Public Safety

Content warning: The following story contains references to violence and sexual assault. 

Date rape drugging, or roofying, is the use of any sedative, usually mixed with alcohol, to incapacitate a victim and facilitate a sexual assault. While anecdotal stories of suspected roofying circulate around Alaska, cases and culprits are difficult to confirm.

Alaska Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robert Lawrence said that’s partially due to the nature of the crime.

“Many of these medications actually their mechanism, tragically, is memory loss,” he said. “One of your neighbors will have been assaulted, and know that an assault has occurred, but have no memory of how or when or what led up to it, just because of the way that the substance itself works. So that’s the reality of the situation that we’re in,” he said.

Substances can vary and are metabolized quickly in the body. GHB or Rhohyprol, most commonly identified as date rape drugs, are tasteless and odorless. They can cause intense inebriation, dizziness, memory lapses and pain, especially when mixed with alcohol, and are used to facilitate sexual assault.

The state does not track reports of suspected drugging or a drug facilitated sexual assault, according to officials with the Alaska Department of Public Safety and Department of Health. Lawrence explained that’s due to several reasons, but does not reflect the seriousness of the issue.

“We’re talking about sexual assault in Alaska, which is a very serious problem across the whole state. And then when you add to that the element of people using a sedating or incapacitating drug in order to make it more likely that someone could be assaulted, it becomes even a more serious issue,” he said.

He said the main reason the state does not track drug facilitated sexual assault is that data collection is variable. He said incidents are both medical and legal, so information can be reported to different agencies. State agencies are limited by whether a victim decides to report to authorities and when, and whether substances are detected in their systems. “Sometimes the medical record will include that, and sometimes not. And so the absence of that data doesn’t mean that there’s not still a problem,” he said.

Homer Police Department Lieutenant Ryan Browning says the department receives calls from the community periodically to report suspected roofying.

He said they received several calls in September, and one before Halloween weekend.

“Nothing concrete…and they were all very well after the fact,” Browning said. “And one of them was almost a week later, the other one was several days (later). People reporting that they suspected they were drugged at a bar, just based on how they woke up the next morning… typically it’s, ‘I don’t remember. I was at a bar. I was drunk, and I woke up feeling like I got hit by a truck.'”

When officers notice an uptick, the department will post an alert on the Homer Police Department’s Facebook page. He urged the public to remain aware, look out for friends, take note of suspicious individuals and any unwanted or inappropriate attention, and make a report if necessary.

“I’m a big proponent of ‘you are your first responder,’ right, and keeping yourself protected and safe as much as you can, and looking for signs and things like that when we’re out doing things and having fun,” he said.

Browning said none of the recent calls resulted in a reported sexual assault in Homer.

Criminal penalties can vary, Browning said, from criminal mischief charges of intending injury or tampering with food or beverages in an attempt to injure which are felonies. Misconduct involving a controlled substance like GHB is also a felony.

Sexual violence widespread in Alaska

Sexual violence is widely prevalent in Alaska. According to the 2020 Alaska Victimization Survey, the most recent data for Alaska, roughly 58% of Alaskan women had experienced intimate partner violence, sexual violence or both in their lifetime.

Current data is limited, but Alaska Native women experience the highest rates of violence and victimization. According to the Indian Law Resource Center, Alaska Native women have reported rates of domestic violence ten times higher than the rest of the United States.

In 2024, the rate of rape in Alaska was over three times the national average, according to available data by the FBI. That year, the FBI recorded 908 instances of rape statewide, or 122.5 per 100,000 people, compared to 37.3 per 100,000 people in the United States.

Only about one third of sexual assaults nationally are reported to law enforcement, according to an analysis by RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization. That’s due to a variety of reasons, including a fear of retaliation, belief it was a personal matter, or that police would not or could not do anything to help.

Women are disproportionately harmed by sexual violence, but men and LGBTQ+ populations are assault survivors as well. Most assaults, an estimated 60%, are perpetrated by someone known to the victim, according to RAINN, and 30% by a stranger.

Advocates offer resources and support, urge public awareness

Leslie Scroggin is an advocate and shelter manager at South Peninsula Haven House, a domestic violence shelter in Homer, and a member of the regional Sexual Assault Response Team.

“People typically, consistently seem to feel a sense of guilt over it,” she said. “I’ve heard people say things like it was careless of them to go out after work and to go drinking, or that they should have known better, or that type of thing. And it’s also a pretty disheartening experience, because it’s something that is just completely beyond their control… they don’t even have any sort of capacity to have any control over it.”

