Re: One woman died on an Alaska mayor's property. Then another. No one has ever been charged.

[Democrat Serial Abusers]

On 24 Oct 2019, the late Mark Wieber
<chronic.löoser@dole-scröunging.shitbags.of.taft> posted some
news:4RmsF.66138$HU2....@fx26.iad:

> Democrats get away with everything including abusing and killing
> women. Stupid women still buy into their shit and keep them
> empowered.

Before they died, Jennifer Kirk and Sue Sue Norton were both victims of
domestic violence, but the men involved — the ex-mayor’s sons — faced
few consequences despite a long history of similar allegations.

This article was produced in partnership with ProPublica’s Local
Reporting Network.

Note to readers: This story details allegations of violence against
women and girls.

KOTZEBUE — On a subzero Monday morning in March 2020, police found
another woman dead at the ex-mayor’s property.

Two years earlier, the body of 25-year-old Jennifer Kirk lay curled at
the foot of a bed, a rifle on the floor, strangulation marks on her neck
and a bullet hole beneath her chin. City police swiftly closed the case,
declaring it a suicide.

Now police were back at the property, where the lifeless body of Susanna
“Sue Sue” Norton, 30, was discovered in an adjacent house, beaten and
strangled. An autopsy determined the cause of death to be homicide.

Kirk and Norton, both Inupiaq, had each dated sons of the former borough
mayor, and the sons had previously been convicted of beating each of
them. One of the sons had admitted to strangling Kirk twice before.
Another pleaded guilty to kicking Norton in the stomach when she was six
months pregnant.

No one has ever been charged with a crime in connection to the deaths.

In a state where women are 2.5 times more likely than the national
average to be killed by a man and Alaska Native women are especially at
risk, elected leaders here have repeatedly pledged action. The
Department of Justice declared a rural law enforcement emergency in
Alaska following a 2019 report by the Anchorage Daily News and
ProPublica on glaring lapses in local policing. Two years later, the
governor created a state council on Missing and Murdered Indigenous
Persons, and in 2022, new investigators were hired to solve cases like
Norton’s.

Unexplained holes in the investigations into the deaths of Kirk and
Norton call into question this commitment, a review by the Anchorage
Daily News and ProPublica found. More than that, the events leading up
to the women’s deaths illustrate how police, prosecutors and judges here
have regularly given pass after pass to people accused of domestic
violence and strangulation.

Police records obtained by the newsrooms show that Kirk’s body revealed
signs of strangulation. Her boyfriend, Anthony Richards, son of
then-Mayor Clement Richards Sr., admitted to police that he had caused
the marks on the day she died. After reviewing the records, former
Kotzebue Police Chief Ed Ward said the 10 red flags that the Training
Institute on Strangulation Prevention instructs police to look for in
cases of domestic violence killings all appeared to apply to the scene
of Kirk’s death. (Ward did not work at the police department at the time
of her death.)

Yet the Kotzebue Police Department closed the case after a single day of
investigation, labeling it a suicide before receiving the final autopsy
report.

In Norton’s case, police never told her family she had been strangled,
family members said. Police didn’t ask the public to help catch the
suspect, as they had the prior year when a fire department dog was
killed in the same neighborhood. They never interviewed key witnesses
and failed to obtain a search warrant, leaving evidence uncollected.

State troopers, who took over the investigation into Norton’s death in
2022, told her family they planned to travel to Kotzebue over the summer
to investigate further. Norton’s family says that didn’t happen either.
(A department spokesperson said on Oct. 27 that investigators had not
yet visited Kotzebue for the case but planned to do so before the end of
the year. He said the agency’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons
unit is “taking investigative steps with the goal of finding the person
responsible for Sue Sue’s tragic death and holding that person
responsible for their actions through the criminal justice system.”)

Both Kirk and Norton had been victims of domestic violence at the hands
of two of the Richards brothers. The Daily News and ProPublica found
that state prosecutors repeatedly allowed the men to avoid felony
domestic violence convictions for strangling or beating women, including
Kirk and Norton. In those cases, the state offered the sons deals,
allowing them to plead guilty to reduced misdemeanor charges such as
“harassment” and receive slaps on the wrist, not prison sentences.

• • •

Anchorage Daily News · “Fine Third Parties”
Listen to state Superior Court Judge Paul Roetman describe Annette
Richards and Clement Richards Sr. as “fine third parties” in a 2015 bail
hearing for their son Anthony Richards, who was facing sexual assault
charges. (Obtained by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica)

• • •
In one sexual assault case involving a different woman, state Superior
Court Judge Paul Roetman granted Anthony Richards, the mayor’s youngest
son, uncommonly low bail. Roetman explained his decision by saying he
had worked with Anthony’s mother and knew his father held elected
office.

