Public Safety

Alaska State Troopers are asking Kenai residents to be on high alert after a bear attack left a jogger seriously injured on Tuesday morning.

The attack occurred in a neighborhood near the intersection of Chinook Drive, just west of the Kenai Spur Highway. According to a trooper dispatch, a 36-year-old woman was attacked near her driveway at around 5:45 a.m. She was later found by a neighbor and flown to an Anchorage hospital.

Officials with the Kenai Police Department and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game assisted troopers in searching for the bear. Troopers say the bear has not yet been found, and will continue to search the area. It is unclear what type of bear caused the attack.

Troopers say residents should be cautious when going outdoors. They recommend supervising pets and children, and securing attractants like trash or food. If you see a bear, troopers say keep a safe distance and do not approach it.

A federal trial began Monday in Anchorage for a class-action lawsuit against the Alaska Office of Children’s Services on behalf of all kids in OCS custody.

Marcia Lowry, an attorney and director of a national nonprofit advocating for foster reforms, said the organization is helping with this lawsuit because Alaska’s foster system has some of the worst outcomes in the country.

“They have a very, very high maltreatment rate,” Lowry said. “They do not have the kids visited every month. That’s a federal requirement children have to be visited, because how else can you know whether a child is safe when you put a child in a foster home?”

The complaint alleges OCS caseworkers have too many cases to be able to adequately serve families and that the agency has failed to place Alaska Native foster children in culturally appropriate placements, violating the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Former foster youth testified Monday that under OCS care, they moved placements frequently, missed school because of instability and experienced abuse and assault when they were placed in foster homes and hotels.

OCS director Kim Guay also took the stand Monday. She said all OCS employees are working to make positive changes in the system and that the agency has taken steps to increase recruitment and improve training.

Margaret Paton-Walsh, assistant attorney general for the state, is defending OCS in the trial. She said running the foster care system in Alaska is challenging.

“It’s especially hard in Alaska because of the size and the remoteness of so many of the communities, and we are doing the best that we can to manage the challenges that we have,” Paton-Walsh said. “And there are definitely challenges. Nobody is denying that. And I think critically in this context, we have a very, very severe caseworker shortage.”

Guay also repeatedly pointed out on the stand that OCS is only one piece of the child welfare system.

The trial is expected to take three weeks.

The trial against a former Juneau chiropractor accused of assaulting a dozen patients under the guise of medical care has ended, and jurors are set to begin deliberation.

The former patients that accuse Jeffrey Fultz of assault say the incidents took place during medical appointments between 2014 and 2020 while he was employed at Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium in Juneau. 

The state prosecutors and Fultz’s defense attorneys gave their closing arguments Friday. It was their last chance to show what all the testimony was intended to prove — or disprove – and to sway the jurors to their side. 

State prosecutors argued that Fultz abused his patients’ trust and sexually assaulted them in a clinical setting. Fultz’s defense said that he provided appropriate medical care to those patients.

Prosecutor Krystyn Tendy told the jury that from the state’s perspective, the only verdict that is consistent with the evidence is guilty on all counts.

“He believed that he could count on their silence. He believed he could stay in control,” Tendy said. “But he was wrong. They didn’t stay silent. He is no longer in control. You are in control.”

Tendy said that Fultz took advantage of the power dynamic between doctors and patients. She pointed to witness testimony about the challenges of seeking care, and the pain the women sought treatment for. 

“That is a relationship that is supposed to be based on trust that is supposed to be based on the principle of do no harm,” she said. “They are literally putting themselves in his hands.” 

The prosecutor said all witnesses — the ones they called and the ones the defense called — showed that Fultz didn’t follow legitimate medical practices. 

“This wasn’t about treatment,” Tendy said. “This was about what the defendant wanted to do and what he did.”

Defense attorney James Christie reminded jurors of Fultz’s education and expertise as a medical provider, and how some of the women accusing him also reported relief from his treatments. He said the questions of informed consent and how exposed the women’s bodies were during treatment come secondary to the primary question. 

“Focus on the question,” he said. “Was the treatment recognized, legitimate, and lawful?”

Christie spent some time reminding the jurors of their role, and what it means to deliver a not guilty verdict.

“The first thing I’ll tell you is that criminal cases are not about choosing sides,” he said. “Voting not guilty doesn’t mean you are for Dr. Fultz. It doesn’t mean you are against the state, it doesn’t mean you are against the 12 women. It means the state did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

He told the jury to put aside their feelings about victims of sexual assault. He said that criminal trials must come down to the state’s burden to prove Fultz’s guilt, based on more than speculation or probability. 

“This is not a heart decision,” Christie said. “This is something that’s going to require thought, careful thought.”

Christie said that most of the women accusing Fultz of assault came forward after reading about initial accusations against him in the media. 

He told the jury to deliberate carefully, and remember their duties.

