he was shot. When she heard gunfire and word of a police shooting, she went to the senior center and recognized May’s body at the scene.

A woman who knew both May and the man initially detained told police he had visited her apartment that evening. During the visit, she said he abruptly strangled her for about a minute.

“(She) told detectives that May was talking to her that night about being ready to die and said he loaded and unloaded his gun,” Shorey said.

The detained man told police he visited the woman’s apartment and told May to take a walk with him. But May was still angry, the man said, and fired his gun during the walk.

The detained man said he didn’t see police shoot May because he was facing away at the time, but he said he flinched when he heard the gunfire and saw May’s body when officers led him to a police car.

Frey told detectives that after he arrived at the senior center, he and the other officers were determining whether anyone had entered the building when they saw May and the other man.

Frey said that during the struggle with May, he fired immediately after seeing May draw his pistol.

“I remember seeing the barrel, and like Dorsey and Flechsing are right there so if he gets that clear he’s gonna shoot and kill them,” Frey told detectives. “Like I can’t…I can’t let him do that.”

Both Kimball and Flechsing told detectives that the officers had initially hoped to handcuff May while he was face-down, but were surprised when he rolled onto his back despite having a K-9 on him.

Kimball, a firearms instructor and member of APD’s SWAT team, said that had May fired at the group of officers, “we would’ve taken that round for sure.”

Flechsing said as May drew his pistol, he decided that if May aimed the weapon at him he would open fire.

“And that’s when I drew the line in the sand, when I saw him still raising the gun after being – refusing commands to drop the gun,” Flechsing said. “And that’s when I fired my rifle.”

Shorey said that given the overall circumstances leading up to the shooting, it was “objectively reasonable” for police to be concerned about “an armed subject in a crowded neighborhood who has been firing shots and scaring other residents.” He ultimately decided against charging the officers, noting that state law allows officers to use deadly force against people they believe pose a threat of death or serious injury to themselves or others.

“Collectively, the officers subjectively believed that deadly force was necessary to protect their own lives and the lives of their fellow officers,” Shorey said.

The Anchorage Police Department’s revised body camera policy went into effect Monday.

The policy says the chief of police still has discretion to keep recordings of certain incidents from becoming public, but the chief must publicly explain why in detail. Otherwise, the recordings, which may have redactions, should be published within 45 days. Incidents covered include uses of force that lead to serious injuries or deaths, police shootings generally and deaths in custody.

The policy also creates a way for families of people killed by police to privately see the recordings before they are published.

The Alaska Black Caucus and other organizations had pushed for a quicker turnaround for when videos are released. Rich Curtner, a retired federal public defender for Alaska who works on justice issues for the nonprofit, acknowledged it can be a complicated process.

“The important thing is that there are deadlines, and there are guidelines for when it’s released, and when it’s not released,” he said. “So those were the important issues that we were concerned about.”

The Alaska Black Caucus has campaigned for years for more police transparency and oversight. That included getting Anchorage voters to approve new taxes to outfit police officers with body cameras in 2021, and pushing APD to follow through.

The revised policy follows an unusual string of five Anchorage police shootings from May 12 to July 8. Officers killed three people and wounded two. They’re the first since officers were equipped with body cameras. In the first shooting, a neighbor’s security video appeared to contradict the department’s initial narrative, renewing public demands to release police videos and for more oversight.

The policy, notably, does not include an appeals process if the chief declines to release recordings. The Anchorage Assembly asked for that in a resolution last week that passed 9-1.

After discussing the policy further with the Assembly on Friday, the department did make some small changes to its initial draft. But an appeals process didn’t come up.

Anchorage Police Chief Sean Case said he didn’t want to delay the other policy revisions.

“You know, it looks good on paper in the resolution, but how do we make that actually work?” he said. “And there’s ways you could do it, but I definitely wanted that to be a broader discussion.”

Case said he expects the appeals process to come back up when its main Assembly proponent, Vice Chair Meg Zaletel, gets caught up. Zaletel is traveling, and missed the meeting on Friday. She said Tuesday she wouldn’t be able to immediately comment.

