Sexual Abuse & Domestic Violence

A 34-year-old Ketchikan man drowned in a creek last month while fleeing police. Family and friends describe a bright but troubled young man who fell into addiction.

KRBD’s review of police bodycam footage shows a routine stop by police that ended tragically.

At about 12:30 a.m. on Dec. 11, dispatchers answered an anonymous 911 call about a man attacking a woman outside the caller’s apartment.

“This guy keeps dragging this lady around and pushing her,” the caller said.

Officers found Brandon Larson and his girlfriend huddled together on the banks of Ketchikan Creek and separated the two. Larson told Officer Ray Satterfield the couple was just having an argument and were homeless.

“What the person that called it in said [is] that you were trying to drag her into the wood line over there,” Satterfield says in one video.

“No sir,” Larson answers. “I would never put my hands on a girl.”

As they talked, Larson slowly edged away and then abruptly fled. Larson swung under a railing and dropped 10 feet onto the swollen creek’s bank — heavy rains had prompted flood warnings the weekend before. After Larson ran out of sight, Satterfield spotted him again a little ways upstream.

“Stop, or I’ll tase your ass! Stop!” Satterfield says in the video, though the report says Larson was far beyond Taser range.

The footage shows Larson hesitating for a moment before stepping into the fast-running creek. Satterfield calls out: “Get out of the water, you idiot!”

The current then took Larson downstream.

Ketchikan Police Department Lieutenant of Investigations Andy Berntson said that officers still aren’t sure whether it was an accident or an attempt to evade police.

“[The officer’s] initial take was that it appeared he was essentially trying to ride the creek — like, lay into it. Could that be a slip and fall? I mean, it certainly could,” Berntson said in an interview this month.

About 20 minutes later, an officer called for medics after finding Larson’s body pinned in a logjam a few hundred feet downstream. He’d been in the water for about 40 minutes.

‘I do think they chased him to his death’

Police released the bodycam footage to KRBD a few weeks after his death. Members of Brandon Larson’s family have since watched the tapes.

His sister, Brianna Gunn, says it’s clear her brother wasn’t forced into the creek. She’s puzzled by his actions that night.

“But I do think they chased him to his death. I do think that,” she said in an interview this month. “And, you know, whatever that means, I’m not really sure, but I do think that happened. I don’t necessarily think they intended to, but that’s what happened. And I don’t think it had to happen.”

Larson didn’t have any violent criminal arrests in Alaska. Gunn says her brother wasn’t an aggressive person and believes his problems came from drug abuse.

“He was not a threat to anybody. He wasn’t out to hurt anyone. He was an addict. He needed help,” she said. “And I realize that he was in legal trouble. I understand that. There’s protocol for that. I get that. But at the same time, like, you have to be able to read those kinds of situations.”

Ketchikan police defend their officers’ actions. Berntson said that at the time of the pursuit, they were investigating a report of a woman being assaulted, and Larson had open warrants.

“We had an initial report, which brought us there, we had information from that report that was concerning to follow up on. And domestic violence investigations are tricky, and they can be difficult to sort themselves through,” Berntson said.

But Berntson said the way the night ended was tragic.

“It’s horrible. I mean, any — any person that dies from a preventable situation is just — it’s sad. It’s, it’s, you know, you feel like, you know, everybody in that situation, you know, it could have been, it could have resulted better for everybody. And it didn’t need to end that way,” Berntson said.

He said the department was reviewing what happened that night to prevent it from happening again.

Who was Brandon Larson?

Bergan Wieler was one of Larson’s best friends.

“He was a really carefree type of guy,” Wieler said in an interview.

They started as high school friends, wrestling on the beach and catching pint-size trout in Carlanna Lake. He remembers Larson loving books and having an intellectual streak.

“He would have an extreme knowledge base, because he’d read like 20 or 30 different books from different [political science] authors and then going off on diatribes about things like that,” Wieler said.

But after finishing high school, Larson didn’t continue his education. He started abusing prescription opioids. He moved to Seattle a few years later.

He would bounce back and forth between Ketchikan and the Lower 48. Then last summer, he returned to Ketchikan for good. Dave Timmerman had been his boss years back when he’d hired him as a security guard at the port. He came across Larson again this summer.

“I ran into Brandon on the sidewalk, downtown — actually, in front of the Ketchikan Daily News,” Timmerman said in an interview.

But he said he could tell right away that addiction had taken its toll.

“And I was shocked by what he looked like,” Timmerman said. “He was skeletal.”

Wieler says his childhood friend was trying to get clean.

“Life had been a little difficult for him where he was, and he decided to take a shot coming back up to Ketchikan,” Wieler said.

