Public Safety

A Washington state man died while exploring an abandoned mine on Prince of Wales Island last week, leading to an extended recovery effort.

Fifty-year-old Devin Albert was visiting his cousin in Klawock for the New Year’s holiday, and ventured out with a few other locals on Thursday, Jan. 2 to go rock hunting in the Salt Chuck Mine near Thorne Bay. The mine historically produced gold, silver, copper, and palladium from 1905 to 1941 and has since been designated as an EPA Superfund site.

While deep within one of the mine shafts, Albert suffered a medical emergency, which those with him believed was a heart attack. Alaska State Trooper Sergeant Rob Jensen said the man was having difficulty breathing, so the others in the group tried to assist him out of the mine.

“One particular area was a very steep climb,” Jensen said. “They were on their way out. The individual wasn’t really communicating verbally. They were assisting him along and shortly thereafter, he collapsed.”

Jensen said the group then attempted CPR on Albert for more than 30 minutes, but were unable to resuscitate him. He was presumed dead at that point, as he did not have a pulse and was not breathing. The rest of the group climbed out of the mine, but they weren’t able to carry Albert’s body with them.

By the time Troopers and Village Public Safety Officers arrived on the scene, it was dark and beginning to snow. Jensen said the entry point to the mine site looks like a 400-foot volcano, with a rope leading down from the rim to the mine shafts below.

“In order to go down in there and out, you need both arms, both legs to be working great,” Jensen said. “And be able to kind of hand-over-fist this rope coming out. It’s extremely sketchy, getting in and out of during daylight. Doing it at night time was a suicide mission.”

Troopers decided not to attempt a recovery that night but remained on scene and activated the Ketchikan Volunteer Search and Rescue Squad. Throughout Friday and Saturday teams descended into the mine using a helicopter, ropes and other equipment, but were unable to locate the body. On Sunday, Jan. 5, rescuers tried an alternate shaft entrance near the beach that extended nearly a mile into the depths of the mine, and they were able to locate and recover Albert’s body.

Jensen said there’s no foul play suspected, and that officials anticipate an underlying health issue to be at fault. But he said navigating the mine site is extremely stressful.

“I must emphasize that going in and out of there without the proper gear, training, you know, if somebody does get injured, you are looking at a very protracted time in order to get out of there,” Jensen said.

The body has been sent to the state medical examiner’s office in Anchorage to determine the official cause of death.

A man held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex has died after authorities say his cellmate severely beat him, in a case involving mental health concerns.

William Farmer, 36, died Monday at an Anchorage hospital, according to an Alaska State Troopers statement. He is the first Alaska inmate to die this year.

The Alaska Department of Law said 33-year-old Lawrence Fenumiai is now charged with second-degree murder in Farmer’s death.

According to a charging document against Fenumiai, jail staff first noticed the incident just after 6 p.m. on Dec. 17. A correctional officer said he looked through a cell door and saw Fenumiai atop Farmer, punching him in the head. The officer banged on the window and ordered Fenumiai to stop as he awaited backup.

Fenumiai allegedly didn’t stop punching Farmer until more officers arrived. Three minutes after the first officer arrived, Fenumiai was restrained and removed from the cell. Medics were called for Farmer, who was unconscious and taken to Providence Alaska Medical Center.

Another inmate also in the cell told troopers that Farmer had arrived within the last day. He said on Dec. 17 Farmer had been lying on the floor and talking to himself. Fenumiai, he said, climbed down from his top bunk in the cell, told Farmer to “shut the (expletive) up,” then began striking him, according to the charging document.

Megan Edge, director of the Alaska Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, said it’s rare for an Alaska inmate to fatally assault another.

“One in a year would be unusual,” Edge said. “Two in a year is exceptionally unusual and very concerning.”

Farmer’s death comes nearly a year after troopers said they were investigating the death of Anchorage Correctional Complex inmate Joshua Zimmerman as a homicide. Troopers spokesman Austin McDaniel had no updates Tuesday on that investigation, but said it’s “still active and ongoing.”