The body camera policy is subject to review in a year, though Case said it can be changed sooner.

Case said the department is aiming to publish recordings of the first police shooting on Monday. He said the department is working on getting the family of the man killed in that incident, Kristopher Handy, in to see the recordings before they’re published.

He expects recordings from the fatal shootings on June 3 of Tyler May and June 19 of Lisa Fordyce-Blair to follow.

The release of recordings from the other two wounding incidents are likely to be delayed significantly, Case said, because criminal cases are pending against the men police shot, Kaleb Bourdukofsky on June 1, and Damien Dollison on July 8. Case said the public can expect a deeper explanation on those delays to come.

Just last week, state officials who investigate local police shootings explained their position that body camera videos shouldn’t be released until after their investigation wraps.

The state’s Office of Special Prosecutions also concluded last week that the APD officers who shot Bourdukofsky were legally justified.

A federal judge is sending Interior Department officials back to the drawing board after concluding a Cook Inlet oil and gas lease sale didn’t adequately consider the possible impacts on endangered beluga whales in the area.

The ruling temporarily suspends a lease held by dominant Cook Inlet producer Hilcorp. The privately held Texas-based oil and gas company won a 5,693-acre lease in a 2022 sale.

Hilcorp was the only bidder in the lease sale, which was mandated by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. At the insistence of West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, that climate-focused federal law also included provisions mandating oil and gas lease sales in Cook Inlet and the Gulf of Mexico.

A coalition of Alaska-based and national environmental groups challenged the Cook Inlet lease sale. They argued the Interior Department agency that offered the sale had not taken a hard enough look at the possible impacts of drilling on the endangered population of roughly 300 beluga whales that live in Cook Inlet. Oil and gas production involves loud undersea noises from things like piledriving, drilling and vessel traffic, and the groups argued that can interfere with belugas’ echolocation.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason agreed, but she stopped short of vacating the lease sale entirely. She ordered the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to come up with a supplemental environmental analysis and a range of alternative lease arrangements that better account for the possible impacts on Cook Inlet beluga whales.

“In sum, the Court finds that BOEM failed to consider a reasonable range of alternatives at the leasing stage in violation of [the National Environmental Policy Act] because it failed to consider any alternative that would offer for lease a reduced number of blocks that would meaningfully reduce overall impacts, could feasibly meet the purpose and need of Lease Sale 258, and would better allow for ‘informed decision-making and informed public participation,’” Gleason wrote in the 49-page order.

That could ultimately force the Interior Department to shrink or cancel Hilcorp’s lease, said Earthjustice attorney Carole Holley, who represented the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Cook Inletkeeper, Alaska Community Action on Toxics and the Kachemak Bay Conservation Society.

“This ruling just confirms that the Inflation Reduction Act is far more limited in scope than industry and its allies, and in this case, the state of Alaska, have been pushing, and it does not override NEPA, or our other bedrock environmental laws,” Holley said by phone.

The National Environmental Policy Act is a Nixon-era law that requires federal agencies to evaluate the possible environmental impacts of their actions. Earthjustice and a variety of conservation groups are also challenging similar lease sales mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act in the Gulf of Mexico.

Though the state of Alaska and federal government often clash on resource development, Alaska intervened in the case to support the lease sale. Department of Law Communications Director Patty Sullivan said in a prepared statement that the state was disappointed by the decision.

“In 2022 Congress sought to provide certainty for this overdue and long awaited lease sale,” Sullivan said. “The state is disappointed with the continued uncertainty in leasing caused by the court’s order, which is counter to the intent of Congress to provide certainty.”

A spokesperson for the Alaska office of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management did not respond to a phone call seeking comment. The agency manages oil and gas activity in federal waters, which generally begin three miles offshore. Most Cook Inlet oil and gas production occurs onshore or in state waters.

Hilcorp is the only company with active federal leases in Cook Inlet, though none of its 15 federal leases were producing oil or gas as of January 2024, according to Interior Department data. Hilcorp did not respond to a phone call seeking comment.