At first, things looked good. But the pandemic made it difficult to keep in touch in-person.

Larson was charged with minor theft in October, his first criminal case in Alaska. The following month, he was arrested for allegedly dealing drugs, a felony. Wieler bailed him out. But Larson skipped his court appearance. That technically made him a fugitive from justice the night he ran from police.

His sister wants people to know her brother was never a violent criminal. She hopes his story helps the community view those fighting addiction as human beings.

“Instead of just writing these people off, as you know, just, junkies,” Gunn said. “And I think it would be good to shed a light on that — for, like, the public of Ketchikan to know like this could be your kid, this could be your brother, or this could be your grandkid. Brandon was that and more to everybody.”

When Dr. Barbara Knox started to evaluate child abuse data from the past year she noticed an alarming change.

“The cases that are presenting, are presenting inpatient, and it’s the big and the bad,” Knox said. “A serious uptick in cases of abusive head trauma, serious physical abuse.”

Knox is the medical director of Alaska Child Abuse Response and Evaluation Services (Alaska CARES), a clinic at Providence Alaska Medical Center that focuses on children who have suffered from abuse.

Many kids in Alaska are just now starting to return to in-person learning after the pandemic forced school buildings to close nearly a year ago. And as students return, child welfare advocates are assessing the impact of the pandemic on child abuse.

The number of reports to the Office of Children’s Services decreased by as much as 30% in some months of 2020, and the overall number of evaluations that Alaska CARES completed also saw a slight decrease compared to 2019. But the number of times an Alaska CARES staff person visited a child who needed to be hospitalized for severe injuries as a result of suspected abuse skyrocketed by 220% in the last year.

“This absolutely reflects an increase in serious physical abuse and neglect cases,” Knox said.

The lower reporting rate and the spike in severe cases is likely due to a combination of factors, most of them exacerbated by the pandemic, Knox said.

Things like increased isolation, stress on families from financial instability, and school closures, which limited kid’s contact with adults who could help them.

Schools are the single largest source of child abuse reports, according to OCS.

Additionally, OCS is seeing the number of children in foster care balloon, and children are staying in foster care for longer periods of time.

Kim Guay, acting Director of OCS, said the pandemic “sent us for a loop.” Family courts closed, social workers’ ability to do home studies and home visits were disrupted, and the pandemic made it hard for the office to investigate suspected cases of abuse, especially in rural areas. The issues just compounded over time Guay said.

“How do we assess safety? We have requirements where you have to see the child that’s in foster care face-to-face every single month. Well, how do you do that when you don’t have PPEs to go to the home?” Guay said. That’s just one example of many logistical obstacles the pandemic created. There are also other factors to consider that have kept some children in the system.

“There’s so much stress going on families lives, is now the appropriate time to put the children back home?” Guay said.

It’s a multi-pronged issue that Guay said OCS is continuing to work through.

Now, as children are returning to school, Guay said she expects to see the number of child abuse reports go up as children interact more with school staff. But advocates stress that’s to be expected because reporting typically dips when students are away from school, such as during summer break, and rebounds when they return in the fall.

School staff, like counselors, across the state are preparing to support the transitions back to in-person learning, according to Elizabeth Congdon-McGee, the acting executive director of the Alaska School Counselor Association and counselor at Whaley School in Anchorage

“I do believe the mental health and the trauma is going to be coming in our doors full force,” Congdon-McGee said. “Because we don’t know what has been in our kids lives. We see them on a screen, but we don’t know what’s behind that screen.”

Knox said families who may be overwhelmed or struggling should reach out to their medical provider or the Office of Children’s Services to get help finding the resources they might need.

This article was produced in partnership with ProPublica as part of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network and is part of a continuing series, Lawless: Sexual violence in Alaska.

Second of two parts.

Law enforcement agencies across Alaska are failing to collect DNA from people arrested for violent crimes, violating a state law passed with much fanfare in 2007 that was going to put Alaska at the leading edge of solving rape cases.

The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found that across the state, some law enforcement agencies are not aware of the law or are not following it. That lapse means the database is potentially missing thousands of people and may explain why the effort to test a backlog of unexamined rape kits for DNA has yielded only one new prosecution.

Emails obtained by the Daily News and ProPublica show state officials have been aware of the problem since at least December 2017, when the director of the police regulatory board forwarded a request to all police departments.

“The Department of Public Safety has determined that jail personnel are not consistently collecting DNA samples from offenders arrested for ‘qualifying offenses,’ particularly those arrested in rural areas serviced only by contract or municipal jails,” then-Assistant Attorney General John Novak wrote. (The Alaska Police Standards Council sent the memo on behalf of Novak. Officials overseeing the state crime lab, the Department of Law and then-Department of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan also received the email.)