In a Wednesday response to emailed questions, state Department of Corrections officials said staff evaluate all major incidents at Alaska correctional facilities alongside investigations by troopers.

“The safety and security of all individuals housed in any of our facilities is our top priority,” DOC officials said. “We are constantly evaluating best practices, which is evident in the fact that occurrences of this nature are rare.”

Court records show that Farmer and Fenumiai had taken different paths to last month’s deadly encounter.

Anchorage police said Farmer had been arrested Dec. 5 in a string of robberies at Midtown businesses, including two in November during which he allegedly pepper-sprayed employees.

Fenumiai had last been charged in May with a misdemeanor assault in Juneau, during which he allegedly punched a man in the head and destroyed a smartphone.

Edge, with the ACLU, said the two men shouldn’t have been in a cell together on Dec. 17 in the first place.

DOC officials said Fenumiai was initially held at the Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau, then transferred to the Anchorage jail on June 23 to be mentally evaluated at the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. He spent some of his Southcentral Alaska time at the Goose Creek Correctional Center in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

Records show Fenumiai was ordered to be transported from Goose Creek to API on Nov. 13. The Juneau assault case was dismissed on Dec. 13, after Fenumiai was found incompetent to stand trial.

A second transport order was issued that day – four days before the reported assault – for Fenumiai to be sent to Juneau. But he never got moved.

“What happened in the system that left him stuck in Anchorage and not transported back to Juneau when the charges were dropped?” Edge said.

Corrections officials didn’t directly answer a question about why Fenumiai wasn’t transported to Juneau before the assault. They noted that his transport order was vacated on Dec. 20, after the reported assault happened.

“Mr. Fenumiai has been in specialized housing, without incident, during the entire period of his incarceration,” DOC officials said.

Edge – a former DOC spokeswoman under previous Gov. Bill Walker – said the jail houses a large and diverse population, with many people held for uncertain durations of time. The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported Tuesday that times to resolve major cases in Alaska have ballooned, with a majority of inmates statewide now in pretrial custody without being convicted of a crime.

Edge said the situation is complicated by widespread delays in freeing inmates after judges order their release. That leads to severe overcrowding at the Anchorage Correctional Complex, she said, including the triple-bunking described in Fenumiai’s charging document.

“You usually have multiple people to a cell, and sometimes you have people that are vulnerable, who should not be in general population,” she said. “And that becomes especially dangerous for everybody there, and traumatic for everybody there.”

According to the charges against Fenumiai, he told an investigator that Farmer had irritated him by refusing multiple demands to be silent.

“Lawrence stated that it looked like Farmer did not want to stop talking so he just started hitting him,” the charges said.

According to the charges, when an investigator asked Fenumiai if he wanted to kill Farmer, he said yes and added that Farmer had not struck him. When asked if he was injured, Fenumiai allegedly said that his hands were sore.

Edge noted that the department had not posted an online death notification for Farmer on its website, despite the statement from troopers. A DOC spokesperson said Farmer was not being considered an in-custody death because prosecutors released him to pretrial supervision on Dec. 23, nearly a week after the assault took place. Edge said that doesn’t make sense.

“DOC should be reporting his death because he died (as) a result of an assault that occurred inside of one of their institutions, that they failed to protect him in,” she said.

The ACLU is independently investigating Farmer’s death, Edge said, as it does all deaths of Alaska inmates. She extended her condolences to his loved ones.

“Our hearts go out to his family, who are left to deal with what’s happened because of the failure in a lot of systems,” she said. “It’s just – it’s absolutely heartbreaking.”

Court records show Fenumiai remained in custody Wednesday at the Anchorage Correctional Complex.

Juneau police say a man found dead inside a house that caught fire early on Saturday intentionally started the fire before he died. 

According to the initial investigation, the 33-year-old man’s death “was not related to the fire and is not suspicious in nature.” 