Scroggin said while public awareness is important, the larger issue is interrupting and addressing predatory behavior and the crisis of violence against mostly women.

“It’s the individuals that are causing harm that really need to be addressed, and they’re the ones that should be taking responsibility,” she said. “And obviously, we should always do whatever we can to protect ourselves. But that shouldn’t be something that we’re just constantly doing all the time.”

Scroggin said she has seen a rise in anecdotal reports of roofying in the summer months with increased tourism, but every situation is unique. She said people should seek medical care if they need it, and can make a report anonymously.

“The forensic nurse can do a sexual assault kit anonymously, and basically that just looks like collecting evidence and then putting it into a kit that is assigned a case number, but no one’s name will be attached to it,” she said. “So then they basically will just have that evidence there, and if the person who it got collected on should decide, you know, in three months, or even a couple of years that they would like to report then, then that will be available to them.”

Scroggin said the sooner a victim completes a sexual assault kit after an incident the better, but they have up to a week.

In Valdez, Tina Russell is a direct services coordinator with Advocates for Victims of Violence, Inc. a non-profit advocacy group and domestic violence shelter serving Valdez and the Copper River Basin region. She said she also notices an uptick in suspected date rape drugging in the summer months with more tourism and the fishing season, but has not seen any confirmed cases.

She says alcohol-related cases are more typical. “People under the influence of alcohol in a high amount, and then being taken advantage of to where they felt like they really didn’t give consent. And so they’ll come and talk to us about it, and or the hospital will call,” she said.

Russell said their organization is part of an unofficial sexual assault response team at the hospital in Valdez, and advocates, nurses and the local police department have training to respond and provide support to survivors, whether they choose to make an official report or not. “There’s so many different reasons that people don’t report,” she said. “You know, all of our statistics are so under-reported.”

Lawrence, as the chief medical officer, said Alaskans should know the risk, and look out for each other, both to prevent harm and to support people going through these experiences.

“All of us can be involved in the lives of people in a way that prevents individuals from being alone,” he said.

“All of us can be there as a neighbor or for someone who has suffered an assault,” he said. “I think that’s one of the most important things for people to have when they’ve suffered rape or sexual assault, is for there to be a caring adult who is there to walk with them through the process. That’s one of the most protective factors afterwards.”

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, resources are available: 

• STAR Alaska Crisis Line: Confidential 24/7 (800) 478-8999
• AWAIC Alaska Crisis Line: (907) 272-0100
• Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN): Confidential 24/7 (800)-656-4673.
• Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault’s list of shelters
• AWARE’s list of resources
• Legal help through Alaska Legal Services Corp.

The Alaska Supreme Court has ordered disgraced former U.S. District Court Judge Joshua Kindred to be disbarred, meaning he is no longer allowed to practice law in Alaska.

In an order published Friday, the three state Supreme Court justices deciding the case agreed with the Alaska Bar Association that Kindred – who resigned in 2024 from a lifetime appointment as a federal judge – should lose his license to practice law in Alaska. Two justices recused themselves.

Kindred did not participate in the formal proceedings, which began when the Bar Association filed a petition for disbarment in mid-September, according to the order and attached documents.

“I think the order itself, it speaks for itself,” said Phil Shanahan, counsel for the Bar Association. “Mr. Kindred didn’t participate, which probably made it a little bit faster than it would have been had a lawyer participated in the process.”

Mirroring a report from the federal 9th Circuit Judicial Council released days after Kindred’s resignation, the 67-page Alaska Supreme Court order includes information about Kindred’s inappropriate, sexualized relationships with two federal prosecutors, including a woman who had served as one of his law clerks. Other allegations included that Kindred created a hostile, sexualized work environment and that he lied to investigators about the relationships, which, in the case of one federal prosecutor, involved her sending him nude photos.

Kindred’s resignation and the unfolding scandal caused the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Alaska, where the two prosecutors worked, to review dozens of cases for potential conflicts of interest. At least two defendants have won new trials, after their attorneys argued inappropriate relationships among federal prosecutors and the judge resulted in their clients getting unfair treatment.

On a Sunday morning last month, James Taq’ac Amik was huddled on a small bridge with his girlfriend. At 4 a.m., they had scrambled into an 18-foot aluminum motor boat, fleeing floodwaters from a massive storm surge that inundated Kipnuk, a village of 700 in the heart of western Alaska’s sprawling Kuskokwim River delta.

