Public Safety

At least $10,000 worth of heating oil has been stolen from Juneau homes so far this year. Since January, Juneau police say there’s been nearly twice the number of thefts than were reported for all of 2010.

The latest was for $200 in oil stolen from a tank at the back of a Lemon Creek area home. It’s prompted police to ask Juneau residents for help.

Spokeswoman Cindee Brown-Mills says police have no leads in any of the cases.

“We have in 2011 so far 19 cases and I wonder how many have not been reported or never discovered,” Brown-Mills says. “There’s not anyone area of town that’s been more affected than others so we don’t really have a whole lot to go on. This is really something we need the public’s help on if we’re going to catch people doing it.”

Local fuel-delivery companies say they’ve been getting their fair share of complaints about oil thieves, especially now that prices are more than $4 a gallon. Reliable Fuel says calls come in spurts, and have averaged two a month this year.

The best deterrents? Lock the tank, put it behind an enclosure, or install a video camera. Police say be a nosey neighbor and pay attention to what’s happening in your neighborhood.

Taku Oil’s Tim Hansen says locking caps will help, but a determined thief can still get your oil.

“Those plug-type caps seem to work better. They’ll go inside the hole in the tank there, rather than being up on a spout where someone can tip off the fill spout with a pipe wrench,” Hansen says. “Definitely the more obstacles you can put in people’s way, the less likely people are going to try to get some (oil) from you. Below ground tanks are pretty hard to get to.”

Juneau police say anyone with information on stolen oil should call JPD at 586-0600, or remain anonymous and leave a tip at www.juneaucrimeline.com.

The wreckage of a single-engine plane that crashed July 24th on Douglas Island rests in a Juneau hangar. A National Transportation Safety Board crew is piecing the aircraft together for the investigation into the accident that killed Charles Luck and his wife Liping Tang-Luck.

The NTSB preliminary report indicates the plane crashed very shortly after Luck communicated with the Juneau tower. So soon, says investigator Clint Johnson, that in interviews the air traffic specialist used the term “moments.”

“Mr. Luck called in, indicated that he was about 10 miles to the southeast, landing Juneau, and right after that, we’re not sure exactly how long it was, just moments after that, they received a very faint ELT signal,” Johnson says.

That Emergency Locator Transmitter signal led searchers to an aircraft debris field, at about the 31-hundred foot level of Mount Ben Stewart, near the Eaglecrest Ski Area. The fuselage and bodies were not found until the following day. It was six days before skies cleared enough to recover the bodies.

Johnson has been conducting interviews and expects to review Juneau Air Traffic Control Tower tapes later this week. He’s also awaiting autopsy results.

“What we’re doing is gathering information on the pilot, as far as past history, experience level,” Johnson says. “Obviously there was an autopsy and toxicology screen, which is very, very standard for anybody who’s killed in an airplane accident.”

Charles Luck was a physician assistant at the SEARHC health care clinic in Hoonah. According to Johnson, Luck had not filed a flight plan for his early morning trip to Juneau.

Johnson says the Cessna was being operated on visual flight rules. While weather conditions at the accident site aren’t known, the Juneau airport tower reported marginal conditions that morning.

Johnson says local pilots tell him that when the cloud ceiling is low in Juneau, it’s often even lower over the area where the plane crashed.

Services are planned this week for a young Juneau man who died recently in Arkansas from injuries suffered in a random assault.

A Rosary will be said for Kevin Thornton on Monday, Aug 8th, at 7 p.m., at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in the Mendenhall Valley.

A funeral Mass is Tuesday, Aug 9th, at 7 p.m., also at St. Paul’s Catholic Church. A reception will follow.

The 19-year-old Thornton died last week in a Little Rock hospital, apparently the victim of a beating.

Hot Spring County sheriff’s officers say Thornton was walking with a friend in the Malvern area when he was attacked. Four teenage boys ages 14 to 17 have been charged with murder and are lodged in separate juvenile detention facilities outside the county.