Roetman and two prosecutors, now a magistrate and judge, declined to
comment through a court system spokesperson. “Judicial officers cannot
and do not comment on their cases, in order to maintain the integrity of
their decisions and to ensure that, for fairness reasons, their thinking
is reflected solely in the official court record without extraneous
commentary,” the spokesperson wrote.

In the center of Kotzebue, Norton’s adoptive mother, Susanna “Mama Sue”
Norton, is waiting for answers from Alaska’s criminal justice system.
She lives three doors down from the house where her daughter was found
strangled to death.

“My family is not going to have peace until they know that they found
someone that did this to her,” she said in an interview in 2020. Three
years later, as another winter begins, the case grows colder by the day.

A history of criminal charges
Kotzebue lies just above the Arctic Circle on a frying-pan-shaped
peninsula, nearer to Russia than to Anchorage. Clement Richards Sr. was
born here in 1961, two years after Alaska became a state. The city sold
itself back then as the Polar Bear Capital of the World, where small
planes carrying trophy hunters from across the globe parked on the sea
ice. (One of the largest polar bears ever recorded was hunted here in
1963.)

In the 1970s, geologists confirmed what a local bush pilot long
suspected: The red-stained creeks that veined the tundra hinted at a
massive mineral deposit. In the ‘80s, Kotzebue and surrounding villages
voted to create a new Northwest Arctic Borough government, with the
second-largest zinc mine in the world funding public services such as
search and rescue.

Meantime, Clement Richards Sr. and Annette Richards were busy growing
their family. The couple had two sons, Amos and Clement Jr., and another
on the way in May 1989 when Clement Sr. kicked Annette in the stomach,
according to charges filed in Kotzebue state Superior Court. Clement Sr.
had previously struck her, Annette wrote in an earlier restraining order
request. This time she was eight months pregnant.

The charges say Annette was “bleeding profusely from her genital area.”
The couple’s third son, Anthony, was born the next day.

Clement Sr. pleaded no contest to felony domestic violence assault and
received a six-month jail sentence. The conviction wasn’t mentioned by
his opponents or the media a decade later when he won a seat on the city
council in 1999 or still later when he became the city’s vice mayor,
then mayor. Annette began working in a local office for the Alaska State
Troopers where her duties involved assisting state prosecutors,
including one who later served as the judge in domestic violence cases
against her sons.

The sons wrestled in high school, competed in fishing derbies and
sometimes worked at the nearby zinc mine. Now 34, 37 and 39, all three
have listed the former mayor’s property as their home address for most
of their adult lives.

All three sons have been charged with assaulting women at the mayor’s
property but dodged serious punishment.

The Daily News and ProPublica reviewed 31 criminal court cases involving
the three sons, including more than 800 pages of charging documents,
testimony, sentencing orders and protective order requests. In 12 of
those cases, one of the sons was charged with committing domestic
violence. The victims — six different women — included the sons’
relatives and current and ex-girlfriends, including Kirk and Norton.
(The other criminal cases involved driving while intoxicated, indecent
exposure and trespassing.)

Seven of these domestic violence cases were filed while Clement Sr. held
political office, from 1999 to 2018. All told, the three sons have been
charged with a combined 16 counts of domestic violence, including five
felonies. Yet none of the charges against them resulted in a felony
domestic violence conviction.

While the details in each case differ, seven of the domestic violence
cases unfolded in familiar ways:

First, one of the girlfriends or a worried neighbor called the Kotzebue
police. Officers arrived to find the victim with visible wounds such as
bruises, markings on her neck or a bloody nose. The girlfriend told
police one of the sons punched, kicked or strangled her.

She told police the attacks began when she tried to stop the son from
drinking, attempted to leave the house or refused sex. In two cases,
police noted the mayor or his wife refused to cooperate with the active
investigation. The Kotzebue Police Department then arrested the son but
usually labeled the attack as a low-level misdemeanor rather than felony
assault.

Next, the son appeared before a local judge or magistrate who was
sometimes a former state prosecutor who had worked alongside the
ex-mayor’s wife. The judge or magistrate agreed to set bail for the son
— once even acknowledging on the record that the bail was unusually low
and telling the victim that the mayor and his wife would help keep the
son out of trouble until the trial.

