Southcentral

A group of Alaska car dealerships advertised vehicles for sale that they did not actually have and, in some cases, did not honor the advertised price for vehicles, according to a state lawsuit.

The Department of Law said its civil filing Wednesday against the companies that own Swickard dealerships in Anchorage and Palmer started with three customer complaints to the state’s consumer protection unit in late 2022 and early 2023. That included one from an investigator with the unit who, acting in a private capacity, had been trying to buy a vehicle for himself.

There are four Washington state-based Swickard companies named in the lawsuit doing business in Alaska — selling Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC, Audi, Porsche, Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz vehicles.

According to the lawsuit, representatives with Swickard claimed that two of the false advertisements had been published by accident and said a third was accurate, but that “a single, overzealous salesperson refused to honor it.”

Then, the state brought in undercover investigators who experienced similar problems with Swickard, Assistant Attorney General John Haley said.

“What happened here is, not only were there those complaints, but then the undercover checks just kept revealing the same thing over and over again,” Haley said.

The lawsuit alleges it was part of Swickard’s business model to post the false advertisements and get potential customers to come into the dealership, so salespeople could sell them a different vehicle at a higher price or a vehicle with expensive add-ons, like extra warranties.

Swickard disputed those claims in an emailed statement Thursday, saying the company believed the three customer complaints mentioned in the lawsuit had been resolved.

“There is clearly a misunderstanding between us and the Attorney General’s office,” wrote Kerry Myers, Swickard’s marketing director. “We are hoping to have a conversation with the Attorney General’s office to gain understanding of the concerns outlined.”

The concerns are detailed in the lawsuit, which seeks penalties of $25,000 per alleged violation, with the total number of violations to be determined in court, as well as an injunction to stop what the state described as Swickard’s deceptive business practices.

And the point is not just to punish Swickard, said Haley, the assistant Attorney General.

“I think that if there are other car dealers that are doing this and we just haven’t heard about it, or if there are other car dealers that might be thinking about doing this in the future, I do think that this lawsuit’s likely to deter them from doing that,” Haley said. “There are a lot of reasons why you wouldn’t want to be sued by the Attorney General’s office.”

More than 20 endangered sea lions have been found dead in the Copper River Delta this summer, many with gunshot wounds. The National Marine Fisheries Service has now quadrupled the reward for information on the illegal killings to $20,000.

Sadie Wright, a biologist with the agency, said the dead animals were found during surveys of the area east of Cordova. This year, she said, it’s an unusually high number.

“We’ve done this for a number of years,” Wright said. “And this year we’ve found a big spike in the number of dead sea lions on the islands there.”

As of June 2, they’d found seven dead sea lions in the area. Since then, at least 15 more have been reported. Wright said by this time in previous years they’d found about three or four.

Steller sea lions are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. Killing them is illegal — the only exception is for subsistence hunting by Alaska Native people. Wright said the animals found in the Copper River Delta didn’t appear to have been harvested for food or craft.

This isn’t the first time numerous sea lions have been killed in the area. Wright said in 2015, fishermen illegally shot sea lions they saw as a threat to their livelihood. She said it’s still unclear what is behind this year’s spike.

“In this case, I don’t know,” she said. “We’re not sure why people would injure or harm or kill sea lions in the area.”

The endangered sea lion population is already facing challenges like the marine heat wave, and Wright said these killings hurt their chances of recovering.

“A lot of these animals that we’re seeing out there dead are young animals in their prime,” she said. “So it’s sad to see them die when there doesn’t seem to be a good cause for it.”

Wright said people can report harm or harassment of marine mammals to NOAA law enforcement at 1-800-853-1964.

A wayward walrus calf, just one month old, was rescued from the North Slope and flown to the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, where the staff is now providing “round-the-clock cuddling” to the 200-pound pinniped.

Dr. Carrie Goertz, director of animal health at the SeaLife Center, said the walrus is improving and taking to his new caregivers.

“He follows people around and as soon as they sit down, he’ll be laying up against them,” she said.

The center says workers on the North Slope spotted the baby walrus on tundra, about four miles inland from the Beaufort Sea.

Pacific walrus are marine mammals and don’t normally venture so far from the coast.

