The group was Patriot Front, described by major news outlets as a white supremacist and neo-fascist organization.

Reuters reported that hundreds of masked members marched through DC on July 4, carrying Confederate flags, Patriot Front flags, and altered versions of the American flag.

The Guardian reported the same: hundreds of masked members of a white supremacist organization marching in the nation’s capital on Independence Day.

It is tempting to look at this and ask, How did we get here?

But the truth is, we have always been here. The slogans and the platforms change, but the belief underneath stays the same.

Some people matter, and some people do not. Some people deserve protection, while other people deserve punishment.

Today, under an online post made, a man wrote: “good we should sentence all them hookers to death.”

Just someone sitting behind a screen, typing out that hookers should be sentenced to death like he was commenting on the shitty 4th of July Anchorage weather.

People want to pretend there is a huge distance between masked men marching with Confederate flags and some guy on Facebook saying sex workers should die, but there isn’t.

Both are built on dehumanization.

What is that?

Dehumanization is when someone takes a whole group of people and turns them into a label. Not a person. Not a mother or a daughter. Not a friend. Not a survivor. Not someone trying to pay rent, stay alive, feed their kids, get through the day, or get home safe.

Just a label. “Hooker.”

Once a person becomes a label, it becomes easier to say what should happen to them.

Lock them up. Ignore them. Laugh at them. Don’t believe them.

Don’t investigate when they disappear.

Don’t care when they are beaten. Don’t care when they are raped.

Don’t care when they are murdered.

And if someone says hookers should die, people shrug and call it a joke.

That is what scares me on this glorious American holiday celebrating freedom. Not only the men marching through DC, although they should scare everyone, but the everyday permission people give themselves to talk about marginalized people as if their lives are negotiable.

I have watched this happen with sex workers for years.

When a sex worker is raped, people ask if she can even be raped.

When a sex worker is murdered, social media talks about her record before they ask about the man who killed her.

When a sex worker reports violence or a possible murder, cops look for a reason not to believe her.

So when someone publicly says “hookers” should be sentenced to death, too many people treat it like ugly background noise instead of what it is: a violent belief stated plainly.

That comment did not come outta nowhere, it came from a social culture that has spent decades teaching people that sex workers are disposable.

Disposable to police - to prosecutors - to politicians.

Disposable to the public.

Language matters, not because I am sensitive or because I cannot take a joke, but because violence starts with the story people tell themselves about which bodies count.

Before a society abandons people, it has to rename them.

This is what fascism does.

It sorts human beings into categories of worthy and unworthy. It promises safety to one group by threatening another. It turns cruelty into order. It turns domination into patriotism. It tells people their fear is righteous and their hatred is moral.

And that is also what whorephobia does.

This is why these two images belong in the same conversation.

One is a national warning sign, the other is a local warning.

Do not look away from either one. Hate doesn’t stay contained in the comment section. It doesn’t stay at the march. It finds laws, policies, police indifference, prosecutorial discretion, public silence, and social permission.

I am not going to pretend the man saying “sentence all them hookers to death” is just some random idiot online.

I am not going to pretend masked men waving Confederate flags on the Fourth of July is just some fringe embarrassment to an already Idiocracy-looking presidency.

The Fourth of July is supposed to be about freedom, and yes, freedom has always been complicated in this country, and for sex workers, freedom is still conditional.

In 2026, neo-fascists can march through Washington, DC with Confederate flags, and a man online can say “hookers” should be sentenced to death.

Both are warnings, and both are asking the same question:

Whose humanity is still up for debate?

Mine is, is yours, yet?

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Years before the public was asked to trust Alaska’s death investigations, auditors had already found problems inside the state crime lab.

In 2017, a special audit by the Alaska Division of Legislative (DLC) pulled back the curtain on the Alaska Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory and showed the public something interesting - a $90 million high-tech crime lab with unfinished forensic space, bureaucratic offices tucked inside, and serious safety and credibility problems.

The lab opened in June 2012.

According to the DLC report, planning and design started back in 2004 and cost about $16.8 million. In April 2010, the Alaska Legislature approved another $75.75 million specifically for construction.

The public was told this 84,000-square-foot building was being built for forensic work and future expansion, but at the time of the DLC audit, nearly one-fifth of the building was left as unfinished “shelled-out space” to save money.

Instead of being used for future forensic expansion, some of that space was being used for administrative offices, records, supplies, and storage. At one point, the Commissioner of the Department of Public Safety and DPS administrative staff were using the space. The DPS Office of Professional Standards also occupied the lower floor of one wing.

DPS later moved the Commissioner’s staff out of the crime lab space and across the street in late 2020, according to Forensic Magazine. Around that same time, the Anchorage Assembly approved a lease agreement allowing the Anchorage Police Department to move staff and equipment into the building for $1 a year for five years, with an option to extend.

The stated goal was to “utilize existing capacity,” “maximize efficiency,” and “standardize forensic science practices.” That sounds good.

The 2016 audit also found problems that should have shaken public confidence.