“I couldn’t make it up. I tried, but the wind was too strong to try and go by boat, so we ended up staying on the bridge for five hours,” Amik said. Things only grew more dramatic. “The houses started drifting away around 5:30 a.m.,” Amik said. “There was still lights in them; there was people in them.”

When they set out, the couple were heading to Kipnuk’s public school, the largest building in the Alaska Native Yup’ik village. At least that building, they hoped at the time, would be secure.

The storm that hit Alaska’s west coast in mid-October was the remnants of Typhoon Halong, which picked up momentum in a warmer-than-normal Pacific Ocean. After the wind died down and the floodwaters receded, the village lay in ruins. But while the school still stood relatively unscathed on its steel pilings more than 20 feet above the muck and wreckage, there were other problems inside. District staff had been working on much-needed upgrades to its main generator. Then the school’s backup generator sputtered. Everyone in the community, including Amik and his girlfriend, stayed for two days until local leaders decided the storm had done too much damage and organized a mass evacuation.

When disaster strikes, public school buildings are integral as safe havens in hundreds of predominantly Indigenous villages scattered across Alaska’s vast landscape. In many remote communities, schools are some of the only buildings with flush toilets and their own generators. Schools are often the only buildings that stand on pilings — important amid the rising waters of climate change — and also the only buildings large enough to house dozens, if not hundreds, of people for days at a time.

“It is a known fact that if you need to evacuate, you evacuate to the elementary school,” said Alaska state Sen. Löki Tobin, a Democrat and chair of the Senate Education Committee, who grew up in Nome but now represents Anchorage.

“Those are lifeboats,” said Alaska’s emergency management director, Bryan Fisher. “They’re the last place of refuge.”

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican and former educator, has declared more than a dozen disasters since August 2024, and in at least half of those cases, public schools were used as emergency shelters. The state reported damage in 52 communities in October, and the impacts forced hundreds of residents to sleep in gymnasiums and on classroom floors in rural public schools. Since 1998, Alaska has seen more than 140 state-declared disasters, and dozens of those required schools to function as shelters.

But Alaska’s rural schools have been neglected for decades. Earlier this year, ProPublica, KYUK Public Media, and NPR documented a health and safety crisis inside many rural school buildings across Alaska. In some cases, the buildings that function as safe havens in times of emergency are becoming emergencies themselves.

The state is required by law to fund construction and maintenance projects in rural school districts because they serve unincorporated communities where there is no tax revenue to help fund education. In the last 28 years, Alaska’s rural school districts have made close to 1,800 requests to the state for money to maintain and repair deteriorating schools, but only 14% of those requests have been approved. And as the backlog of major maintenance projects continues to grow, the state budget has been shrinking.

“Just the maintenance that goes in every day to keep up a building, that’s really where the flaw is,” said Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop. For years, her department has struggled to meet the growing need for dollars to maintain school facilities, including more than 60 owned by the state. “The crux of the situation,” she said during an interview in Juneau last year, is that “we get to an emergency because we didn’t take care of it.”

The main generator that provides power to the school in Kipnuk was not working before hundreds of residents fled there during ex-typhoon Halong. Lower Kuskokwim School District Superintendent Andrew “Hannibal” Anderson said the generator “was working well enough to provide what it needed for the school.” But it was quickly overwhelmed by the sudden increase in demand for power once the school became Kipnuk’s primary emergency shelter. A smaller backup generator also couldn’t meet that demand to charge cellphones and keep the building heated after the community’s residents piled in.

The school district waited 14 years for the state to approve funding to do a major renovation in 2015, but it has not asked for funding since then. Every year, the applications school districts submit for construction and maintenance funds are ranked. Data analysis and interviews with superintendents across the state indicate that submitting an application that ranks high enough to win funding is cumbersome, and they feel pressure to include professional inspections and surveys, which can be expensive. Anderson explained that although the generator required maintenance, he believed Kipnuk’s needs wouldn’t be considered urgent enough to receive funding. “Kipnuk is a relatively new school,” he said.

In Kotlik, a village of just over 650 residents almost 220 miles north of Kipnuk, 70 people spent two nights at the school. “We have a church and a community building, but those are seldom used in evacuations,” explained Principal Cassius Brown. “That’s because the school is situated higher and it’s not as close to the river.”

Since 2018, the Lower Yukon School District has made annual requests ranging from $2 million to more than $5 million to the state’s education department to make extensive repairs to the school in Kotlik and another in a nearby village. That work remains unfunded.