Thornton is the son of Bill and Darlene Thornton of Juneau.

A former Juneau police officer initially accused of sexual abuse of a minor could still face as much as two years in prison.

Prosecutors dropped the three felony abuse charges on Friday, just before Brian Ervin’s jury trial was to start on Monday, August 8th. But the 38-year old former downtown officer pled “no contest” to a new charge of interfering with a witness.

Ervin did not say anything aside from answering routine questions from Superior Court Judge Trevor Stephens, who participated telephonically from Ketchikan. Ervin’s attorney Louis Menendez made a short statement on his behalf.

“It ends the state’s relationship with the Mr. Ervin as to any charge or uncharged crimes of sexual misconduct or any other crime involving D.E.,” said Menendez. “He stands by the statement that he specifically and emphatically denies the allegations of D.E.”

Ervin’s prison term for felony interference with a witness may be well above the presumptive minimum sentence of a year because the crime occurred while he was out on release.

The accuser was present in the courtroom, but she declined to make any comment during the short change of plea hearing.

Menendez declined to comment further after the hearing on Friday.

District Attorney Dave Brower also declined to comment or explain what happened with the state’s case until after Ervin is sentenced in November.

Ervin started as a police officer in April 14, 2008, according to City and Borough of Juneau records. Even before the charges were lodged against him last September, Ervin had been reassigned away from the Juneau Police Department to other CBJ positions unrelated to policing. Human Resources Director Mila Cosgrove says it mostly was clerical and other tasks related to human resources or other administration projects. Ervin left CBJ employment on May 22, 2011, but Cosgrove declined to say whether he resigned or was terminated.

The jury trial scheduled to start August 8th was expected to be one of the very last cases handled by Menendez as a private defense attorney. He had delayed his installation as Superior Court judge until the Ervin case was resolved. One of Menendez’s colleagues will represent Ervin during the sentencing phase.

Juneau Police say an 18-year-old woman made up a story about being abducted and sexually assaulted because she was having problems in her personal life.

At about 2:45 last Saturday morning, the woman’s mother called police saying her daughter had reported being abducted at knifepoint by three men. The girl said she was taken to an unknown location and sexually assaulted by one of the men.

On Tuesday, she confessed to making the story up because she was upset by relationship issues.

Juneau Police Lieutenant Kris Sell says filing a false report is a Class A misdemeanor. But in this case investigators didn’t feel it was necessary to charge the girl.

“We’re hoping in this case that it’s a young girl who learned her lesson from this experience,” said Sell. “Of course, as a police department we really hate to see false reports about sexual assault, because it damages then the credibility of women reporting legitimate sexual assaults.”

The girl’s name is being withheld, because she wasn’t charged. Sell says the investigation is now closed.

The man found dead Tuesday from an apparent fall on the Herbert Glacier Trail was a nursing supervisor at Bartlett Regional Hospital.

Forty-two year old James “Steven” Reese had worked at the hospital about ten years. Bartlett Spokesman Jim Strader says he was popular with both patients and staff, and the whole hospital is shaken by his death.

“They’re talking today about his sense of humor, his sense of caring, his sense of giving,” Strader said. “A lot of people consider Steve to be so typical of the best quality in nurses, a person who thought more about other people than he did himself.”

Strader says Reese had two children.

He helped out with the annual Project Homeless Connect event put on by the Juneau Economic Development Council, and was a member of the Juneau Human Rights Commission from 2005 to 2007.

Reese was reported missing at about 1:30 Tuesday morning when he failed to show up for work. Juneau Police found his car at the Herbert Glacier trailhead and notified Alaska State Troopers. Searchers from Juneau Mountain Rescue and SEADOGS found his body eight hours later in the Herbert River, below the glacier.

The body is being sent to the state medical examiner’s office in Anchorage for an autopsy.

Reese is the second person to die on the Herbert Glacier Trail this summer. In June, 30-year-old Adam Webb of New York was found dead, also from an apparent fall.