• In 2012, a minor was given an electronic key card and allowed to help with drug inventories.

• In 2014, Alaska appointed Dr. Zientek as the state’s only Chief Medical Examiner, despite the fact that he had previously been convicted in Virginia on three felony drug charges, later reduced to misdemeanors. His medical license had also been suspended. The Virginia medical board reinstated his license in 2007, but with restrictions.

• In 2015, the lab moved to a “self-service” evidence vault because of budget cuts. DLC auditors warned that this increased the risk of theft.

But here is the biggest problem, without a new performance audit, the public has no way to know whether any of that actually happened.

That question matters even more when you remember the Kyle Hopkins Lawless series, in partnership with ProPublica from 2021. He detailed how Alaska law enforcement agencies had failed to collect DNA from more than 21,000 people arrested for qualifying crimes, even though they were required to do so under state law.

So we have a big beautiful building to do all of this work, with promises of efficiency and capability, being underutilized. Protocol issues. Evidence at risk. The DLC report is now more than a decade old, have things been remedied?

Can we get a new audit?

Because without one, we do not know what changed, and at some point, “trust us” is not good enough.

We are being asked to trust a system that has already been warned about safety breaches, poor judgment, unused forensic space, and weak oversight.

We are being asked to trust the only Chief Medical Examiner Alaska has, and his team that handles evidence, autopsies, toxicology, DNA, and death investigations.

But really, why I started even looking into the Crime Lab is the fact that we are being asked to trust an office that seems to reach for the same catch-all phrase when Alaskans die under questionable circumstances:

Natural causes.

Most people in Alaska do not know the name Troy Michael Laky.

They will not think about a 17-year-old babysitter and her 18-year-old friend, alcohol, memory gaps, court delays, dismissed charges, and the way a criminal case can shrink once it moves in Alaska’s legal system, when they hear his name.

They will not trace the case from a February night in 2019 to an arrest in 2020 in Homer, Alaska.

But I will, and I want to tell you about Troy Laky and this case.

The state alleged Laky furnished alcohol to underage girls and then sexually assaulted them, and the prosecution seems to have focused on incapacitation/lack of consent, not statutory age. Alaska law makes it illegal to furnish alcohol to anyone under 21, which is why both a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old can be “minors” for the alcohol charge.

Troy Laky, 37, was charged with three counts of Sexual Assault 1 - Penetrate without consent, five counts of Sexual Assault 2 - Penetrate Incapacitated Victim, three counts of Sexual Assault 3 - Conact with Mental Incapable and two counts of Furnishing Alcohol to Under 21, but was only convicted of a single felony charge, and not even one he had been originally charged with.

Coercion. Instill Fear of Injury

Court records list Troy Laky’s conviction as coercion under AS 11.41.530(a)(1), described as “instill fear of injury.” The judgment labels it a Class B felony, but when I looked up what coercion was, I was confused because Alaska’s statute lists coercion as a Class C felony.

Weird.

Moving on to what that charge means is easier than figuring out why it is listed as a Class B when it is a Class C. Simply, Laky was convicted of coercing someone by making them fear that, if they did not comply, he or someone else might inflict physical injury or commit another crime.

Many will hear “charges dismissed” and assume that means the story ended clean.

I am here to tell you, it did not.

Let's start at the beginning.

This case began in Homer Superior Court as State of Alaska v. Troy Michael Laky, case number 3HO-20-00154CR. The alleged incident happened on February 16, 2019. According to court filings, Laky was 37 years old. His two victims, listed by initials, were 18 and under.

T.H. was 17, and S.W. was 18. T.H. was at Laky’s home to babysit his children. S.W. was there as her friend.

The State alleged that Laky gave the girls alcohol, and that Laky recklessly disregarded their lack of consent, and engaged in sexual conduct when he knew they were incapacitated while a sexual act was happening.

Court language always sounds cleaner than real life. It takes a night that someone has to live with forever and puts it into a paragraph that sounds like it was written by a machine. I know all too well the feelings dry sentences and initials leave on a young girl. I know the aftermath and damage.

Underneath those words are two young girls describing a night that came back in broken pieces.

One described playing Cards Against Humanity, being unable to walk or talk much, trying to tell him to stop but only being able to mumble. She described blurry moments, blackouts, realizing she was naked, and waking up with Laky on top of her.

The other described being offered a drink, watching a movie, and then nothing. She said she woke up and saw Laky on top of her. She described being unable to move. She described seeing him later get on top of T.H. She said the next day she felt sore and did not remember a large portion of the evening.

I am not sharing these details for shock value. I am repeating them because this is what sexual assault cases often look like before the courtroom and a powerful private attorney gets hold of them.

Alcohol. Memory gaps. Fear. Power. An older, usually “respectable” man. A teenage babysitter.

A full year went by before there was an investigation. In March 2020, Alaska State Troopers received a report of a possible sexual assault involving two underage girls.

A public notice says the investigation led to Laky’s arrest, and he was taken to Wildwood Pretrial Facility on 17 charges.