In Chevak, where about 950 Alaska Native Cup’ik people live less than a dozen miles from the Bering Sea coast, school Principal Lillian Olson said 65 people spent a few nights on the gymnasium floor. “Our community is kind of dependent on the school for shelter,” Olson said. “One time, two years ago, we had an electric outage in one part of town that lasted for like a week, and because the houses didn’t have electricity and no heat, we housed them.”

Olson said a test of the building’s fire sprinklers failed in September. In a phone call last spring, Kashunamiut School District Superintendent Jeanne Campbell described a host of problems related to the Chevak school’s boiler and broken water pipes that impacted the fire sprinkler system. “And that’s just inside the building,” Campbell said.

In 2024, the Kashunamiut School District made its first request to the state’s education department since 2001, asking for $32 million to update and renovate the school. The proposal was one among 114 for fiscal year 2025. The state allocated enough money for only 17 of those projects. Work at the Chevak school was not one of them.

Just over a dozen miles west, in Hooper Bay, Mayor Charlene Nukusuk said between 50 and 60 people sheltered for two nights in that community’s public school. The village’s location makes it extremely vulnerable. Over the last few decades, fall coastal storms have devoured several rows of sand dunes that used to protect the community of 1,375 people. Now, the black and frigid Bering Sea laps at the beach only a few hundred feet from the far corner of the local airport runway. Nukusuk said that the school is one of the safest buildings.

Hooper Bay’s school was rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire in 2006. Since then, the district has made 29 funding requests totaling more than $8.4 million in needed repairs to the state for a range of projects on the school including roofing, emergency lighting, and siding. In 2024, the district received money for one of those — just under $2.3 million for “exterior repairs,” according to state data. The superintendent did not respond to questions about specific needs in Hooper Bay.

Alaska’s emergency management division does not have formal agreements with the state’s education department designating schools as emergency shelters, and neither agency has funding to help maintain schools specifically as emergency shelters. However, a division spokesperson said there are some state grants that schools could access for emergency preparedness.

“Schools are built for educational purposes — other uses are incidental or secondary to design,” education department spokesperson Bryan Zadalis wrote in an email. He said no one from the education department visits schools “to ascertain whether a facility is in condition to serve as an emergency shelter.”

“I don’t know if people necessarily correlated together that if you’re going to use schools as multipurpose facilities, that you also have to maintain them for those purposes,” said Tobin, the state senator. “They’re not just institutions of learning. They’re also institutions of after-school activities, of community gatherings, and of evacuation facilities and disaster preparedness support infrastructure,” she said.

@georgebrightsrThis shows that no matter what hardship this village is going through they have a gathering of praise to our Lord Jesus♬ original sound – George

In February 2024, Tobin, who also sits on the state senate’s Military and Veterans Affairs finance subcommittee, put the question of funding schools for emergencies to Craig Christenson, deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, during a budget meeting.

Alaska’s emergency management division falls under Christenson’s department. “From my understanding,” Tobin said to him, “if the school wasn’t available in some of these very small, rural, remote areas, we would be paying to evacuate people, versus using an asset that we have already put resources into but have already failed to maintain. Is that accurate?”

“I can’t comment on failing to maintain them,” Christenson responded. “Our department does not maintain schools.” (The deputy commissioner declined to comment further on last year’s meeting.)

“But you do utilize them?” Tobin asked.

“We do,” Christenson said.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

Emily Schwing reported this story while participating in the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship. She also received support from the Center’s Fund for Reporting on Child Well-being and its Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.

Every morning, Alaska’s court system publishes an updated list of new civil lawsuits filed across the state during the past week.

And every morning, that list is dominated by debt collection cases, newly filed by credit card companies, debt collection firms or businesses seeking repayment. On Tuesday, of the 115 listed cases, 84 were for debt collections.

In the first nine months of 2022, the court system saw 1,869 debt collection cases filed. Every year since then, the number has risen. Through the first nine months of this year, there were 3,447, almost double the figure filed in 2022.

“It’s pretty wild, the rise of them,” said attorney Stacey Stone, who practices in Alaska and is familiar with the issue.

Alaska isn’t alone in the upward trend — nationally, the number of collection lawsuits is rising after an ebb during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency.

January Advisors, a national data consulting firm that noted the rising trend in August, concluded that multiple factors may be driving it.