Three other people who were inside the house on Aspen Avenue at the time escaped, but one man went back to find the person who started the fire. He sustained severe burns and was later medevaced out of town. 

The investigation is ongoing, and a spokesperson for the police said Thursday they cannot provide further details about how the man died.

Several pets also died in the fire and the house was destroyed. Police say the Red Cross is assisting the remaining people who lived there.

Juneau has seen two destructive residential fires in the Mendenhall Valley in the course of three days. One person suffered severe injuries in Saturday’s fire.

The strain on local first responders prompted Cheyenne Sanchez, a member of Juneau’s firefighter union, to speak out about staff shortages at Monday night’s Juneau Assembly meeting.

“We the Juneau career firefighters, in light of this weekend’s tragic house fire, have reflected a lot upon our current staffing shortage and the declining number of responders to aid in the community during the crisis,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez is with the local chapter of the International Association of Fire Fighters and works for Capital City Fire/Rescue. He pointed to four vacancies in the department and wages that aren’t competitive enough to recruit new staff.

“When you know a normal firefighter is starting a new job in the fire service, and they go to search for a job, one of the common filters that they use is the wage scale,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday. “If we’re not even on the first or second page of a list of fire departments that are hiring … we’re losing those opportunities.”

And Sanchez said the lack of staff not only impacts his job, but concerns him as someone who lives in Juneau.

“I’m a member of this community. I live here,” Sanchez said. “I want happy, competent firefighters working in the town I live in.”

Fire Chief Rich Etheridge said the staffing shortages mean fewer people can respond to fires.

“They work to the point of exhaustion, and then they go get cleaned up and get ready for the next calls,” he said.

Etheridge said wages are negotiated every three years between city management and the firefighter’s union. Currently, starting wages are between $18.30 and $22.50 an hour, with an expectation to work 56 hours a week.

“We have a minimum staffing every day, and we’ve been able to meet minimum staffing,” he said. “But it usually does take mandatory overtime, where people don’t have a choice whether they want to work it or not.”

He said one barrier to hiring is certifications, so the department plans to offer more training opportunities to certify new hires in emergency medicine and firefighting — and eliminate prerequisites.

Correction: A previous version of the story said a man died in a fire over the weekend. New information from investigators revealed that the man’s death was not caused by the fire.

Alaska prosecutors will again attempt to convict a former state legislator on election-tampering charges after their first attempt ended with a hung jury late last year.

In a Monday court hearing, Alaska Chief Assistant Attorney General Jenna Gruenstein confirmed that the Alaska Department of Law is continuing its case against Gabrielle LeDoux, a Republican who represented Kodiak in the Alaska House from 2005 to 2009 and an Anchorage district from 2013 to 2021.

In spring 2020, state prosecutors accused LeDoux of illegally encouraging people who lived outside her district to cast votes within the district. Some charges were dismissed, but LeDoux faced five felony charges and seven misdemeanor charges this year.

Her case was repeatedly postponed and reached trial in November, more than four years after initial charges were filed.

Two other people, including a former LeDoux aide, also faced state charges but accepted plea deals in exchange for testifying against LeDoux.

After a week of court arguments, jurors split for and against LeDoux’s guilt, and Judge Kevin Saxby declared a mistrial.

On Monday, an attorney representing LeDoux said he is asking an additional expert to testify at the next trial. The state has filed a motion to preclude that testimony.

Both sides are expected to trade another round of written briefings on the disagreement, with the issue to be decided before a second trial.

On Monday, Saxby set Feb. 3 as the date of the next hearing between the two sides.

Alaskans Christina Love and Josie Heyano served on the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking and helped shape the council’s 2024 report.

It outlines the forms of human trafficking, suggests policies to address the underlying causes and points out holes in the justice system that allow this type of violence to continue.

Love, who lives in Juneau, and Heyano, an Anchorage resident, spoke with KTOO’s Yvonne Krumrey to talk about what it means to be a survivor and to take the stories of other survivors — and those who didn’t survive — to the desks of federal lawmakers.