Let’s break those charges down:

Sexual assault 1 usually means sexual penetration without consent, including by force/threat or by causing the person to become incapacitated.

Sexual assault 2 can include sexual contact without consent, sexual penetration with someone who is incapacitated, mentally incapable, or unaware a sexual act is happening, or other non-consensual penetration not covered by sexual assault 1.

Here is the link that explains those terms.

Alaska law can call a 17-year-old a minor when someone gives her alcohol, but not automatically call her a minor when someone sexually assaults her.

Troy Laky could be charged with furnishing alcohol to minors and sexual assault, but not necessarily sexual abuse of a minor.

The state’s theory was likely not “she was underage.” The theory was “she could not consent.”

Why wasn’t he charged with Sexual Assault of a Minor for at least the sexual assault of the 17-year-old? He was in a position of authority, by definition he was her employer.

From there, the case moved through Homer Superior Court.

And it kept moving like molasses, while years passed.

By the time the case resolved in April 2024, the public record looked very different from where the case began.

The charges were dismissed by the prosecution under Criminal Rule 43(a).

Laky was convicted by guilty plea of one felony count: Coercion. Instill fear of injury.

This case, which began with serious sexual assault allegations involving a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, ended with one felony coercion conviction.

But wait. There's more.

There was also a defense motion in 2024 asking the court to allow evidence of a prior sexual relationship between Laky and T.H. The defense argued that history was relevant to consent and credibility.

Remember, a prior history means that T.H. would have been younger than 17 years old at the time.

This is where Laky’s private attorney, Wally Tetlow, starts doing what they always do in a trial, they make statements and poke holes into the allegations. It is Tetlow’s job, and he does it well. The defense even requests her medical records and essentially calls her mentally unstable.

This is how cases get turned inside out. The original allegations get buried under questions about whether the victim was the right kind of girl.

A prior relationship does not create permanent consent. I'll repeat this: If it had happened before 2019, then she was younger than 17.

In April 2025, the Alaska Office of Victims’ Rights withdrew its limited entry of appearance on behalf of crime victim S.W. in the same case.

Laky was not convicted of the sexual assault charges. Those charges were dismissed. He was convicted of felony coercion.

But the documents of the case still matter. They show how a case can begin with a long list of sexual assault charges and end with something much narrower.

Alaska tells survivors to report. Then its own numbers show what happens next, nearly half of sex-offense referrals are declined, resolved cases are more likely to be dismissed or pled than tried, and trials are almost nonexistent.

In the Department of Law’s own report, “Sex Offense Cases Referred to the State of Alaska, Department of Law Between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021,” only five sex-offense prosecutions had gone to trial.

Four ended in acquittal.

One ended in conviction.

Troy Laky’s case did not happen in a system where sex offense cases reliably move to trial and accountability. It happened in a system where nearly half of sex-offense referrals are declined, resolved cases are more likely to be dismissed or pled down than tried, and trial convictions are rare.

Then came May 2026, so, is there hope?

Alaska lawmakers passed House Bill 239, a sweeping crime bill that raises Alaska’s age of sexual consent to 18.

Rep. Andrew Gray, who had repeatedly pushed to raise the age of consent to 18, said the change would make it easier to prosecute people who sexually assault minors. After the bill passed the Senate, he said there was nothing his office would ever do that was as important as what happened that day.

That is the bridge I see between this Homer case and the new law.

The Laky case cannot be retried under a law passed years later. That is not how the law works. But cases like Laky’s are exactly why laws change.

When a 37-year-old man is accused in a case involving a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, alcohol, blackout memories, and sexual assault allegations, the public should not have to study the fine print to figure out whether the law was strong enough to hold a perpetrator accountable. If the law can not clearly protect victims under sex offense laws, that is not a technicality, that is the gap victims fall through.

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As a clickbait tool when it wants a headline, a sex trafficking crime when it wants government grants to keep coming in, or as a reason to shame someone.

And I am tired of watching everyone pretend they do not see it.

Look at the recent Jasmine Spa documents. Investigators say they executed a search warrant looking for “evidence of prostitution and sex trafficking operations.” They found two women, and according to the documents, the two women “appeared to be living in the back portion of the building.”

Really?

So, if police walk into a business and find women living in the back, the first response is, “Let’s charge them for sex trafficking?”

Read the document. At least one of those women becomes part of the state’s sex trafficking case. The sex workers arrested didn’t know that screening, scheduling, negotiating, or staying safe is criminalized in Alaska. Here, in a state with staggering rates of sexual assault and domestic violence, and in a region shaped by the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, survival strategies are “sex trafficking.”

I wrote recently about the Anchorage and Wasilla massage parlor raids because the public was being handed the same tired script of law enforcement raiding a business, saying it is “sex trafficking,” and everyone is supposed to clap like someone was saved.

But when you actually look at the charging and bail documents, the picture gets a lot clearer.