Years later, supervisors at some police departments said they still were unaware of the requirement.

The problem extends to local police and to state troopers, according to a progress report published this year by the Department of Public Safety on efforts to clear a backlog of sexual assault evidence kits.

The failure was perhaps most striking in the case of accused serial rapist Alphonso Mosley, whose DNA was not submitted to the state crime lab after a qualifying arrest in 2012. In the years that followed, prosecutors say, Mosley committed three more rapes across the city, impregnating one of his victims. Even when he was arrested a second time for domestic violence in 2015, no DNA was collected, contrary to state law.

Alaska was among the first states in the nation to require all suspects arrested for a violent crime such as robbery, domestic violence or rape, even misdemeanor assault, to be swabbed for DNA. The swabs would be sent to the state crime lab, where the DNA would be extracted and could be matched against evidence from cold cases and kept on file to aid in future cases.

Privacy advocates have long fought such laws, saying they infringe on civil liberties and should not be allowed prior to conviction. Alaska lawmakers were unmoved, comparing the swabs to jailhouse mugshots.

“What we have before us is the 21st century version of fingerprints,” Sen. Con Bunde, R-Anchorage, told his colleagues.

Alaska is now one of at least 31 states that require DNA samples be collected upon arrest or when criminal charges are filed against a person. Many of those states are now discovering that their laws have been ignored and they’re missing DNA evidence, in some cases tens of thousands of samples.

The problem of states passing DNA collection laws that are ignored or partially implemented is being discovered on a national scale and is sometimes known as “owed DNA.” It involves people arrested, convicted or sentenced for crimes who now “owe” a DNA sample because authorities neglected to collect or process it.

The reason the owed DNA problem is significant is that it inhibits investigators’ ability to solve crimes. In recent years, states, including Alaska, have come under pressure to process backlogs of untested sexual assault exam kits, an effort that is undermined if the DNA databases are incomplete.

Researchers in Ohio were among the first to quantify the problem, reporting in 2019 that about 15,300 DNA samples had been missed in Cuyahoga County. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation estimates that there are more than 76,000 missing DNA profiles from felony offenders in that state, based on preliminary research.

The attorney general’s office in Washington state calculates that “tens of thousands” of people legally owe the state DNA samples for entry into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).

Angela Williamson, who oversees the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative for the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance, said states with larger populations likely have about 50,000 missing samples each.

It’s not clear how to fix the problem nationwide, because it’s not clear if the laws in various states allow authorities to seek out people released from custody and obtain DNA samples. In some states, including Alaska, officials have started collecting missed samples from those who are still in jail or prison or who are on probation.

Matching DNA doesn’t just solve sexual assault cases; it can also deliver justice in burglary and murder cases, save Alaska money on years-long investigations and even exonerate the wrongly accused, said Rachel Lovell, a research assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University who has co-authored studies on owed DNA in Ohio.

When the DNA is finally collected, she said, “there are crimes waiting to be solved.”

An accused serial rapist roamed free

In 2019, Anchorage police announced the arrest of a man prosecutors called the “definition of a serious serial rapist,” precisely the kind of offender the DNA collection laws were meant to capture.

Alphonso Mosley, 35, is awaiting trial for three alleged sexual assaults committed between 2012 and 2019. (Mosley has pleaded not guilty to the charges. His DNA also linked him to an earlier attack in 2009, but that victim had since died.)

One of Mosley’s victims was developmentally disabled, the charges say. One became pregnant with his child. One moved away from Anchorage, prosecutors wrote, “out of fear and shame.”

“The victims are already terrified of the defendant because he has freely roamed the streets for years,” Assistant District Attorney Betsy Bull wrote in a bail memo describing why Mosley posed a risk to the public. She told the judge Mosley looked for women who had been drinking, offered them alcohol, then pinned them down and assaulted them in the woodsy Town Square Park of downtown Anchorage, in the back of a van and even outside the city jail. (The judge denied the defense’s request to reduce his bail.)

When announcing the indictment, the state Department of Law said Mosley’s DNA was collected under Alaska’s DNA identification law following his arrest in a 2018 case unrelated to the sexual assaults.

But what police and prosecutors didn’t say is that Mosley’s DNA had also been collected by the state Department of Corrections in 2012 after he assaulted a girlfriend. For reasons that remain unclear, the sample was never received by the state’s crime lab, according to the Department of Public Safety. As a result, Mosley’s DNA profile was not entered into the FBI’s CODIS database.

The Anchorage Police Department and jailers had another chance to obtain Mosley’s DNA and add it to the database in 2015, when he was arrested for punching his girlfriend in the face and pleaded guilty to domestic violence assault. According to the Department of Public Safety, his DNA was not collected after that arrest, which would have been contrary to state law.