And a warning, these advocates discuss homelessness, sexual violence, drug use and suicide in this interview.

Listen:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Josie Heyano: My name is Josie Heyano. I am a presidential appointee to the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, which is an Advisory Council tasked with creating recommendations to the President’s interagency task force to combat trafficking.

Christina Love: Hi. My name is Christina love and I’m 2024’s presidential appointee to the Council on Trafficking. 

People entrusted us with their stories, and we have a responsibility to receive those words, to not let them hit the floor and to lift them up. We recognize that Josie and I are in seats of privilege, you know, that there’s a lot of other people that could be here who aren’t — like, literally — and people who aren’t with us, right? The recognition of people who died, you know, like, what it means to be a survivor, is the recognition that we survive something that a lot of people don’t. 

Josie Heyano: In last year’s report, and I think we put it in this year’s report also there’s a dedication space. That was a really important piece to me when I first came into the council. And to tack onto what Christina said, like, my position on the council, the reason I accepted it wasn’t because necessarily of my own lived experience, but because I was carrying so many stories, and still I’m carrying so many stories.

And that when we work in direct care, when we work in our community, it is our responsibility, or it feels like my responsibility, to do something with those stories, especially my years working with youth experiencing homelessness in Anchorage, so many of those stories were incredibly similar, and there were so many points of intervention that could have been so impactful in those stories. 

And so that’s what the council position meant to me, was taking those stories from not only the clients and the people that I’ve served in my community, but my colleagues at different agencies, law enforcement, NGOs, and being able to take that experience in those stories, and level it up to the federal government level, and say, these are our experiences in Alaska.

I struggle with the word survivor. A lot of the times I actually, I really don’t like it. It doesn’t resonate for me. And it maybe that’s even like a guilt thing, I’m not sure, but it always brings to mind to me that there’s a lot of people that I’ve worked with over the years who aren’t here anymore, and there’s a lot of people who won’t be here in the future. 

And so it was really important to me that the council was rooted in the recognition of that, that when we show up as survivor leaders, we’re also showing up honoring and respecting that there is a lethality to this, that there are people who aren’t here.

I found that my time on the council, there’s a lot of — maybe because it feels protective — there’s a lot of need to like, be really high level, be really federal, be really just top level, macro, everything. And that’s valuable, because that’s where we make our recommendations. But we have to root in people too, and we have to remember that humanity piece, that I’m not just going to write this recommendation because it’s my job on the council. I’m going to write this recommendation because I sat with the people who this recommendation impacts, and I care about them, and I took the time to learn about their experiences.

And I think just in general, in the anti trafficking space, there’s a need to want to just only talk about the crime of trafficking, and so I continue to find myself kind of head-butting up against that. Even, you know, I’ve done trainings here locally where submit the feedback I got on the trafficking training was, “Well, we didn’t talk about trafficking enough. ” I’m like, true, but what we did talk about was traumatic brain injuries. We did talk about our suicide rates. We did talk about the lack of shelter beds in the city. We did talk about all of the things that we really should be talking about, and if you’re listening, you can connect those pieces.

Christina Love: Working professionally, where people didn’t know I was a survivor, and then the moment they knew I was a survivor, treated me so differently, completely differently. And then late, years later, at having this experience, and someone told me, “They’re not going, they’re never going to listen to you, because you’re a survivor. They don’t see you as equal to them.” 

When we talk about the people that I’ve worked with who have experienced trafficking, or even my own experience that I never was the perfect victim and have never been the perfect survivor, you know? So we have people who are experiencing great harm, who are also committing crimes, and the majority of them do end up incarcerated. One of my favorite quotes in the council’s report, and there’s so many great quotes, so many, so many great quotes, is the recognition that that so many of them end up in jail, but the people who harm them never do.

Josie Heyano: There are a lot of Native people and Native women especially, who are doing this work, and they’re doing it grassroots. They’re doing it in their communities. Having Indigenous representation on the U.S. Advisory Council is great, and it is long overdue that should have been a really long time ago, because there’s a lot of people that are doing this work and have recognized this issue in Native communities that just haven’t had a voice in the federal spaces. 