But the cases never made it to trial. They were settled at a
change-of-plea hearing where prosecutors dropped any felony charges and
the son promised to do better. Within a few months, maybe a year, the
cycle would begin again.

• • •

Anchorage Daily News · “You Dodged a Bullet”
Listen to state Superior Court Judge Paul Roetman speak to Anthony
Richards, who was facing sexual assault charges. “To say that you dodged
a bullet is probably an understatement on this one,” Roetman said.
(Obtained by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica)

• • •
In one 2013 case, a woman said Clement Richards Jr. punched her in the
face and police filed a charge of domestic violence assault. Clement Jr.
eventually pleaded guilty to harassment and received a suspended
sentence, scrubbing his conviction from the public record. In a sexual
assault case filed the following year against Anthony Richards, Roetman
reduced Anthony’s bail from $7,500 to $2,500 over the protests of the
victim, who said in a quaking voice that she feared running into Anthony
in the town of 2,900.

“I know Mrs. Richards from when she used to work for the troopers,”
Roetman said at Anthony’s bail hearing. “She has a lot of experience
with these types of cases and knows what these are like.”

The Alaska Judicial Code of Conduct states that a judge “shall not allow
family, social, political, or other relationships to influence the
judge’s judicial conduct or judgment.” Roetman did not respond to
questions about his remarks in court, his work relationship with Annette
Richards or the cases he presided over involving her sons. A court
system spokesperson provided the newsrooms with a statement saying
“judicial officers cannot and do not comment on their cases.”

Although a Kotzebue grand jury indicted him on felony charges of sexual
assault and attempted sexual assault, Anthony Richards eventually
pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of indecent exposure in the
2014 case. The deal allowed him to avoid registering as a sex offender.
(The prosecutor, Rachel Ahrens, is now a state Superior Court judge and
declined to comment through a court system spokesperson.)

“To say that you dodged a bullet is probably an understatement on this
one,” Roetman told him at the change-of-plea hearing.

Increasingly dangerous attacks
Clement Richards Sr. won election as Northwest Arctic Borough mayor in
November 2015, campaigning on his experience leading the city and his
bona fides as a born-and-raised son of Kotzebue. He became chief
executive of a region the size of Indiana with a population of about
7,500. As climate change threatened the nearby village of Kivalina, the
Northwest Arctic moved into the national spotlight.

“What’s happening here is America’s wake-up call,” then-President Barack
Obama said after flying over the village and touring Kotzebue just
before Richards was elected in 2015.

Clement Sr. had been in office just a month when Kirk showed up at the
local hospital. She told police that Anthony had punched her five times.

Kirk grew up in the village of Buckland, 75 miles outside of Kotzebue.
She and Anthony sometimes lived in one of two teal green homes that
Clement Sr. and Annette Richards own on a grassy lot, one block from the
police department and City Hall. Officer Nate Lecours came to the
property to investigate the beating.

“Upon arrival the Borough Mayor, Clement Richards, who appeared
extremely intoxicated, answered the door and stated how can I help you a
total of three times speaking over me then slammed the door in my face,”
Lecours wrote in a Dec. 6, 2015, affidavit. (In a brief phone interview,
Lecours said he remembered that encounter but no longer works for
Kotzebue police and referred all questions to the department.)

A few days later, Magistrate Judge Stephan Brady reduced Anthony’s bail
in this new assault case to just $100. (Brady no longer works for the
state. He did not respond to phone messages or emails.)

As the years passed, the attacks grew more dangerous. On March 14, 2017,
Kirk told police Anthony strangled her until her field of vision began
to shrink and she nearly passed out.

That would have been enough, under a 2005 Alaska law, to charge him with
a felony for nonfatal strangulation. Alaska was one of the first states
to recognize that strangulation is often a precursor to homicide and
increases suicide risk, according to the Training Institute on
Strangulation Prevention.

The prosecutor, Ahrens, allowed Anthony to plead guilty to a single
count of misdemeanor assault.

Despite the light punishment, Magistrate Judge Aaron Michels warned
Anthony he could have killed Kirk that day.

“Strangulation is a very serious thing and it’s recognized that way by
the Legislature, that’s why these types of cases can be charged as
felonies,” Michels said at an October 2017 change-of-plea hearing. (He
declined to comment through a court system spokesperson.)

“The result of strangulation — if it’s not stopped, if a person can’t
breathe — is death,” the magistrate told Anthony Richards.