Oil and gas industry analysts point to long-term trends, including rising renewable energy production and higher production costs, as reasons for lackluster interest in recent oil and gas lease sales.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will be required to update the court on its progress on a supplemental environmental analysis in six months, the judge ruled.

For the past few years, Michael Patterson has been advocating for Anchorage families that have lost members to police shootings.

“I’m tired of talking to families and meeting really good, you know, regular working class people and having to discuss with them, ‘Well, your loved one was killed in an incredibly violent and vicious way,’” Patterson said.

Patterson is an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation – Anchorage, or PSL. The far left-wing group of roughly a dozen organizers formed in 2020 and had previously lobbied for the adoption of body cameras for police officers. Since May, PSL-Anchorage has been calling for the release of police body camera footage to the public.

In the wake of five police shootings in Anchorage in less than two months, PSL-Anchorage is pushing for the city to establish an independent police review board to increase transparency and accountability.

“What we want is an independent police review board that has the ability to investigate police officers for misconduct, refer criminal complaints to the state of Alaska, and recommend changes to policy and procedures and stuff like that,” Patterson said.

A citizen review board would be staffed by professional investigators who would be guided by a board made up of Anchorage residents. Patterson said his group has been working with the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, a national group that has established best practices for these types of boards. He hopes to model Anchorage’s board after other cities in the Lower 48.

“People like to forget this, but the police are the government, who have guns,” Patterson said. “The government is killing people. And there’s literally no accountability and no transparency about why it happens, or if it’s okay if it happens.”

Patterson said the case for an independent oversight board is clear: Since mid-May, Anchorage police have shot five people, killing three of them. All five were armed. These are the first shootings since police were outfitted with body cameras, though none of the footage has been released to the public. Anchorage police say they’ll make the footage available after internal and state reviews, but Patterson said the process has been drawn out.

He is not making the case quietly.

As Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance was sworn in on July 1, Patterson and about a dozen other protesters chanted nearby. While some have criticized the group for being disruptive, Patterson said local officials have done enough talking over the years over how the police can better serve the community.

“We are past a conversation,” Paterson said. “We’re here for action. You know, you can’t have the police shoot four people justified or not justified killing three of them justified or not justified in a really I think, under 50 days, and then say, ‘Oh, there’s no crisis.’”

One group PSL-Anchorage isn’t working with is the Alaska Black Caucus, even though the nonprofit was instrumental in outfitting the Anchorage Police Department with body cameras, which voters approved in 2021. Patterson said he has not reached out to the group because they’re too deferential to the city.

While Alaska Black Caucus leaders say they want an oversight board and they are open to working with PSL, president Celeste Hodge-Growden said her group doesn’t want to alienate people.

“We are wanting to work in harmony to get, as I shared, to our end goal,” Hodge-Growden said. “So anybody that has conflict or confrontation, we’re not interested in working with them.”

The concept of a civilian oversight board does have some city support. Assembly member Felix Rivera said he’s in favor of some sort of civilian oversight of APD.

“This doesn’t have to do about trust with APD,” Rivera said. “This really is about how we can have civilian oversight, much like many, many, many cities in the Lower 48 do, and build a better relationship between the community and APD.”

Mayor LaFrance’s new police chief, Sean Case, took office at the beginning of the month, and has publicly stated he’s focused on improving the relationship between the police and the public.

At a press conference Thursday about the city’s fifth police shooting this year, he was asked by Alaska Public Media if he supported a civilian oversight board.

“Probably isn’t the right time to do it,” Case said. “If you think about it, from the officers perspective, going from one level of oversight to another level of oversight, that can really, you know, kind of kind of hurt the morale and desire to get up every day and come to work, knowing that it’s, we just keep stacking these things on top of each other.”

Case said there are already several layers of accountability for the department, including press conferences and other media engagements, as well as opportunities for elected officials to express their concerns to the police. Right now, he said the department is focused on improving the body camera policy.

Patterson with PSL-Anchorage said his organization is reaching out to community stakeholders to sign on to a compact, agreeing to come together to discuss what a review board would look like in Anchorage. The goal is to present the proposal to the Assembly and get it before voters as a ballot initiative.