If the Alaska system for gathering and processing DNA from arrestees worked as intended, Mosley might have been identified years earlier and before at least two of the sexual assaults. That’s because authorities collected the DNA of an unknown man from the victim of the 2009 rape and entered it into CODIS in March 2010. Had Alaska law enforcement officials followed the law and put Mosley’s DNA into the system after either the 2012 or 2015 arrests, he would have been immediately flagged as a suspect in the earlier rape.

After police identified Mosley as a suspect in a 2017 rape during their investigation, his DNA was finally collected and entered into the database in 2018, according to the Department of Public Safety, leading to “hits” on DNA taken from rape victims in 2009 and 2012. The woman in the earliest case had died, but police recommended Mosley be charged with rape for the 2012 and 2017 assaults.

It took the district attorney’s office eight months to file the felony charges in court. During that time, he committed another outdoor assault, according to the criminal complaint. A Department of Law spokeswoman said the department cannot comment on specifics of a pending case.

In August 2019, the same month Mosley was charged with the three sexual assaults, the Anchorage Police Department for the first time began training officers to collect DNA upon arrest, 12 years after the Legislature passed the law requiring it to do so.

“We received clarification and guidance last year from the Department of Law with the Municipality of Anchorage and the State of Alaska because the 2007 legislation as written wasn’t clear about which agencies, outside of the (state) Department of Public Safety, are authorized to collect DNA samples,” said Anchorage police spokesman MJ Thim. “Today, our officers can and do, if warranted, collect DNA samples at the time of an arrest.”

“It’s all news to me”

Foster, who has since moved out of the state, said she looked into the matter a few years after the law passed and was surprised to see it seemed as if little had changed. She’d been assured by the state that the system was working and the question of owed DNA never came up, she said.

“So it’s all news to me,” Foster said. Perhaps looking at the number of arrests in Alaska, compared with the number of DNA samples collected, she said, might reveal the scope of the problem.

But Department of Public Safety records for the number of DNA samples collected from arrestees each year is incomplete. The available information shows a high of 6,082 samples collected from arrestees in 2009. That number fell by half to 2,830 samples in 2017.

The number of people arrested for crimes against a person each year in Alaska is not readily available, said Barbara Dunham, project attorney for the Alaska Criminal Justice Commission.

But the justice commission does track the number of criminal cases filed each year that involve one or more assault charges, one of the most common types of crimes that would require collection of a DNA sample upon arrest. In some years, including 2017 and 2015, the number of assault cases filed in state court alone exceeds the total number of arrestee samples submitted to the crime lab. (Dunham noted that some offenders are arrested more than once and might already have their DNA on file at the time of their arrest.)

In fact, as the number of reported violent crimes rose in Alaska between 2013 and 2017, the number of DNA samples sent to the lab fell. It is unclear why.

Meantime, a 2016 audit of the state crime lab found that it had not expanded its services or increased the speed of evidence processing despite its move into a new $90 million building in 2012.

The Department of Public Safety would not make the state crime lab’s sexual assault and CODIS program supervisor, Michelle Collins, available for an interview. The department also denied requests for an interview with Randi Breager, a special assistant to the public safety commissioner who prepared the report that said troopers and police in Alaska are rarely swabbing for arrests.

For now, the overall number of missing DNA samples in Alaska, each representing an opportunity to solve past or future criminal cases, remains unknown.

“We do not have that estimate,” Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Megan Peters wrote in an email. The department recently created a working group to address the missing DNA problem, among others, she said.

The group “will be working with multiple departments to collate data to help identify the scope and magnitude of the gaps in collection,” she said.

Number of missing samples remains unknown

In Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, Lovell’s team had no idea how many missing samples they might discover when they began looking at arrests and convictions from 2008 to 2016. A 2016 federal Sexual Assault Kit Initiative grant funded the research, with findings published in 2019. By the time the research was complete, they discovered that more than 15,300 people had been missed or owed DNA.

That’s for just two law enforcement agencies, the Cleveland Police Department and county sheriffs, in one county with a population of about 1.24 million. (Alaska’s statewide population is 732,000.)

As of January 2019, efforts to swab just 10% of the previously missed samples led Ohio authorities to open dozens of new criminal investigations including into sexual assaults, burglaries and homicides.

“Several rapists have been convicted as a direct result” of tracking down the owed DNA, Lovell said.

Williamson, who heads the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative program, said the Bureau of Justice Assistance considers owed DNA to be phase two of the agency’s efforts to clear rape kit backlogs nationwide.