“Observers reported a notable ‘walrus trail’ on the tundra close to a road where he was discovered, although it is unknown how he arrived inland,” a press release from the SeaLife Center says. “Walrus calves depend on maternal care for their first two years of life, and with no adults in the vicinity, it was apparent that the wayward calf would not survive long without intervention.”

Several organizations rallied to help the animal, including ConocoPhillips and Alaska Clean Seas. With approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the calf was moved to a warehouse overnight. ConocoPhillips flew the calf to Seward Tuesday in a company plane.

Veterinarians at the SeaLife Center found the young male walrus was suffering from dehydration, malnutrition and a cloudy eye. The SeaLife Center is now providing 24-hour care.

“Walruses are highly tactile and social animals, receiving near-constant care from their mothers during the first two years of life,” the SeaLife Center said in a written statement. “To emulate this maternal closeness, round-the-clock ‘cuddling’ is being provided to ensure the calf remains calm and develops in a healthy manner. Calves tend to habituate quickly to human care, and staff report that he is already eating formula from a bottle.”

The rescued calf is only the 10th walrus ever admitted to the SeaLife Center in its 25-year history.

Alaska’s largest city has broken its record for outdoor deaths.

So far this year, 29 people believed to be homeless have died outside in Anchorage. That surpasses last year’s grim milestone of 24 outdoor deaths, and there are still five months left in the year.

The numbers come from reporting by the Anchorage Daily News and ADN reporter Michelle Theriault Boots, who writes about the city’s homelessness issues. (In another recent story, Theriault Boots chronicled one woman’s yearlong journey from homelessness to getting housed).

Theriault Boots says six of the outdoor deaths happened in just a four-day period, from July 18 to July 21, and that more than half occurred after the city closed the Sullivan Arena shelter.

Listen:

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Michelle Theriault Boots: That (number of deaths in a short time) really says something. Why is this happening? I think we have incomplete information. A little bit about the data: This is something that we have requested for years from the Anchorage Police Department. And what they give us is incident reports. You know, police were called to the scene of X place and found a person not breathing. Few details, and it notably does not include the cause of death. I mean, one kind of speculative explanation offered by Alexis Johnson, the homeless coordinator for the city, is that this summer you just have a bunch of people, who otherwise might have been in some kind of shelter, who are all camping. So in many of these recent cases, you know, people are found dead in a tent that’s hidden away in the woods somewhere. So there was kind of a thought that maybe people are more isolated, and there’s fewer opportunities for intervention. Like, no one can give you Narcan if you’re alone in a tent, whereas maybe if you’re overdosing in a shelter environment, or somewhere where there are more people, there might be more of an opportunity for someone to intervene.

Casey Grove: Yeah. And the city continues to work on that. But it does sound like there’s not going to be anything here in the very near term in regards to a homeless shelter or navigation center going into the fall in winter. What do you expect to happen?

Michelle Theriault Boots: Well, I mean, there also is the threshold where the city, I think legally, has to provide some kind of cold weather shelter. What I was hearing was that the city believes that with all the new non-congregate housing that’s come online recently, with the hotels that are converted to, you know, so people can live in the rooms, many people see as a success story. They think that’s gonna make a really big dent in the number of people who need shelter this winter. And they think that they — I mean, what, again, city homeless coordinator Alexis Johnson said is they think they can handle the need for winter shelter, using that non-congregate space, those hotel conversions. Whether that’s true remains to be seen. And that also doesn’t exactly address the issue of the person who is, you know, functioning maybe on a really low level on the street and who needs immediate, just a place to get warm on a frigid day. So I think that that’s something that people believe needs to be addressed.

Casey Grove: Well, this high number of outdoor deaths is obviously troubling. But you also recently wrote a story about somebody’s journey from homelessness to getting housing. And I think it’s fair to say that it’s a little bit more complicated than just somebody getting a job and getting an apartment. And that person, her name is Monique. Can you tell me about her story? And I guess maybe just starting with how you met her?