Several of the people facing the harshest conditions were the women identified in the documents as sex workers. A suspected male manager, Terry Allan Volkman, was released on a $5K bail. Same with Van Ness, low bail, and he has been released. Even Tuan Huynh is out on $10k bail. Meanwhile, Guoguo Zhang is hit with $100K cash/performance and $100,000 cash/performance bail. Hongzhen Li is being held on a $55K cash/performance bail.

Those numbers look like the same old system deciding who is dangerous and who gets to walk out the door.

And in Alaska, this matters because our sex trafficking laws are what most people think of when they hear the words “sex trafficking.”

People hear “sex trafficking” and imagine kidnapping, violence, locked rooms, stolen passports, and organized predators. And yes, those things happen.

But in zero of the charging documents were any of those words used to describe what was going on with the recent sex trafficking raids.

Alaska law turns ordinary survival arrangements into sex trafficking because managing or supervising a place of prostitution, negotiating with customers, and helping someone else work, common safety practices used by sex workers, are twisted into sex trafficking charges.

According to the charging docs, that is what Guoguo Zhang was doing. An undercover officer propositioned her during a massage and asked if another girl could join. In a rational world, that might tell us something about how police manufacture these cases, but here in Alaska, it becomes part of a sex trafficking charge. In fact, they added a special charge on her just for this.

Read the wording of this added charge, and you may see something interesting. Guagua is listed as living at the spa. If a woman is living in the back of a spa, she does not need the state to turn her into a criminal defendant.

We have a problem here. Alaska has not figured out how to combat actual sex trafficking without arresting sex workers.

This is where the media comes in. Because they can see the same charging documents I can. Police didn’t build this stigma alone. Prosecutors do not build it alone. Media helps build it.

Now look at the Anchorage Daily News headline about the resigned Nome judge:

“Judicial commission accuses resigned Nome judge of lying to investigators about Facebook friendships with sex workers.”

This judge had already been accused of vile conduct and racist and xenophobic comments. He had multiple reports of inappropriate behavior from the bench. Those are things that should absolutely be reported on, and it was.

But this headline did something else. It made “sex workers” the scandal.

As if knowing sex workers is evidence of moral rot, or having a Facebook connection to a sex worker is contamination. It was written in a way that framed sex workers as people not worthy of having friends.

This kind of framing does not stay inside one article. It trains the public.

Sex workers = low worth/the thing you use to disgrace someone else.

And if anyone thinks I am exaggerating about how fast this stigma shows itself, I posted a shorter version of this on Facebook and shared it in a few groups. The comments did exactly what I am talking about.

Some people told me I did not know anything about the sex trafficking cases.

Which is funny, because I have spent years reading these kinds of documents, writing about these cases, and sitting with these laws. I myself have lived inside the consequences. I am not going to sit idly by, watching people who know almost nothing about sex work suddenly become experts the second they want to defend a raid. Of course, I am going to say something.

Some people acted like I had misspelled prostitution because I wrote “sex worker.” Ha ha.

That part is almost funny, if it were not so revealing.

No, I did not spell prostitution wrong. I chose a word that recognizes labor, agency, humanity, and the fact that people in the sex trade are not all the same.

And then there were the people who skipped straight to cruelty.

One calling me a “third world piece of shit prostitute criminal,” as if the goal was to prove my point in real time.

And they did. That is what happens when the media and public policy spend years teaching people that sex workers are not really people with rights.

I am not upset about one headline or one bad comment.

I am disgusted with the systemic structure Alaska has built around dehumanizing sex workers, and then acting confused when violence against sex workers is ignored or minimized.

Lawmakers claim criminalization is necessary because the public has already been trained to see sex workers as less credible and less worthy of rights.

Then we are killed, or go missing, and no one looks, or they look too late, and someone inevitably comments, “Well, what did they expect? It’s dangerous.”

Yes, it is dangerous. It’s dangerous because stigma and criminalization make it dangerous.

It is dangerous because lawmakers use our bodies to justify funding, task forces, and prosecutions, but still refuse to give us rights.

Alaska cannot keep pretending this is about rescue while treating sex workers as low-worth criminals and pretending to fight trafficking while charging workers.

You cannot say you care about exploitation while making it more dangerous for exploited people to ask for help or claim moral concern while using “sex worker” as shorthand for shame.

This is a system. It is a whole damn machine that sex workers pay for with our autonomy, and I am tired of being described in the language of the media and the state-sanctioned shame.

Prostitute. Commercial sex worker. Known to the police. High-risk lifestyle, anything but a whole person.

If you are still reading, thank you. I hope you understand what I am trying to be clear about. Sex workers are not asking anyone to pretend coercion does not exist, or the media to ignore exploitation.

We are asking for basic human rights.

A sex worker is not automatically a victim with no agency or a criminal with no credibility, and a person knowing sex workers is not, by itself, a scandal.

The scandal is that Alaska still treats sex workers as a class of people it can use but does not have to respect.

Lawmakers need to stop pretending criminalization protects people while every safety practice we use is turned into evidence against us.

And the public needs to stop applauding headlines before asking who is actually being helped, and who is being jailed.

Sex workers are not the scandal.