“You all agreed that you would hold the state to its burden,” Christie said. “You all agreed to the presumption of Mr. Fultz’s innocence.”

And Christie told them to carefully consider the weight of their verdict.

“This is not a decision you can undo,” he said.

Jurors will now deliberate until they reach a unanimous verdict. The jury can return a verdict at any time. There is no time limit on their deliberations. The trial lasted six weeks and involved testimony from dozens of witnesses.  If jurors cannot reach a verdict, it will be declared a mistrial. 

In Skagway, at the height of summer, hundreds of tourists wait in line – some patiently, some less so – to return to their cruise ships. But they can’t get there on foot. Instead, they wait for shuttles or small, orange boats.

Jeff Jarvie, of Riverside, California, experienced the rigmarole this week.

“It’s disappointing, because it’s a ship with so many people,” he said. “The water taxi takes a whole, like, process.”

But that process is in place for good reason. Skagway’s largest cruise ship dock, known as the Railroad Dock, has been off-limits to pedestrians since the summer of 2022. That’s when multiple rock slides tumbled toward the dock from a ridge to the east.

No one was injured. But the slides damaged infrastructure and resulted in dock closures that took a major toll on the local economy. An assessment by an engineering firm later concluded the entire slide area would eventually collapse, which it said would be “catastrophic in nature.”

That fueled widespread concern in the community.

“We know that we have this one spot that’s active,” said Reuben Cash, the environmental program coordinator for the Skagway Traditional Council, a local tribe. “Where else? Where else can we expect to see these geohazards show up?”

That question is the driving force behind an ongoing research project that aims to study rockslide risk along the rest of that ridge and elsewhere in Skagway. The initiative is part of a regional effort that aims to help seven tribal governments understand and respond to local geohazards.

In Skagway specifically, the issue is rooted in the fact that the area for thousands of years was under miles of ice. Those glaciers retreated long ago. When that happened, they exposed the now slide-prone ridgeline.

“There’s no longer that support,” said Cash. “These valley faces, these slope faces, are beginning to topple because they don’t have anything holding them up.”

A landscape of wiggly rocks and leaning columns

That toppling effect is what brought Josh Roering, a University of Oregon geologist, to Southeast earlier this summer. He’s been visiting the area for research since 2022.

While out on a day-long hike along the town’s most prominent ridgeline in June, he said the project has a few main components.

First, mapping when and where rockfalls have happened before, modeling where they could happen later, and simulating where rocks would end up if they did fall. That work included analyzing hundreds of rockfall events in Skagway between 2005 and 2022.

“We identify that there are parts of this valley that are much more susceptible to rockfall runout than others,” Roering said.

That means some slopes are both rockslide-prone and oriented in a way that could put people and infrastructure in harm’s way.

Another key component is gauging the ridge’s stability – and the extent to which rocks along it respond to everything from wind, frost and rain to trucks, trains and cruise ships. The researchers did that by placing 38 seismometers, which measure movement, in the area for about a month, two years ago. They’re now analyzing that data.

“The more wiggly these rocks are, the more sort of decoupled they are from the underlying mountain,” Roering said. “And so that is a relative measure of how potentially unstable they may be.”

Roering spent several days this summer going back to those sites and gathering more information. Along the way, he and another team member used photos and GPS data to pinpoint exactly where the sensors were placed. Then they mapped the geology around those sites and measured the angle of various rock faces.

During that hike in June, Roering stopped periodically to point out deep, vertical gashes in earth – some of which could fit a human. The ridgeline is covered in them.

Roering explained that the mountain – like others in Skagway – is largely made up of upstanding sheets of granite that are peeling apart, absent support from glaciers. That process speeds up when rocks, trees and other debris fall into the fractures, wedging them open. Then they start bending toward Skagway down below.

“Once you sort of got a big column of rock leaning this far over, it starts to become difficult for it not to flip over,” he said.

For Skagway, no “time bomb just waiting to happen”

The research has generated some good news so far. The ridge above town does not seem to be prone to a deep-seated landslide, like the one that killed two people in Haines in 2020.

“We know that we don’t have a time bomb just waiting to happen,” said Cash, of the Skagway Traditional Council.

That doesn’t mean there’s no risk at all. Right now, rockslide activity that could threaten life or property is concentrated in a handful of areas in the valley, including two main spots along the ridge that towers above the cruise ship dock.

But Roering said it’s clear the instability isn’t limited to those specific areas. It’s also present along the rest of the ridge and elsewhere in Skagway. As a result, he said, it’s likely the toppling effect will continue to ripple across the region far into the future.

A major remaining question is what actually triggers that instability and sparks rockslides. So far, Roering said, it’s not totally clear. But there seems to be more activity during spring, as temperatures warm.

“This was a surprising finding for us because it shows that the timing of thaw is way more important than rainfall for triggering these rockfalls,” Roering wrote in an email this week.