It’s fantastic that states and cities across the country are testing sexual assault kit evidence for the first time, she said. “But if you know the offenders who are responsible are not in CODIS, you are not going to get justice for the victims.”

As of December, law enforcement agencies and local governments in a dozen states have received $10.6 million Sexual Assault Kit Initiative grants for tracking down owed DNA. Alaska isn’t one of them.

The state has not applied for one of the grants, the Department of Public Safety said.

Slipping through the cracks

The remoteness and isolation of Alaska makes this a place of escape. Not always in a good way. Some criminals see Alaska as the end of the road, a place to distance themselves from trouble with the law in other states.

Enforcing the DNA collection laws here, and entering those samples in the federal database, could solve crimes elsewhere, Lovell said.

“For Alaska, or any rural jurisdiction, the mobility of many of the individuals, I think, is what’s particularly scary,” she said. “Many people who live in Alaska are not actually from Alaska.”

The state faces law enforcement challenges unlike anywhere else in the United States. As of 2019, about 1 in 3 communities had no local law enforcement of any kind. State troopers must fly to make arrests in villages across the state that sometimes lack a public safety building or even running water.

Despite the breadth of Alaska’s law on owed DNA, there’s confusion within police departments about who is responsible for collecting it. Some police departments interpreted the law to mean the responsibility to collect DNA upon arrest falls to the state Department of Public Safety, not individual departments. Other smaller departments assumed the Department of Corrections would collect the sample.

People arrested for a qualifying offense also might not be booked into jail and instead appear at an arraignment without submitting a sample.

The Daily News and ProPublica asked police departments across Alaska if their officers obtain DNA swabs upon arrest. Of the 17 that responded, six said they did not.

“I believe that all the DNA collection is done at the correctional center. We only collect when we have a search warrant,” said Soldotna Police Chief Peter Mlynarik. Police in Wrangell and Palmer also said they do not collect DNA at the time of arrest.

In Juneau, Lt. Scott Erickson said that police do not collect DNA at the time of arrest and that he was unaware of the 2007 law.

Asked how the state first discovered the failure to swab some arrestees and inmates, Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Peters said in an email, “This issue has come up a number of times since the statute came into effect through examples and interagency conversations about protocol and policy.”

The one conviction that resulted from Alaska’s three-year, $1.5 million effort to test 568 rape kits collected by state troopers showed the potential of shelved DNA evidence when combined with samples obtained from suspects by police in the field.

In that case, a Kenai jury found one-time Iditarod musher Carmen Perzechino guilty of raping and kidnapping a woman in his van in 2001. Perzechino’s DNA was in the database because he voluntarily gave a sample to Anchorage police in 2012, when he was arrested for attempting to solicit a prostitute. When the Department of Public Safety recently tested the rape kit from an unsolved 2001 attack, it matched his profile.

Retired state trooper Mike Burkmire investigated the crime, phoning Perzechino last year to confront him about the rape for the first time.

Despite his 25 years in Alaska law enforcement, Burkmire said he had never heard about a state law mandating DNA collection at the time of arrest until he began working as a cold case investigator in 2018.

At a national Sexual Assault Kit Initiative conference in Washington, D.C., Burkmire attended a presentation on owed DNA and saw Alaska listed among the states that collect samples when someone is first taken into custody.

While flying across the state to train police departments on DNA collection over the past two years, Burkmire found that most Alaska cops he spoke to didn’t know about the mandate either.

“I have met two police officers that actually knew the law existed,” Burkmire said, “but none that have ever actually collected a sample upon arrest.”

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

But what the state’s news releases didn’t mention is that Perzechino is and will likely remain the only offender arrested as a result of the initial effort to clear the backlog of unsubmitted evidence. After spending three years and $1.5 million to test 568 kits and review the results, Alaska has filed only this one new criminal charge.

The Sexual Assault Kit Initiative grants paid for a prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Jenna Gruenstein, and a cold case investigator to review the DNA results from every test, but that money will run out in 2021. Asked if the project will lead to any more charges filed, Gruenstein said the state concluded the majority could not be prosecuted but “a few cases” are still being reviewed.

Now, Alaska is spending an additional $2.75 million from state coffers to test about 2,400 more rape kits from local police departments in hopes of solving other cases.

This story is the first in a two-part examination by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica of why Alaska’s effort to clear the backlog was not as effective as politicians or the public might have hoped and why it has not identified serial rapists.

In the next story we will examine how Alaska law enforcement may have limited the effectiveness of the rape kits by failing to collect DNA swabs from people arrested or convicted of certain crimes, contrary to state law. Those missing DNA profiles might have matched evidence found in rape kits.