Michelle Theriault Boots: Yeah, Monique, she was raised in Anchorage, went to high school in Anchorage, spent some time Outside in San Diego, trained as a medical billing and coding specialist. And then found herself homeless in Anchorage about eight years ago for the first time. You know, homelessness was kind of driven by alcoholism and some mental health issues. Monique is a really smart, really funny, witty person. And we actually met her on the steps of the Sullivan Arena the day that it closed for the summer in 2022, so about a little over a year ago. And she was one of the folks that was just sitting there waiting for what was next. She had nowhere to go. She had been kicked out of most of the shelters in Anchorage for what she described as her outbursts of anger. And she was just very articulate about her situation. She did not want to go camp, but that was her only choice. So the city sent her to Centennial Campground, and she went from being, you know, having all of her belongings in garbage bags, at the closed Sullivan Arena to moving into an apartment. And, you know, through that time, she really worked on herself. I mean, she is completely responsible for her success. She addressed a lot of longstanding difficult issues. But she was also really helped by being able to live at a place called Complex Care, which is a small shelter for people with medically complex situations. And that place just really worked for her.

Casey Grove: In a photo that you took, she was sitting there on her bed with her cat under her arm.

Michelle Theriault Boots: Yes, her cat Coco was a really big motivator. You know, someone she knew had been caring for Coco for years, and she just wanted to be reunited with her cat and have that freedom and dignity to have a pet, which I think a lot of people take for granted. But when you’re homeless, that’s, you know, that’s not something you can always do. And so just having that autonomy to have her pet with her meant the world to her, I think.

The Don Young Port of Anchorage.

That’s what a panel recommends renaming the city-owned Port of Alaska. There are two changes there: An honorary thing for the man who represented Alaska for 49 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, and a reversion to the place name historically attached to the port – Anchorage, not Alaska.

The proposed legislation credits Young with helping to steer hundreds of millions of dollars to port projects.

The panelists said in a letter that switching the name back to “of Anchorage” better reflects industry practice.

The “of Alaska” moniker is only five years old. The Anchorage Assembly changed the name in 2017 in a symbolic move, in part to convey to legislators who fund infrastructure projects the port’s importance to the entire state. Most freight, fuel and consumer goods that come to Alaska flow through the port.

The Assembly will hold a public hearing and is expected to vote on the name-change proposal on Sept. 12.

At a public hearing the renaming panel held in June, no one from the public participated. The four panelists were appointed last year by Mayor Dave Bronson and then-Assembly Chair Suzanne LaFrance.

The renaming process began after Young died on March 18, 2022. A city code requires a one-year waiting period after someone’s death before the Assembly can rename a city facility after them.

State and federal officials have named several other things for the late Congressman. Gov. Mike Dunleavy proclaimed March 18, 2023, as Don Young Day. U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan backed legislation that renamed a volcanic mountain west of Adak, a job center in Palmer and a federal office building in Fairbanks after Young.

An Anchorage man who pasted swastika stickers at several locations around the city in 2021 was sentenced in federal court on Tuesday to 18 months in prison. He was convicted on two acts of hate-motivated property damage and one drug trafficking offense.

According to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s office, in May, 2021, Luke Foster, now 28, placed swastika stickers with the text “WE ARE EVERYWHERE” at eight locations around Anchorage, including the Alaska Jewish Museum and the gay nightclub Mad Myrna’s. Foster returned to the Jewish Museum a few months later to place another sticker and carve a swastika into the door.

The swastika is an ancient religious symbol now most associated with the German Nazi Party, which carried out a systematic slaughter of Jewish people, LGBTQ people and others during the Holocaust.

“It’s very sad when you see young people who are misguided and don’t understand the danger of being influenced by the fear of ‘the other,’” said Rabbi Yosef Greenberg, president of the museum board.

Greenberg said he was encouraged by an apology Foster made during court proceedings, saying he was misguided and hoped to learn from the experience.

Nationwide, the number of recorded antisemitic events has reached an all-time high, according to a 2022 audit from the Anti-Defamation League. Greenberg said that in his 32 years in Alaska, he’s also noticed an uptick in threats against the Jewish community in the last decade. He blames it on the spread of misinformation aided by the internet.

“Bigotry and hatred only leads to destruction of themselves, of those who do it,” Greenberg said. “But that does nothing good. Evil can never prevail.”

Federal agents initially caught Foster on drug charges after he was found using social media to sell psilocybin mushrooms. While executing a search warrant, agents found “Nazi-inspired imagery, including a box of swastika stickers” in Foster’s home, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

The office said the federal Bureau of Prisons will assign Foster to a facility to carry out his sentence in the next few weeks.