The scandal is how comfortable Alaska remains with treating us as less.

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This is an opinion piece from the Durango Herald, April 8, 2026, and was submitted to be reprinted in full on The Alaska Record by the author, Dave Stephenson, of Juneau, Alaska.

Alaska Native and other Alaska residents comprise a plurality of students at Colorado’s Fort Lewis College.

Shortly after I graduated from there in 2002, professors and local police began a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and retaliation based on my guest columns and letters to the editor of various publications.

Because the college is still funded and promoted by tribal governments and corporations, the following letter to the editor regarding my case might be useful to other Alaskans studying or considering studying at FLC.

- Dave Stephenson

I was reported to the FBI as a “domestic terrorist” by Fort Lewis College professors and Durango police on Feb. 11, 2003, in response to a column I wrote for the Minneapolis Star Tribune that mentioned the American Indian Movement. This was part of a larger, racial criminal libel prosecution. While it was eventually reduced on appeal and I returned home, my confusion and trauma remain.

The Jan. 24 killing of Alex Pretti, a VA nurse – who, like me, was simply attempting to negotiate the nuances of the First Amendment – by ICE agents, and his immediate labeling by Kristi Noem as a “domestic terrorist” certainly evokes comparisons to my prosecution, which in many ways foreshadowed ICE and the selective application of constitutional rights.

I am a disabled Tlingit veteran diagnosed with service-connected PTSD and encephalopathy – and a terminal liver condition exacerbated by a stay in filthy Colorado prisons without medical care. The VA staff are always warm and attentive, so I feel like I knew Alex personally. We both were nonviolent people subjected to life-ending violence (I’m just taking a little longer to die).

My mother, Ernestine Hayes, is a Tlingit memoirist, professor emerita and American Book Award winner. FLC professors depicted her as Ma Barker in their reports – an irony, given that her books are required reading in some FLC courses. Race was an undeniable factor in my case, as it is in ICE tactics. What is unfolding nationally has been present in Durango for decades, maintained by an establishment that benefits from the racial hierarchy.

Dave Stephenson

What jumps out to me about the massage parlor raids is not just who was charged. It is who is being treated as more dangerous. In total, there were seven people arrested.

I wasn’t able to find charging documents for Xiong Xiaotian. Maybe it was a spelling issue, but I tried multiple variations for the spelling. I even tried Vinelink. No luck.

But I found the others.

According to the charging and bail information, Terry Allan Volkman, identified by investigators as a suspected manager of Renew Spa, was released on a $5,000 appearance bond on April 15.

Meanwhile, several of the women charged, women who are identified in the charging docs as sex workers, face far steeper bail amounts.

Guoguo Zhang was held on $100,000 cash/performance and $100,000 cash/appearance bail. The undercover officer had propositioned her during a massage and asked if there was another girl who could join.

Tuan Huynh’s bail was set at $25,000 cash/appearance. From the charging docs, he appears to be the boyfriend of one of the women, Hui Zhang, helping with shopping and sometimes acting as a driver. In the docs, they write that he also said that a long time ago he used to be a client, but not anymore, since he had met Hui.

Hui Zhang is described in the docs as being a sex worker, but also getting rid of condoms, and helping to pick up a sign from SIGNCO for Zen Massage.

Her recommended bail? It was presumptive release to personal recognizance, but that was overridden due to “Significant Criminal History”.

I couldn’t find anything about her criminal history, and I searched. Although there is a man by the same name in Massachusetts who defrauded the bank of a million bucks.

I don’t think they are the same person. And that is worth noting.

Hongzhen Li was listed on business documents as the registered owner of Zen Spa and is being held with no bail at all. Huynh told the police that she was Van Ness’s girlfriend. She is 51, and Lee Merrill Van Ness is 75. Van Ness had $5,000 cash/appearance bail, with a court-approved custodian.

When sex trafficking cases are announced in the media, the public is usually handed a familiar script. The news reports what the police tell them, and the headlines exclaim “SEX TRAFFICKING” and “VICTIMS SAVED”.

We are told this is about rescue.

We are told law enforcement is targeting exploitation.

But when you look at who is actually locked up, who gets a path out, and who is left sitting in jail, this story gets messy fast.

If Volkman was important enough to be described as a suspected manager, someone allegedly helping run operations at Renew Spa, why was his bail only $5,000? Why does a man described as part of the management structure walk out on a relatively low bond while women in the same alleged business face high bail amounts or no bail at all? That is not a small detail.

This raises a harder question that these raids rarely answer. When police say they are going after trafficking, who are they actually going after? Because over and over, the answer seems to be women who are sex workers, and because the women in these specific raids are not white, it only makes it harder to see them as capable and independent enough to make their own choices. Xenophobic much?

Well, until you figure the bail amounts anyway. Then they are seen as capable criminals.

That is what makes these cases so hard to take at face value. Using the language of trafficking suggests the state is targeting power, coercion, and force. But the bail outcomes suggest something else. They suggest a system that still knows exactly how to sort people by who the court sees as worthy of release.