The reasons for the low success rate are complex. Many of the backlogged kits involved cases where DNA evidence did not solve the crime because the identity of the suspect was already known, and the investigation turned on consent rather than who was involved. In even more cases, the sealed rape kits were opened to reveal no usable suspect DNA at all.

Still, some places, such as Cuyahoga County in Ohio, have used DNA to file hundreds of criminal indictments and identified serial rapists like Nathan Ford, whose DNA matched evidence in 19 sexual assault kits. The city of Fayetteville, North Carolina, used $1.1 million in grants to clear a backlog of 688 kits leading to 59 cases “solved and charged,” including some involving serial rapists, Lt. Michael Petti said.

They are the exception. Most states and local governments are reporting modest results, but few have tested so many kits resulting in so few new charges as Alaska.

In Washington state, federal Sexual Assault Kit Initiative grants paid for the testing of 5,096 backlogged rape kits as of Nov. 30, but the state attorney general’s office and a state patrol spokesman could not say how many charges had been filed as a result. A December report to the state’s Legislature notes two cases that led to convictions and three that are awaiting trial.

Wisconsin tested 4,472 kits, leading to the convictions of four people, and several more are awaiting trial. In Iowa, the state Department of Justice received $3 million in federal grants resulting in the testing of 1,535 kits and two new criminal cases. In Connecticut, which received $4.7 million, the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative coordinator provided two examples of arrests made as a result of genealogy testing funded by the grants. The Hawaii Department of the Attorney General tested 1,512 kits resulting in one new conviction.

All told, the federal government has spent more than $223 million on the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative program, known as SAKI, over the past six years. The Sexual Assault Kit National Training and Technical Assistance Program reports some 71,491 kits were sent for testing from September 2015 to June 2020.

In that period, charges were filed in 1,521 new criminal cases, according to the program.

A senior policy adviser at the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Angela Williamson, who manages the SAKI grant program, said it’s unfair to compare the performance of various grantees until the sites have completed their projects.

“We don’t know these numbers yet,” she said. “But testing is only one part of the solution, which is why SAKI supports so many other critical activities such as crime analysis and investigation.”

The delayed testing comes too late for some. In Alaska, some victims contacted long after reporting the attack no longer wanted to disrupt their lives and pursue a criminal trial. In other cases, victims and suspects have died in the years between the report of a sexual assault and the new initiative.

“On a shelf gathering dust”

The federal Bureau of Justice Assistance began the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative in 2015 under President Barack Obama. The money was intended not only to clear existing backlogs but to help state and county leaders come up with ways to avoid future ones.

The issue was gaining nationwide attention as states and cities began to realize that countless sexual assault kits had gone untested over decades. Some had never been submitted by police to crime labs; others were considered a low priority and languished in evidence backlogs.

That year, state Rep. Geran Tarr, an Anchorage Democrat, urged colleagues in the Alaska Legislature to launch a statewide inventory of untested kits. The audit would serve as the first step in identifying the scope of the problem here and would be necessary to obtain grant money for testing.

“There are perhaps violent criminals who are still out on the streets only because these kits haven’t been processed,” said Tarr, who’d heard about the issue of sexual assault kit backlogs from a national advocacy group. Sen. Berta Gardner, also an Anchorage Democrat, proposed a companion bill in the state Senate.

“The evidence that could bring the guilty to justice, and prevent the perpetrator from raping, again sits on a shelf gathering dust,” Gardner wrote in January 2016.

The statewide inventory of untested kits included those collected by state troopers, which were directly in the state’s control, and those kept by local police departments, which were one step removed. Then-Gov. Bill Walker said his administration aimed to clear the trooper backlog by 2017. “It is now a top priority,” he said.

Advocacy groups estimate that hundreds of thousands of such kits had been sitting in evidence lockers, some containing the only key that could solve certain cases: a sample of the rapist’s DNA.

Sometimes the evidence was never submitted for testing because police believed it wouldn’t have made a difference in the pending sex crime case. Some suspects had already pleaded guilty. Others admitted to having a sexual encounter with the victim but claimed it was consensual. In those cases, a DNA sample that confirmed the identity of the suspect wouldn’t change the investigation, police believed at the time, because it hinged on a he-said-she-said question of consent rather than identity.

But many sexual assaults reported in Alaska involve a woman who is unconscious and can’t give consent. In past decades, police might not have sent DNA samples in such cases for testing, thinking it wouldn’t solve the case. (Investigators already knew who the suspect was; he had admitted sexual contact but said it was consensual.) However, testing all such kits could reveal patterns such as a string of identical accusations against a single person. With enough evidence, prosecutors might be able to file charges.

