DISAPPEARANCES FINALLY GETTING SOME ATTENTION

Residents of three Native villages met with law enforcement officials last week to discuss a series of suspicious deaths and disappearances dating back decades. The cases involved mostly Native men who died or went missing while visiting the city of Nome. They went unnoticed or unsolved until the recent murder of a young Native woman who had moved to Nome from a nearby village. A police officer is on trial for her death.

According to the website Indianz, residents of the villages said some of the cases may be linked to police brutality. Some said they didn't report the cases out of fear. Others said they received little or no help from the police in Nome.

The Anchorage Daily News reported Sunday that victims are mostly Native men who traveled to Nome, the Seward Peninsula's commercial hub, from surrounding villages. Many of those communities are Inupiat and Siberian Yupik. The newspaper said 10 cases of death or disappearance have been reported since 1990 alone. A list of 20 suspicious cases, along with reward offers, was released last week by a Native organization in Nome.

Villagers in the Bering Strait region have long worried that danger, hostility and police indifference await those who travel to Nome. But no official investigation into deaths or disappearances had been launched until earlier this year, when the region's Native community was galvanized by the murder trial of a Nome police officer accused of killing a 19-year-old woman from Unalakleet who came to Nome for work.

By February of this year, villagers trembling with emotion were stepping forward in meetings to tell stories of missing family members. The U.S. attorney for Alaska and the commissioner of the state Department of Public Safety flew to Nome with FBI officials in June.

The cases, long a concern in the villages, then finally caught the official attention of Native organizations and state and federal law enforcement authorities.

Last spring, the Norton Sound Health Corp. board passed a resolution seeking a federal civil rights investigation of the "extraordinarily high" number of missing and dead Natives, citing complaints of inadequate investigations and "discriminatory harassment and excessive force" by Nome police. Other groups expressed similar feelings.

Kawerak Inc., a Native nonprofit agency that has pushed the cases into the open, says it is not trying to point fingers at past problems with police.

"Our attempt is to come to some resolution of these cases and to work with our Police Department to make Nome a safer place," said Kawerak executive vice president Melanie Edwards.

"We want people to feel someone took a good hard look into their family member's case -- whether they were drinking or not, whether they were from a village or a city, whether they were from a wealthy family or a poor family. Justice should be served."

Most of the cases remain under Nome Police Chief Craig Moates jurisdiction.
In a recent tour of area towns and villages, Moates heard some pointed questions and comments that revealed a deep-rooted mistrust of Nome police. But he also was thanked repeatedly for reaching out to the villages, and a number of people opened up.

A not untypical story came from Joseph Akeya, a forty year old Indian.

"He choked me, kicked me," said Akeya, at one of the meetings, speaking softly with a toddler on his lap. It was 1988 when, as he recalled, an officer barged into the room at the Polaris Hotel in Nome where he was sleeping off a few drinks. The officer beat him up, he said, calling him a "drunk Eskimo."

"He threw me down, handcuffed, stepped on my neck real hard on his hard boots, brought me downstairs from the hotel. I was choking and couldn't breathe. On the way down, he opened the door and banged my face on the door. And my mom saw that because she was working for that hotel."

Akeya said he fought back.

The meetings, organized by Kawerak Inc, were polite. Villagers wanted to know if police had installed audio or video recording devices in their cruisers (the answer: no), if they patrolled alone in their vehicles (sometimes, with the force short-handed), and how far back their records go.

"I have a question. Do your records go back as far as the '40s and '50s?" asked a woman in Brevig holding a toddler. She pointed to an elder sitting nearby. "Her brother was missing the late '40s and another from Teller was missing in the '50s."

The police chief said his department's records probably don't go back much further than the mid-1970s.

Although Native people in the area had long feared even making public their concerns about the police, stories of alleged police misconduct came pouring out after a Nome officer, Matthew Owens, was charged in 2003 with murder in the death of a 19-year-old Unalakleet woman who had moved to Nome. His high-profile trial in Nome earlier this year ended in a hung jury. A second trial of Owens is now under way in Kotzebue.

Among the complaints was that police took nearly a month to follow up on reports from Native witnesses linking the victim's disappearance to a police car. State troopers eventually took over the investigation. Nome's former police chief resigned after the arrest.

Moates, who had worked his way up through the ranks to become deputy chief of the 100-member Franklin, Tenn., police department, answered an ad on the Internet and arrived in Nome 18 months ago. He has made repairing relations with the Native community a top priority.

Moates said he has investigated all complaints he's heard of past police misconduct, but could not substantiate any. "If it's something that happened 15 years ago, it's going to be pretty difficult to do," he said.

The chief said he hasn't received any recent complaints about the eight patrol officers currently serving on the force. Any such complaints would be thoroughly investigated and misconduct will not be tolerated, he said.

"If there are issues that have taken place many, many years ago, if there is something we can do to resolve that, I would like to," Moates said. "We have a reputation to uphold."

FBI experts in serial homicide have now made the series of unresolved cases in Nome a top priority according to the Juneau Empire and FBI spokesman Eric Gonzalez. The FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Va., has agreed to profile each case in a search for possible links.

Case files on the mysterious deaths and disappearances have been forwarded to the FBI by Nome police and the Alaska State Troopers. The FBI was given details of 24 cases

The dead and missing all appear to be Natives.. Seventeen of the 20 were men. Eight of the 20 disappeared and were never found, officials said. The others died under suspicious circumstances -- for instance, people with no known suicidal tendencies who drowned off the jetty.

Myra Henry of Koyuk has organized two Missing People marches in recent years down Front Street to call attention to the problem. She got involved after her brother-in-law, Archie Henry Jr., disappeared on a 1998 shopping trip to Nome. For a year, she called the Nome police daily, turning up several potential witnesses herself. But the case never went anywhere.

"The seven years has been very difficult for us, not knowing what happened," she said.

She also lost a cousin, Ernest "Sonnyboy" Saccheus of Elim. He disappeared in Nome in 1987, on a stopover coming home from Anchorage, after leaving his hotel to get a few drinks.

Delbert Pungowiyi, a tribal council member from Savoonga who has been pushing for an investigation since 1998, believes more than one person is preying on Natives in Nome.

"People disappear over there and where are the bodies going? Where are the remains going?" Pungowiyi said. He called Nome "a boneyard for the region because there are so many remains there that have never been found. We're in 2004, 2005 -- and it's still happening."

The cases never would have lingered had the victims been Nome residents instead of villagers, Pungowiyi said.

"Can you imagine the outcry they would be having, demanding that these be solved?" he said. "It should have been given attention years ago. I'm just really glad it's finally happening. ... The region is just overwhelmed with this. They're tired of this. They're tired of living with these big gaping holes and no closure." Sources: Juneau Empire, Anchorage Daily News, Indianz