And in Alaska, this pattern is not new.

In Alaska, sex trafficking just means that someone manages or supervises a place of prostitution (Sex Trafficking in the Second Degree). Or like Guoguo Zhang, allegedly agreeing with the undercover to go get her friend for a double (also Sex Trafficking in the Second Degree). In the charging doc details, condoms and security measures are being used as criminal evidence. Alaska has not figured out how to actually combat sex trafficking without arresting sex workers.

Sex workers are often treated as both suspect and expendable. Victim or victimizer. Our bodies become the site of public outrage, and then we are handed the harshest consequences. But the men around sex workers, often when described as facilitators or managers, often seem to move through the system differently.

Especially if they are white men.

Maybe prosecutors will argue there are facts not yet public that justify the bail disparities. Maybe more information will come out. I don’t know, but I will be paying attention. I have the charging docs and the pretrial assessment docs. The proof of service and the arrest sheets. I have read them all, and many things stand out, but I wanted to focus on the bail discrepancies right now.

Based on what is public now, what is alleged, let me paint you the bail picture that tells its own story.

A suspected male manager at Renew Spa got out on $5,000. One woman got no bail. Another was hit with a $100,000 bail. That is not what equal concern for exploitation looks like. It looks like the same old hierarchy bullshit.

Here are the people charged and the specific alleged charges and bail info (minus Xiong).

Tuan Huynh, charged with five counts of Sex Trafficking in the Third Degree. He was observed transporting women and luggage between various spas and the airport. $25,000 cash/appearance.

Lee Merrill Van Ness, charged with five counts of Sex Trafficking in the Third Degree. Evidence shows him picking up workers from the airport and transporting them to spas. $5,000 cash/appearance.

Terry Allan Volkman, charged with five counts of Sex Trafficking in the Third Degree. He was identified as a suspected manager of Renew Day Spa, where he was seen bringing groceries, transporting workers, and managing patron altercations. $5,000 appearance bond, per risk assessment, pretrial enforcement was recommended, and records indicated he is on formal probation supervision, although I did not see anything in a court records check on what that would be from.

Hui Zhang (alias Sunny), charged with one count of Sex Trafficking in the Second Degree (managing/supervising an enterprise) and two counts of Sex Trafficking in the Third Degree (receiving compensation and facilitating the enterprise). Presumptive release to personal recognizance was recommended, yet this was overridden, and she is being held with no bail according to her arrest sheet.

Hong Zhen Li, charged with two counts of Sex Trafficking in the Second Degree (owning/managing an enterprise) and one count of Sex Trafficking in the Third Degree (facilitating the enterprise). No bail.

Guoguo Zhang, charged with two counts of Sex Trafficking in the Second Degree (owning an enterprise and procuring customers) and two counts of Sex Trafficking in the Third Degree (accepting proceeds and facilitating the enterprise). $100,000 cash/performance and $100,000 cash/appearance.

If this really is about sex trafficking, then the public deserves more than headlines about raiding massage spas.

What about the other sex trafficking cases that have been repeatedly called in to APD?

Women like Kaitlyn Kaganak, her alleged sex trafficker has not been arrested, and it has been months since she was found murdered.

There are other names I cannot list, bad men, predators, that have been shared by family members asking the police for help getting their loved one away from their trafficker. Where are those headlines of those arrests?

We deserve an honest accounting of who is being punished, who is being framed as dangerous, and why that burden keeps falling so heavily on the women. Before you applaud these arrests and thumbs up these raids, try to read beyond the headlines, between the police press releases, and stop treating every raid as a rescue.

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Today marks the anniversary of a day I started to visit a serial killer to get information.

March 17, 2024.

It sounds crazy. I know.

That is why I didn’t announce it to anyone. There were three of us who decided it was the best course of action to get answers about a specific person: Ian Calhoun.

I have to be honest. I wasn’t as nervous as the average person as I waited in the lobby of the Anchorage Correctional Center. The killer I was waiting to visit didn’t know me, and I didn’t know him, but I knew what he had done. I had gone daily to his long, drawn-out, and gruesomely evil murder trial. He sat there, looking as if he was relishing the videos and evidence on display.

Videos and images of two women he had brutally murdered, Veronica Abouchuk and Kathleen Jo Henry. The jurors took less than two hours to come back with their guilty verdict. He had been found guilty on all fourteen counts.

But here I was, on St. Patrick’s Day, sitting in the lobby of a jail waiting for the door to be buzzed open. I didn’t know what I was going to say to gain his trust. I knew there was a likelihood he would take a look at me and refuse the visit. I didn’t want that to happen. I wanted the information he held. From what I gathered during the trial, he wanted to be heard, he had a fondness for brunettes, and he wanted to be liked. He wanted to pull people into his orbit where he felt important.

To visit someone in ACC you had to fill out a visitor’s form. It asked the usual questions, and they needed an ID, but there was one line I didn’t know how to answer: How do you know this individual? I wrote - WORK. It might be a stretch, but it was sex work that brought me to the trial. I wanted to go support an amazing sex worker badass, the woman who had turned in the SD card.