At the time of some older cases, such as the 2001 attack by Perzechino, state troopers had a “standard practice” of declining to test a kit unless a suspect had been identified, according to Department of Public Safety Commissioner Amanda Price. Today, many states, including Alaska, have mandated testing of all kits.

After testing, the state crime lab can add eligible DNA profiles of suspects to a state database where it can be compared to the FBI Combined DNA Index System to see if that person’s DNA was found at another crime scene, in another sexual assault kit or matches a known offender.

Rachel Lovell, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, and colleagues described many reasons for the massive rape kit backlogs in a recent edition of the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin: “Poor evidence tracking, outdated and ineffective investigation practices, scarce resources and personnel, misunderstanding of crime lab case acceptance policies, and lack of knowledge among law enforcement personnel about the value of testing the kits.”

As the backlogs gained national attention, the issue resonated across the country, Lovell said in an interview. People were enraged to learn that evidence of such serious crimes was often bagged, boxed and forgotten on a shelf.

“I think that’s why people are sort of disgusted or sort of shocked at all these rape kits that haven’t been tested,” she said.

Alaska attempted its first statewide inventory by 2016. The initial count showed some 3,600 untested sexual assault kits. That year, the Department of Public Safety received a $1.1 million, three-year SAKI grant to assess the problem.

“We owe it to victims and their families to deliver justice to perpetrators and bring closure to these tragic experiences,” Walker, the governor, said at the time. The next year the state received another grant, for $450,000, to continue the work.

The program quickly expanded across the country. Two grants in Oklahoma. Three in Montana. Four in Oregon.

Today, more than half of Americans live in one of the 71 jurisdictions that have received the federal grants.

When speaking to other legislators about the motivation to count and test shelved rape kits in 2015, Tarr said she’d come to a realization that violent offenders might be roaming Alaska towns purely because the evidence against them had been forgotten.

“Maybe even just one crime could be solved if we had this information in a more timely fashion,” she said.

Five years later, that’s precisely what happened.

Most kits contained no suspect DNA

In Alaska, the first round of testing focused on about 700 kits collected by state troopers; a fraction of the untested kits identified statewide. That initial number quickly shrank as investigators identified, for example, some that had been previously tested, were too damaged to test or had been mislabeled.

Ultimately, 568 trooper kits were sent to a private lab in Virginia to be unsealed and tested. By spring 2019, the testing was complete.

The lab found that as was the case in other states, nearly two-thirds of the previously unsubmitted rape kits in Alaska contained no DNA samples from anyone other than the victim.

From there, the number of kits that could unlock unsolved cases grew even smaller, as investigators began to pore over the DNA results arriving in monthly batches from the lab. Of the 199 kits that had DNA from someone other than the victim — meaning a potential suspect — 99 were set aside. Either the DNA belonged to someone other than the rape suspect, such as a partner, the DNA sample was of poor quality or degraded and couldn’t be matched to a single person, or authorities determined the case didn’t meet the statutory definition of sexual assault.

Now the 568 kits were down to about 100 that might be used to solve a cold case. Of those, 59 of the DNA samples matched a known person in law enforcement databases.

The cold case investigator, retired trooper Mike Burkmire, and prosecutor Gruenstein huddled over the 59 cases to determine if they could make new arrests. Most of the DNA “hits” confirmed the identity of a person who was already a named suspect in the case rather than revealing a previously unknown suspect.

Burkmire investigated the cases that remained and forwarded four for prosecution, according to a Department of Public Safety report. The Department of Law declined three of the cases, including one in which the suspect was deceased and two in which the survivors did not want to move forward with a trial.

Gruenstein, the prosecutor, said deference to victims played a role in the low number of charges filed in Alaska and was based on the recommendations of survivor advocates. “While we might not have charged certain cases because of a victim’s wishes, it is possible that in other states, those cases would have been charged, resulting in higher numbers of charged cases.”

The remaining case resulted in the arrest of Perzechino, whom Sattler said she wouldn’t have recognized as her rapist because so many years had passed. Had it not been for the new test of her old kit, the case never would have been solved.

With the testing of trooper kits well underway as a pilot project, the Legislature in 2018 agreed to spend state money to test about 2,400 additional kits held by police departments around Alaska.

It is unclear what will happen if Alaska’s expanded testing uncovers new leads. The state funding does not include money for a cold case investigator, meaning any new leads will compete for attention from detectives focused on other duties.

That’s what happened in Akron, Ohio, years ago. The DNA results from 1,200 previously untested kits started coming back to the police department in 2015, said Lt. David Whiddon, but the department had a shortage of detectives. There was no one to consistently follow up on the new leads.