During the COVID-19 emergency, many Americans received financial aid that helped them pay down debt and build savings. Those programs have now ended, and American consumer debt is now at record highs, according to figures published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The number of people who are behind on their credit card payments is also on the rise, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported earlier this year, and the number of car repossessions is rising.

Automated software programs also are making it easier for companies to more easily file large numbers of debt collection cases.

In June, the National Center on State Courts concluded that easier access to generative AI software is likely to increase filings in contract cases, like debt collections.

Typically, a credit card company or medical provider will try first to get payment on an overdue bill directly. But if a bill still goes unpaid, many companies will deem the debt uncollectable. At that point, they sell the rights to the debt to a collections company.

The sale means the company with the unpaid bill will get at least some money, and then it becomes the collections company’s job to try to recoup the debt and earn money for itself.

Court filings in Alaska and elsewhere indicate that debt collection companies are filing more cases in an attempt to collect on the unpaid debts they’ve bought.

Two researchers with The Pew Charitable Trusts, in a September analysis, said that can have significant consequences for regular people.

People who are sued for consumer or medical debt rarely hire attorneys, they noted, and in many cases, people may not even be aware that they are being sued.

The Debt Collection Lab — a research group that includes Princeton University — found that in Oregon, private collection agencies filed the bulk of lawsuits on behalf of credit card companies, health care providers and utilities.

Only four percent of debt defendants responded to the cases filed against them, and as a result, Oregon courts awarded default judgments in favor of the debt collectors in almost seven of 10 debt cases filed between 2017 and 2023.

Data on the result of Alaska cases was not immediately available, but a preliminary examination of court dockets and filing patterns by the Alaska Beacon shows that the trends in Alaska are similar to those in other states.

A frequent filer in Alaska courts, a national debt-buying company called LVNV Funding, increased its filings by 350% in a handful of states between 2019 and 2024, January Advisors found.

In Connecticut, the top 10 most frequent filers in debt cases accounted for more than 80% of all debt cases filed in that state last year, January Advisors found, indicating that the most frequent filers are stepping up their aggressiveness.

“More people are defaulting on their debt right now because people are living paycheck to paycheck for various reasons, so I think you do have an organic process happening, but also there’s an aggressive process happening that’s uncharacteristic,” Stone said.

In Alaska, even a state representative has faced a debt-collection lawsuit whose details appear typical of the kinds of cases being filed here.

On Oct. 27, a debt collection firm known as Jefferson Capital Systems filed suit in Anchorage District Court against Rep. Jamie Allard, R-Eagle River.

According to the complaint, Allard took out a loan from Celtic Bank in 2023 and didn’t fully repay it. Celtic Bank subsequently transferred the debt — just $1,075 — to Jefferson Capital, which filed the lawsuit.

The attorney who filed the lawsuit didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Allard didn’t know about the suit until she was contacted by the Alaska Beacon, which was already writing this article.

“Oh my God; I had no idea what this was about,” she said.

Stone is Allard’s attorney and said cases like these seem to come out of left field. She said they tend to be filed in bulk, and as a result, they may be inaccurate, especially when a case is filed by a third-party firm that has purchased debt from another source.

Allard has an attorney; most Alaskans named as defendants in a debt-collection case don’t have that, according to a review of online court records.

Unlike in criminal cases, the state is not required to assign someone an attorney.

In most instances, that leaves the defendant to represent themselves or to seek help from a group like the Alaska Legal Services Corporation, a nonprofit that provides legal help to many Alaskans in civil lawsuits.

Maggie Humm, the corporation’s director, said it doesn’t have enough funding to take on every request for help that it receives, but it is seeing a surge in the number of requests for help on debt collection cases.

From 2022 through 2024, “there was a 61% increase in applications for all consumer protection matters,” which includes debt collections, said Humm.

Though the group hasn’t closed out this year, Humm said the number of people seeking help is about the same as last year.

If an Alaskan doesn’t respond to a debt collection lawsuit and a court issues a default judgment on behalf of a debt collection agency, a judge could order the garnishment of part of their income.

“Here in Alaska, we know that collectors file more cases because we have the Permanent Fund dividend … and they can garnish a percentage of it if they get a default judgment,” Humm said.

A court order also might allow a debt collector to go after someone’s checking account, other assets or — in the case of a member of the military — their military pay.

Humm said Alaskans who receive a legal complaint for debt collection should do their best to respond. She suggested they ask for help from the corporation, or get other help via online resources.