Alaska is so important to me to be talked about because of my experience and because of holding the stories of so many people who their trafficking experience is rooted in drug trafficking in Alaska, it’s rooted in forced criminality. It’s rooted in substance use, and we still do not have the resources to support that. 

You know, if we have a young person who is — or a person at all — who is at the airport, who is being forced to transport substances into the community, there is no legal service or advocacy route for them to access safety whatsoever. It happens consistently, constantly in the state, and has for a really long time. And I’ve had so many conversations with law enforcement, with Department of Law, with service providers where they recognize this. Yet we have no methodology to help support people. So it just continues to happen.

And at the federal level, and you know, there’s so many toolkits that exist, there’s so many trainings that exist, and I still have yet to see this issue really being tackled head on, that forced criminality piece, the forced trafficking into our rural communities, it’s really heavily impacting all of our communities. I don’t know that there’s any community that’s excluded from that. I don’t have an answer for it, other than we need to be paying attention and we need to be doing better.

Christina Love: When we talk about what Alaska needs to be able to do this in a way that would translate to lives being saved, when we’re genuinely asking people what it is that they want — and we have other reports that show exactly that when we’re saying, “What is it that you need?” People are saying that they they want to be treated as a whole human being, that they want to have access to safe housing, that they want their own money to buy food, that they want help getting their children back, or clothes that fit or they want a washing machine, or they want their car to be fixed.

A big part of the report talks about substance use and mental health coercion, that substances are an incredible way to escape or to alleviate pain, and I will say this in every interview and in every presentation and anytime somebody will listen, that trauma and substance use are a very natural reaction to violence, and violence is the unnatural thing. And that people will end their pain in any way they can. For some people, that is suicide, which why we have such high rates. 

We have to make services as easy to access as alcohol and heroin. Whenever I’m working with someone who’s experienced a lot of harm, who’s trying to leave a domestic violence situation or trafficking situation, substances are not my first priority. And in taking those coping mechanisms away, that can drive them right back. 

And the same for people who are perpetrating harm. When we have removed substances, we see higher rates of lethality. So we deeply need to understand substances as a way of coping with pain as well as a tactic of violence.

People who traffic people, prey on people not having their basic needs. For a lot of people, it’s because they did not have transportation that they got a ride. It is because they did not have a place to stay that they were given what they thought was a safe place to stay, or maybe they knew it wasn’t safe, but they didn’t have another option. They had no other option. 

Or from my own experience, that they met a need that I had, and it was so basic — that’s something that we should all be entitled to.

If we are really working toward a solution, then we would be communities and places that when a trafficker comes in, they would have no ability to be successful, that our children would be so protected, that our children would know what healthy and safe feels like. So the moment they come into contact with someone who means to do them harm, they could feel it in their bodies, and all the red flags would go off, and they would have people that they could go to that would trust and that would listen to them, and we would have a response that would also include the meaningful rehabilitation of this person who is doing harm because they are also not well. 

Josie Heyano: I want to tag on to Christina’s message too. Like anybody that hears this or listens to this, doesn’t matter what you’ve experienced, what you’ve done — that shame can feel so crippling, and it doesn’t stay that way forever. If you keep going, it doesn’t stay that way. You find your people, you find the purpose for it. It could be really transformative. 

My experience was like being in a house that was on fire when no one had ever told me what fire was, and I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know how to put it out, I didn’t know if there was someone you could call. I didn’t know if it was hot, I didn’t know what to do. And I think that that shame, combined with the naivety, like the “how did I not know this? How can I even begin to comprehend or understand it?” It’s such an isolating, lonely place to be. 

And so I think some of the work that’s impactful in the council and being in community with people like Christina is having the opportunity to if anybody that listens or hears this or reads this is in a space where they feel like it’s not overcomeable or believable or understandable, that it is. And I don’t know that you get past it, but life gets bigger.