Updated Dec. 12
Police have arrested one man and questioned at least two other people after a dispute Monday morning in the St. James Place subdivision off east Fourth Avenue in Haines ended with one man being shot in the foot.
Neighbors in the small community of manufactured homes said they heard two men yelling in the street just before noon.
Evelyn Grogan was unloading groceries from her car, she said, and stepped outside to see what was happening.
“The guy who lives [here], I saw his arm raise up with the body language of a shooter. I heard two shots,” she said. “I cannot say I saw the gun, but I heard the shots.”
Grogan said the shooting worried her because children live in the neighborhood. She called the police and went back inside her home. She says she wrote down everything she saw so she wouldn’t forget anything when police arrived.
At 11:24 a.m., Haines police responded to a dispatch of at least one report of shots fired in the area. Police sent out a Nixle alert, advising residents to shelter in their homes.
Emergency personnel blocked off the road quickly, but a steady stream of cars drove by the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Union Street, peering up into the heavily wooded neighborhood.
Interim police chief Michael Fullerton said that’s going to happen whenever the department issues an alert, but decided warning people was better than letting them unknowingly stumble into a dangerous situation – particularly because police were told someone fled the scene and did not know whether the person was armed.
After she heard the shots, Grogan said she saw one man turn and jump into a nearby vehicle.
“As he tore out, tires spinning, rocks flying, he hit the man [who fired the gun] and ran him over,” she said, “I remember the tire going over his body.”
Fullerton said when police arrived, they repeatedly announced that the 48-year-old alleged shooter, who lives in the neighborhood, needed to leave his home. When he answered, he surrendered peacefully, Fullerton said.
In most cases, the Chilkat Valley News does not name alleged victims or perpetrators of crimes until the facts of the case are ruled on by a court.
In a video shot by a neighbor, three officers wait on the landing of the home before one quietly leads a barefoot, handcuffed man away in the snow.
Haines police officer Max Jusi said after the man was arrested, officers were told that two other people involved in the conflict were seen on Main Street, according to court documents. He and Fullerton then found the two, a man inside the IGA grocery store, and a woman in a vehicle outside.
In court documents, Jusi wrote that he interviewed the man, who told him that he had gone to the neighborhood to pick the woman up and the alleged shooter became upset and threatened him with a pistol before pointing it at his feet.
According to court documents, the woman told Jusi that she and the man who had the pistol had smoked methamphetamines twice the night before and morning of the incident. According to Jusi’s account, she told him that she had asked to be picked up, as he was acting erratically.
After those interviews, police charged the man who lives in St. James Place with two felony-assault crimes and three misdemeanors, including another assault, possession of a controlled substance and firing a weapon recklessly.
Grogan said the whole thing felt like being on an episode “Cops,” a long-running American reality television show profiling law enforcement.
Another neighbor, Henry Stevens, lives in a home next to where the altercation happened. As Stevens talked about what he saw, he fed treats to one of his neighbor’s pups, a Yorkie-Corgie mix named Tucker.
Stevens said he heard the two men yelling about drugs. In the last year, the neighborhood has seen more traffic, conflict and police responses, he said. Before that it was a quiet, friendly place.
“It’s not something you expect to hear in small-town Alaska,” he said of hearing the gunshots. “You hear guns off in the neighborhood, they’re usually chasing off an animal, not a person.”