In September, the New York Times analyzed the surge of debt collection lawsuits and noted that part of the reason for the surge is that people don’t bother to defend themselves in court.

A court defense may make someone less attractive as a target, the Times found, and if more people defended themselves, debt collectors might begin seeing lawsuits as an unprofitable way to do business.

The five members of Alaska’s highest court heard arguments last Thursday in a long-running dispute between the operators of a Christian camp and the Fairbanks North Star Borough about whether or not the camp qualifies for an exemption from local property taxes.

Though the dispute involves only a single camp in Fairbanks, the justices’ ruling could redraw the limits that decide when religious groups’ operations qualify for tax exemptions in Alaska.

In court, an attorney representing the borough and one representing the camp’s operator, Victory Ministries of Alaska, said the key question is whether Camp Li-Wa was used exclusively for charitable purposes during 2021.

The borough and Victory Ministries disagree on other years’ taxes, but only one dispute was escalated to the Supreme Court.

The borough contends that because Victory Ministries operates a Christian Bible camp for only two months during the year, it should not be able to claim tax-exempt status for the remaining 10 months of the year, or on buildings not used by the camp.

In arguing its case, the borough submitted advertising material published by Victory Ministries that described the camp as “currently one of the finest retreat locations in the Interior of Alaska” and said it was advertised for vacations, recreation and other profitable purposes, not just charity.

The borough also submitted financial documents obtained from Camp Li-Wa, suggesting that the camp was used more for commercial, profitable purposes than charitable ones.

Victory Ministries fought back, saying that the camp operates at a deficit, and — among other arguments — that paying users are not required to be nonprofit groups, and that charity can involve self-care and pleasure.

In 2024, a Fairbanks Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the borough, causing the defendants to appeal to the Supreme Court.

In part, the operators of Camp Li-Wa argue that the borough and superior court “erred by improperly limiting what constitutes ‘charitable activity’ in violation of the state constitutional protections.”

Janella Kamai, attorney for Victory Ministries of Alaska, told the justices that while Camp Li-Wa may offer programs like horseback riding for a fee, “The fun activities, it’s just a sideline. The purpose is to provide the churches, the schools, with a place for them to host their own spiritual retreats and community events.”

She said the camp’s mission applies even if someone who isn’t religious comes to the camp. “You have to understand that Victory operates to both evangelize and proselytize. Evangelism means they’re going to bring people onto the campus so that they can introduce them to the concepts of Christian camping, introduce them to Camp Li-Wa, so if they want to know more, they can,” Kamai said.

In many cases, the camp is being used as a religious retreat, she said.

Ehren Lohse, the attorney representing the Fairbanks North Star Borough, said that under the borough’s definitions, a retreat isn’t a charitable activity.

“A retreat, by definition, is time away from your other work. So they may be doing charitable and religious work at their normal places,” he said of camp users, “but when they’re having a retreat, that can happen anywhere.”

Justice Dario Borghesan said that raises a problem for the justices: There’s no way to know whether camp users were engaging in religious activity or taking a break.

“I’m just not sure how ultimately this gets resolved,” he said.

The court took the case under consideration at the end of Thursday’s hearing and will issue a written order at a future date.

Five firefighter apprentices in Juneau received their pins on Saturday, meaning they formally joined the force. The five new recruits are officially EMTs and are welcomed by an understaffed department. 

Capital City Fire Rescue Chief Rich Etheridge led the ceremony at the Douglas Public Library, next door to the fire station. 

“This is the future of the fire service,” he said. “These are the folks that are going to replace the ones that have been here for a while. ”

This program is the first of its kind in Juneau. Etheridge said the 10-month training has two necessary credentials built into it, so the department can recruit people before they are certified. 

“We decided that we’ll bring them on,” he said. “We’ll give them all that training. So we look for people with the interpersonal skills and natural aptitude and some leadership and teamwork, and then we start building the rescue skills from that.”

Saturday’s ceremony marks the apprentices finishing their EMT certifications. That allows them to respond to emergencies as EMTs, offering more advanced medical care, instead of just observing those parts of the job.

Sarah Kuhnell is one of the newly certified apprentices and she said her time in the program has taught her that she is resilient.

“And now that I have that certification, and people are putting a little bit more trust in me, I’m able to do more things and kind of show what I know,” she said. “And it’s really fun and exciting to, like, put my skills to the test.”

She said sheʼs excited to have the certification under her belt, so she can be of more service to the department.

The apprentices will complete their Firefighter 1 certifications and graduate from the program in May.