PSL-Anchorage is holding a community event at the Umoja Coworking space on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. to educate the public on what a civilian oversight board could look like. Officials with the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement will also present.

Alaska’s most widely read newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, is cutting its print schedule to two days a week.

The ADN’s print edition will be available on Sundays and Wednesdays starting the week of July 15, according to an announcement Monday.

The move will allow the ADN to focus on its digital products, where it reaches the vast majority of its audience, president and owner Ryan Binkley said. Only about 7% of readers actually read the printed paper, he said.

“It got to a point where there just weren’t enough of them to sustain it, and it just didn’t make sense,” Binkley said. “You know, it takes a lot of time and energy to produce a daily news product that is custom, and bespoke, and manufactured the day of and hand-delivered to your home. And at a certain point, that’s time, energy that we can use, better use, if it’s directed toward the platforms that our customers are on.”

According to the announcement, the change will result in the loss of three positions, all related to distributing the printed paper.

The Anchorage Daily News filed for bankruptcy in 2017, under its previous owner, Alice Rogoff, and the Binkley family bought it out of bankruptcy court.

The shift to printing two days a week is not a signal that the newspaper is struggling again financially, Binkley said.

“I mean, if anything, this is a move that will strengthen the paper, allowing us to focus on our customers and the platforms they prefer. The paper’s still healthy, still profitable,” he said.

Still, as a daily print reader himself, Binkley said he understands why fans of printed newspapers might be glum to hear about the change.

“It’s hard to think of, sort of, too many touchstones of American life for the last century that are as iconic as a daily newspaper in your hands, or on your doorstep or with a cup of coffee in the morning,” he said. “So it’s not a decision that we took lightly.”

The Daily News has printed six days a week since 2017, when it eliminated its Saturday edition.

After it shifts to printing two days a week, the ADN will continue to offer daily news content at ADN.com seven days a week and its e-edition, a digital replica of the print edition, each day on a Sunday-to-Friday schedule, according to the announcement.

In the lengthy procession of more than 30 executive firings and resignations that cast a shadow on City Hall during Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson’s tenure, Sharon Lechner’s doesn’t fit.

“I’m a pretty uninterest – an uninteresting person,” she said with a stumble and a laugh at her confirmation hearing as the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

“That’s exactly how we like our books,” Assembly Chair Chris Constant quipped.

Lechner, a certified public accountant who served as the city’s chief financial officer under former mayors Mark Begich and Matt Claman, would come to learn that Anchorage’s books are very interesting – in bad ways.

A few months after the hearing, she delivered a conservative accountant’s version of a mic drop. She told the mayor in May she was quitting because the Anchorage Assembly rejected budget revisions to address various accounting problems.

Since taking the job in November, Lechner had flagged a litany of problems in the city’s accounting systems that she said could threaten the city’s credit and saddle taxpayers with expenses they shouldn’t be responsible for. She even told a public commission that the city has significant “off-balance sheet liabilities,” not unlike the former energy giant Enron that imploded spectacularly in 2001 amid revelations of accounting fraud and corruption.

“Before the implosion occurred, a whistleblower communicated to the highest levels that debt was being understated and earnings overstated,” she told the Anchorage Budget Advisory Commission in May. “Enron was one of the first companies to bring the concept of off-balance sheet liabilities to the public’s attention.”

She and the city’s independent auditors both say there’s no evidence of fraud in the city’s books. Her point was about risk and failure to heed warnings.

“You can get financial statements and think things are OK,” she said. “But if there are other aspects of risk that are not reflected on your financial statements, and someone shares them with you and communicates them to you, it’s worthwhile to consider listening.”

Lechner works extremely long hours, but made time for an interview at a sleepy City Hall when most of her coworkers were enjoying the Juneteenth holiday.

“I don’t have holidays,” she said. “We absolutely have to get this out because my last day is June 30.”

By “this” she meant the city’s Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for the 2022 calendar year.

Going back to at least 2001, the report’s never been this late. The 2023 report is also overdue under the city charter and code. Grants from the state to the city are potentially at risk because of these overdue reports.