But after the trial ended, after the guilty verdict came in, nothing was happening with the information that came out during the trial. Text messages. A mention of a woman named Alicia Youngblood.

After two protests surrounding Ian Calhoun, we knew nothing was going to be done. He was the man the killer had been texting while he was torturing Kathleen Jo Henry, and he was not going to be arrested, according to the detective on the case. They were not investigating him. He was getting a pass.

And who was Alicia Youngblood? We could only find her obituary online, and the woman we found was young and beautiful and hadn’t passed away in Alaska, so maybe that wasn’t her?

We needed more information.

The door buzzed, and the five of us waiting for a visit stood and formed a line. The guard wanded us one by one, the other four standing in front of the elevator. The guard directed me to one of the two booths to my right, and as he unlocked the door and let me in, closing it behind me, I realized I was now locked in a little plexiglass tube with a phone on the wall. The chair was hard plastic.

I sat and waited a few minutes, and there he was, the short killer from the trial, his eyes looking at me with bewilderment.

I put my game face on.

I sat up, looked friendly, gave a smile. I leaned forward slightly.

He met my smile as the guard opened the locked door on his side. I could tell they were talking, but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

The killer looked at me again, nodded, and stepped into his side of the cubicle with the plexiglass separating us.

The guard stood there waiting for what I now knew was a thumbs up on the visit, and the killer again looked at me, then at the guard as he waved him off.

Then, he sat down.

I knew whatever came out of my mouth next would make or break this visiting thing.

I have compartmentalized things throughout my life. I have had to act as if, bite my tongue, and keep my mouth shut many times. I have honed my poker face, knowing that giving an inclination of disapproval or disgust could impact a conversation. The small, little giveaways of body language were easy for me to hide, to adapt.

I picked up the phone, and he picked up the phone.

His eyes were on me. I meet his gaze. I could tell he was at least mildly interested in hearing why I was there.

“Hi,” I started, making sure my voice had a slight lift, my smile genuine looking, “I’m a friend of Valerie’s.”

Damn it why did I say that?

“I wanted to come see how you were doing? I’ve been in jail before and know how difficult it can be.”

Quick recovery.

“Oh,” the killers eyes brightened, “I don’t really know her, I haven’t met her before,” he stammered.

I knew that was bullshit.

So that is how it is going to go.

“I went to the trial, and just thought I would come visit. I am sure that you have your side of everything. I wanted to just come say hello. It must be difficult being in jail,” I smiled. I knew being in PC was a lockdown, and he would be miserable. Good.

And so it began.

Now, I have to be completely clear about why I was doing this, because this sounds like crazy town, right?

We, as in Michael Livingston and Antonia Commack, coordinated and planned these visits. We would have a check-in before each visit and an immediate debrief after each visit.

I wasn’t there making a new friend. But the killer didn’t know that.

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I wasn’t announcing what I was doing.

For several reasons, but really, how do you tell people you are choosing to visit a seriously evil serial killer, and I didn’t want him to get wind that I was playing him.

And yes, I was playing him.

I didn’t bat an eye as he rambled on during our 40 or 50 total visits. He shared his views on people of color (racist), his views on Alaska (fresh hunting ground vibes), and he shared his paperwork.

All the paperwork.

He sent me paperwork on everything, except the one person I was there to learn about. Ian Calhoun.

He talked about everything except being responsible for the two murders for which he was found guilty.

In the paperwork, I learned about Alicia Youngblood, his letters thick with the police narratives that stopped me in my tracks as I learned of the calls she made in 2018.

I sat at my desk as I went through those papers, the sunlight hitting my keyboard as I read her words, and the pleas to be taken seriously. I cried, sadly aware of why such a young, beautiful woman ended her life, the heaviness of knowing that she had tried to get the Anchorage Police to listen, and they didn’t.

I could feel her there beside me as I read the awkwardly pieced together (after the fact, no doubt) police narrative that detailed her initial contact with the police. I could feel her, shaking her head, saying, “See, I tried, I tried!” and the horror that she had failed, deciding to end her life after a string of Facebook messages with the killer’s wife.

The interrogation and narratives and evidence and letters and visits and revelation after revelation of the ways the investigation went sideways. It was all so much, even with the three of us dissecting the pieces of the puzzle.

The evidence that had been thrown away and recovered (a garbage bag that a canine had hit on during a search of the area that Alicia had brought detectives to, where Veronica Abouchuk’s skull was found months later).

I wasn’t able to share what we were uncovering, but Antonia was.

The Hybrid Witness paperwork, asking the killer what the images of the woman on the grass meant, and who she was, was never fully answered, during my 40 or 50 visits.

As the killer recounted the cold evil lurking above him, because he was in the cell where Israel Keyes committed suicide, I feigned fear.

But the only fear I had were in the dreams that started to take over my sleep. Dark, twisted, and violent dreams. The information I knew, and the things I had to hold in, were taking their toll on my ability to work. I knew I couldn’t and didn’t want to go on much longer.