Akron obtained two SAKI grants beginning in 2018 to fund police work and prosecutions. As of this month, the department had arrested nine suspects known to have attacked 14 victims, plus it filed “John Doe” warrants against an additional 15 people who could be arrested if the identity of the person matching the DNA pops up in the federal database.

Walker, the former governor who sought the first inventory of untested kits in Alaska, said in a recent phone interview that you can’t judge the testing project by the numbers alone.

Alaska has the highest rate of reported sexual assault in the country. As governor, Walker said, he spoke to sexual assault survivors who saw no point in reporting they had been attacked because they didn’t think the justice system would take them seriously.

Testing every sexual assault kit sends a message that every report matters, he said, and no evidence will be ignored.

“Anytime there’s any conviction of someone who has committed that heinous crime, it’s worth it,” said Walker, an independent who dropped his reelection bid in 2018.

Anna Sattler isn’t so sure. She’s grateful for the SAKI program and to the cold case investigator and prosecutor who bulldogged her 2001 case to a conviction. But following the verdict she assumed other trials would soon follow.

“It can’t be one out of 568 that went to court and found someone guilty. Those aren’t good numbers. That doesn’t say anything,” she said.

Next: The Missing Evidence

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

Former Bethel elementary school principal Christopher Carmichael, arrested in December 2019 by the FBI’s Child Exploitation Task Force, has pleaded guilty to federal charges of attempted coercion and enticement of a minor. The plea agreement was entered into court record Nov. 6.

A federal grand jury had previously indicted Carmichael, former principal at Gladys Jung Elementary School, on three other charges, including a second count of attempted coercion of a minor, one count of possession of child pornography and one count of attempted transfer of obscene material to a minor. Those three charges will be dropped in the plea deal. Court records stated that Carmichael pleaded guilty to knowingly attempting to persuade, induce, entice or coerce a minor to engage in sexual activity.

In June 2019, Bethel Police received information that a 14-year-old girl claimed that Carmichael had sexually molested her. Police investigated by posing as that girl’s 13-year-old cousin and messaging Carmichael online. According to a police affidavit, the former principal sent sexually explicit messages and asked to meet up in Anchorage with what he believed to be a 13-year-old girl but was actually a member of the police.

The maximum penalty for the charges Carmichael is pleading guilty to includes no less than 10 years and up to life in prison and a fine of $250,000. He will also have to register as a sex offender.

The state has separately charged Carmichael for two counts of sexual abuse of a minor. Those charges are still moving their way through court, and Carmichael’s next hearing is scheduled for Dec. 17, 2020.

Attorneys for four girls have also filed lawsuits against the Lower Kuskokwim School District, claiming that LKSD failed to protect them from sexual abuse at Carmichael’s hands. Jury trials for those lawsuits are scheduled for the fall of 2021.

Local entities are stepping up financially to help survivors of sexual assault in Nome. Kawerak Inc., Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation and Norton Sound Health Corporation are all pitching in to pay for testing of Nome’s backlogged sexual assault kits. Their donations amount to $38,295.

Kawerak’s President and CEO Melanie Bahnke says the tribal consortium has made public safety a priority. In late July, Bahnke sat down with the Nome police chief and city manager to learn how Kawerak could help.

“One of the things they [Nome police and the city] shared is that they didn’t have adequate resources and also that the state lab is backlogged,” Bahnke said. “After they submitted all of the sexual assault kits, the anticipated wait time is a year. That’s just unacceptable.”

The Nome Police Department sends all of their sexual assault kits to the state crime lab for processing — and so does everyone else, including the Alaska State Troopers and other municipal police departments across the state. Right now, according to Nome police evidence custodian Paul Kosto, it’s taking kits about a year to be processed in the state lab. Kosto says the donated funding will allow Nome’s unprocessed sexual assault kits to get tested at a private laboratory.

“A big part is money,” Kosto said. “It costs a lot of money to get kits sent to the front of the queue and to pay an outside entity to perform the test.”

That means around a dozen kits will tested by BODE Laboratories in Virginia. Instead of taking a year for processing, Kosto says those kits will likely be done in 60 days or less.

“Then the investigators and the District Attorney’s office can determine where they’re going to go forward on those kits,” Kosto said.

More sexual assaults were reported to Nome police by mid-September this year than all of last year — 98 so far in 2020 compared to 88 reported in 2019.

Kawerak’s Melanie Bahnke says it’s unacceptable for any of those survivors to be waiting a year for their sexual assault kit. She wants to remain focused on building a partnership with the City of Nome and local law enforcement.

“We’ve got some bigger hurdles ahead of us, and Kawerak will keep advocating for justice for victims of all kinds of abuse,” Bahnke said.

Bahnke says that includes advocating for resources at the state level so there won’t be a backlog of sexual assault kits to begin with.