• • •

Anchorage Daily News · “You Are Getting Away From a Felony Conviction”
In a hearing where Anthony Richards pleaded guilty to misdemeanor
assault as part of a deal to avoid felony charges, Magistrate Aaron
Michels tells Richards that “the natural result of a punch or a kick or
kind of your typical misdemeanor assault is a bruise or an injury, that
sort of thing. The result of strangulation — if it’s not stopped, if a
person can’t breathe — is death.” (Obtained by Anchorage Daily News and
ProPublica)

• • •
On May 23, 2018, Kirk and Anthony’s final argument began on the mayor’s
property.

Alerted by a neighbor, two officers came to the house around 6 p.m. They
found Anthony in the bedroom holding Jennifer Kirk’s body, according to
police records, his hands and clothes coated in blood.

Anthony told police he had been watching TV with two children in the
living room when he heard the pop of a gunshot and discovered Kirk dying
on the floor. A .22-caliber rifle lay across her feet and a gunshot
wound pierced the underside of her chin.

The police department’s investigator at the time, Thomas Milliette,
measured the weapon.

“I noted the length of the rifle from the tip of the barrel to the tip
of the trigger as being 27 1/8 inches long,” Milliette wrote in his
report. Next he measured the length of Kirk’s arm: 26 3/18 inches. In
interviews, members of Kirk’s family wondered how Kirk, who was 5 feet,
5 inches tall, could have shot herself with a long gun.

Robert Shem, a retired firearm expert for the state crime laboratory,
said in an interview that such measurements can be useful in determining
whether a death is indeed a suicide, but in this case, more information
would be needed. (Shem was the forensic scientist who first established
a link among the shooting victims of Alaska serial killer James Dale
Ritchie in 2016.)

“Before I would write it off as a suicide myself,” he said, “I would
probably try to locate somebody of the same size and build and use that
rifle, or one similar to it, with the same length barrel and
configuration, demonstrate that it’s completely unloaded and see if the
person can lean over and potentially get their thumb in position to pull
the trigger.”

Kirk’s father, Timothy Gavin, said Kirk gave no hints she might kill
herself.

“We never seen that in her. No signs, nothing,” Gavin said. “So it’s
hard to believe she did that to herself.”

Gavin knows something about policing and public service. A Buckland city
council member and the former mayor, he served 11 years as a village
police officer. He’s also no stranger to gunshot deaths. His stepfather
shot and killed his mother, Kirk’s grandmother. (The stepfather was
convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to prison.)

Kirk’s mother, Dora Stalker, chatted with her daughter hours before the
shooting and recalls that nothing seemed amiss. They even made plans.
“She was trying to ask me to send diapers for her daughter,” Stalker
said.

“We kind of had a plan to send each other some Native foods,” Stalker
said. Kirk would trade her mother beluga muktuk in exchange for
springtime smelt from Buckland.

Two days after Kirk’s death, the state medical examiner’s office phoned
Kotzebue police and said her body “showed signs of strangulation,”
according to the death investigation report compiled by police and
obtained through a public records request.

[Read our previous reporting: Lawless - sexual violence in Alaska]

In his first interviews with police, Anthony had not revealed that he
and Kirk violently fought before she died. Once Milliette knew about the
strangulation marks, Anthony admitted to causing the injuries to her
neck. He said he acted in self-defense.

Anthony said Kirk slapped him and he “held her away by the neck and
didn’t know how hard he was squeezing,” according to the police report.
Anthony said Kirk continued to slap him so he pushed her to the ground,
twice. He said he didn’t know if he knocked her unconscious.

Milliette closed the case after one day of investigation. He concluded
his report with a note that the medical examiner’s office had called
again and said Kirk’s death would be ruled a suicide, with the final
autopsy findings to be sent to Kotzebue police when finished. Kirk’s
mother, Stalker, said police never interviewed her or asked her what her
daughter had said to her the day she died.

“They should have investigated a lot better, a lot more thorough before
they said it was a suicide,” Stalker said. “It’s like they just rush and
do whatever to get it over with.”

The Kotzebue Police Department did not answer certain questions about
the death investigation, including any about what conclusions Milliette
drew from the rifle measurements, referring questions to the former
police chief. Milliette did not respond to interview requests. The
Alaska Department of Law, which oversees state prosecutors, did not
answer questions about why no charges were filed in the case.

https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/crime-courts/2023/11/11/one-woman-died-on
-an-alaska-mayors-property-then-another-no-one-has-ever-been-charged/