The ongoing research is set to wind down by 2027. It won’t remedy the gargantuan slide in the harbor that has already damaged infrastructure, threatened public safety, and inconvenienced visitors like Jarvie, the cruise ship passenger from California.

But the effort ideally will provide the community the information it needs to better understand the risks it faces – and to prepare accordingly.

“It’s not going to tell you exactly where rocks will fall,” said Cash. “But it tells us the higher risk areas where it’s more likely to happen.”

Correction: This story previously misspelled Luka Silva’s name in a photo caption.

The Alaska Bar Association has voted to recommend that former U.S. District Court Judge Joshua Kindred be disbarred in Alaska.

Kindred, appointed by President Donald Trump to serve as a federal judge here, resigned last year from the federal bench after investigators found that he had a “sexualized relationship” with a clerk who became a prosecutor and lied about it to a senior judge and investigators, and maintained a hostile workplace for law clerks.

Since that investigation, additional improprieties connected to the U.S. attorney’s office have come to light.

On Thursday, the bar association’s board of governors voted without dissent to recommend that Kindred be disbarred, forbidden from practicing law in the state. The bar association regulates attorneys across Alaska.

The board’s recommendation will go to the Alaska Supreme Court, which must make the final determination. No date has been set for when the court will consider the issue.

Kindred, whose law license is “inactive” according to the bar association’s database, did not participate in the investigation that preceded Thursday’s hearing, said Rebecca Patterson, president of the bar association’s board.

Louise Driscoll, assistant counsel for the bar association, said the association received “lots of calls” when the investigation into Kindred was revealed to the public.

Typically, she said, the association prefers to act when a grievance is filed by someone other than the association’s own counsel, but in this case, the association’s counsel filed the grievance itself in November.

The subsequent investigation, she said, was slowed by the fact that Kindred didn’t respond to requests for a response to the grievance. He no longer lived at his address on file. He had left the federal court. Former acquaintances didn’t know where he was.

Eventually, Driscoll said, a process server found Kindred sitting on the couch at his mother’s house.

“It was Mr. Kindred’s mother who answered the door and accepted service, but you could see Mr. Kindred on the sofa, so he was on notice,” she said.

Even then, Kindred didn’t respond, and in June, a committee recommended that Kindred be disbarred.

Driscoll said the committee considered it “very serious” that Kindred had lied to federal investigators about his activities.

“Lawyers are expected to be honest, and the members of the public have a reason to consider that they will be dealing with honest counsel,” she said.

Kindred’s actions, she added, have caused real harm — there are dozens of cases whose outcomes are now in doubt because Kindred failed to disclose conflicts of interest.

In addition, Kindred’s resignation has left only one active judge on Alaska’s district court bench.

“There’s been grievous harm,” Driscoll said of Kindred’s actions.

In a footnote to the disbarment recommendation, the committee said, “We enter our decision not with any joy. It is our collective hope Mr. Kindred can recover emotionally, financially and physically notwithstanding the hardships Mr. Kindred confronts.”

On Thursday, after Driscoll’s suggestion, the board of governors deleted that footnote.

Kindred, they concluded, should receive no more special courtesy than any other attorney facing the same accusations.

The union representing most Juneau Police Department staff has declared an impasse in its negotiations for a new contract with the City and Borough of Juneau.

Juneau Police Sergeant Sterling Salisbury is the chapter president for the Public Safety Employees Association. He said low pay and staffing shortages are stretching the department beyond its limits — and it’s putting the public at risk. 

“They need to make it a place where people want to come to Juneau and to recruit and retain officers and dispatchers and under their current proposals to us, it’s not even coming close,” he said. 

The union and city have been negotiating a new contract since February. The previous contract expired in June. The union declared an impasse earlier this month.

Salisbury said Juneau’s wages aren’t competitive with other departments and agencies in the state. He said that, paired with severe understaffing, is driving people away from the department. 

Right now, the department has 11 vacant positions, which is fewer than last year. 

But Salisbury said it’s not enough, since many officers are still in training. He said the lack of officers has led to delayed response times, strained investigations and mandatory overtime. He said better pay and benefits are needed to attract and retain staff. 

The department came under public scrutiny recently after a video posted online showed a Juneau police officer slamming a man to the ground during an arrest in July. In the days following the incident, the department placed the officer on paid administrative leave and requested an independent investigation into the incident.

Juneau Police Chief Derek Bos agreed with Salisbury that understaffing is a challenge, but said that the department is making strides to address it. He said JPD currently has eight officers in training. 

“We are definitely doing a robust effort with recruiting and hiring, and that is making a difference,” he said. “We are making headway — beyond just breaking even between attrition — we’re now in a forward number. So I think that is helping.”

Juneau’s firefighters union is also in the midst of wage negotiations with the city. Union representatives said that low staffing rates could also impact Capital City Fire Rescue’s response times.