These reports are typically hundreds of pages long, filled with dry financial statements, lengthy notes on those statements, and, ideally, an independent auditor’s opinion that the city’s bookkeeping fairly and accurately reflects its finances, in line with professional accounting standards.

A clean opinion is the goal Lechner’s working toward with the auditors. Nothing good comes from a bad audit opinion.

“So for instance, the rating agencies that rate you for bonds will view you with suspicion,” she said. “And you could be penalized with a downgrade in your bond ratings, which would equate to higher interest rates when you sell bonds on the market.”

And that means bigger tax burdens for major city projects.

Lechner has a long list of reasons why the annual report is so late, including staffing levels that haven’t kept pace with the city’s bookkeeping demands and  extraordinary turnover in the controller’s division normally responsible for bookkeeping and audits. There’s also a history of siloed, idiosyncratic accounting decisions that have rippled out into systemic inconsistencies, errors and unintegrated systems. It all makes timely, big picture financial reporting at the city nearly impossible.

“We’ll never have perfect books,” Lechner said. “We’re too big and too complex. But I do think that it would behoove our community for the Assembly to have more information available to it, right? I mean, what’s wrong with having timely, accurate information?”

One of the biggest problems Lechner found is related to a major software purchase the city made in 2011. Explaining how this went under the radar gets technical, but basically, Lechner says there were errors around how the expense was allocated to various city departments.

“The impact is that we thought our fund balance situation was here, but in reality, from our perspective, it was $27 million worse than we thought,” she said.

Multiple issues tie back to the privatization of the city-owned Municipal Light & Power utility in 2020. Lechner said that transaction is still incomplete in the city’s accounting, but must be closed out in the 2023 financial statements to satisfy the auditors.

ML&P employees were part of the state’s Public Employee Retirement System, also known as PERS. There’s a wrinkle in state law that says the city has to keep paying into PERS as if many of those positions still exist, for as long as the state’s retirement system is underfunded.

“And in the United States, there are only five states’ PERS programs that are fully funded, and ours is definitely not one of them,” Lechner said.

In the books, that ongoing expense falls on the general fund – city taxpayers. But Lechner said under the terms of the voter-approved utility deal, the income the city gets from the utility’s sale should pay for those retirement expenses directly.

Other accounting failures related to the city’s workers’ compensation fund have obscured what Lechner said is now an exponentially growing deficit, on the order of $33 million. The city hasn’t been putting enough in to cover its employees’ claims for years.

That’s an issue in and of itself. But Lechner said if the books on the utility deal are closed before the deficit is addressed, taxpayers may end up on the hook for the utility’s portion of the deficit.

Lechner has found more issues, big and small, that she fears will surprise policymakers, like time bombs when the accounting is straightened out. She’s outlined them and recommendations in budget advisory commission meetings, and in a transition plan bound for incoming Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, who takes over July 1.

And she’s tried to warn the Assembly members, giving them handouts and her cell phone number. None called, she said.

“The Assembly needs more information, because what they’re focusing on is fund balance in a vacuum,” Lechner said. “And it’s kind of like a horse with blinders on. Because they’re not looking at what’s coming on the right, and they’re not looking at what’s coming on the left. And what they’re missing are these ‘time bombs’ that – through no fault of their own, how would they know this, right? – and then all of a sudden, something happens.”

Meg Zaletel, who co-chairs the Anchorage Assembly’s Budget and Finance Committee, said the body needs time to digest and discuss how to deal with the issues.

“That is why we have now made them a standing item on the Budget and Finance Committee,” she said.

She said the Assembly can’t make big changes quickly.

“We don’t doubt the seriousness or even the urgency of doing so,” Zaletel said. “We just don’t think this was the last opportunity.”

After Lechner explained accounting issues to a layperson for an hour, she needed to prepare for her next conference call with the independent auditors.

“I’ve probably bored you to tears,” she said with a laugh. “There’s probably no story here, I think.”

She plans to work through this final weekend between mayoral administrations to get the audit done.