Soon, true crime shows were circling because of the media surrounding the case. They found Antonia’s TikToks and my writings. We picked one, and after weekly Zoom meetings and real-time updates, they came to Alaska and started filming.

With the film crew and producer in tow, I went in and did an interview face-to-face with the killer. No plexiglass between us. No phone to speak into.

I would finally be able to reveal myself and drop the nodding and the half smiles. I would be able to push back on the words he said.

While waiting to set up in the media visiting room, I got word from the sergeant overseeing the visit that the killer was so excited and had been sharing that we were a couple.

My stomach churned.

I knew what I could say in the interview to embarrass him and hurt him in a way only words could.

During that visit, I was able to push back, but more importantly, I was able to show the killer who I was.

After I had him repeat what he had said about how easy it was to kill prostitutes, I grimaced back, “Like me.”

“No, not like you, you are an advocate.”

“I still work,” I shot back.

His eyes told me everything I already knew: I was killable.

He saw me, and for the first time, saw that I saw him.

After that interview, I have visited less than a handful of times. He knows who I am and knows that I know him.

I walked across Spain, following the Camino De Santiago, the French Way, to walk off the old me that found it easy to talk to a killer.

I wrote, which is the only way I can fully process deep issues, I found. All was not lost. There were good things that came from the times I had thrown myself into the cubicle across from a killer.

The paperwork, still voluminous, has more to be uncovered. But now, I can do it in nice, easy afternoons, not in hit-by-hit revelations like a crime drama I was living in with no escape.

Two years have gone by since I stepped forward to get what was needed by a killer. Would I do it differently? Hell ya. But could I do it differently? No. I had to play it as it was. And it was me, sitting across from a killer, uncovering the things that needed to be uncovered.

And it makes me wonder, exhaustedly, how many more cases are out there like his? That doesn’t have an Amber, Michael, and Antonia there to do the digging?

Trapped.

Afraid.

Healing through action is powerful. So is finding a voice after years of being reduced to a past you are still trying to survive.

We put time and passion into what helps us heal. And when we see others facing the same stigma we know so well, we reach back.

We help.

We cheer them on.

We make room.

Targeting a fellow survivor doesn’t just harm one person; it signals to others that their past, too, can be wielded against them.

When vicious slander comes from someone revered in the community, someone whose platform is built on survivorhood, education, and public trust, it chills disclosure and makes honesty feel dangerous.

An advocate who spreads half-truths and lies, then tells others to keep it ‘confidential’ and ‘between us’ while passing it along quietly, is not engaging in accountability. That is manipulation.

Secrecy is often an abuser’s favorite tool. ‘Keep this between us’ is how silence gets enforced. It is how reputational harm spreads without scrutiny, and how systemic harm sustains itself.

When the next generation of advocates looks back at us, what do we want them to see?

We should not leave behind a culture of bullying, whisper campaigns, and retaliatory harm.

Advocacy in Alaska should be collaborative, principled, and rooted in care. That is true everywhere, but this is my home. I love Alaska. And this is happening here. It is happening to me.

When an advocate with a far-reaching platform uses credibility, visibility, and influence gained through lived experience to spread lies about a sex worker and sex trafficking survivor, the damage reaches far beyond one soured relationship.

Petty personal grievances have turned into hateful slander meant to discredit my advocacy. Power and privilege have been weaponized.

This is not a misinterpretation or a difference of opinion. This is deliberate dishonesty used to damage credibility.

The person spreading these lies isn’t just harming me.

They are undermining my activism and damaging the work I have fought to do.

This kind of slander affects the issues I write about, the energy I have for advocacy, and the opportunities available to me. It affects who invites me to the table, a table I already had to fight to reach.

Hateful slander closes doors for me. It can close them for the people coming behind me, too.

I won’t be silenced by lies, and I won’t accept this being done to anyone else either.

We hold ourselves to the truth, or we become what we claim to fight against.

Today I’m announcing a brand new addition to my Substack publication, subscriber chat.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers, kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

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2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Welcome to the new home of amberbatts.com, now called The Alaska Record on Substack.
After a wild ride on the WordPress site I built years ago, I finally decided it was time to move. I’ll still be writing about the same things, but WordPress became a house with leaky plumbing, where graphics would vanish, links would randomly die, and I recently stumbled across comments from years ago that I was never notified about. That’s when it clicked. I didn’t just need a publishing platform. I needed a place where conversations could actually happen.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but once I had separated my Brian Steven Smith writings and gave The Harm Done its own home here on Substack, moving everything else here made sense, too. Substack lets me publish investigative work and personal writing in the same space, and it makes dialogue possible. For years, it felt like I was writing into the void. Seeing the feedback I’d missed made me realize I don’t want this to be a one-way street.

So here we are. Whether you’ve been with me from the beginning or you’re just tuning in, I’m glad you’re here. Read, subscribe, and if something hits you, leave a comment. Let’s dig into Alaska’s stories together, and this time, let’s actually talk

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Two years apart, two women were found dead in the same stretch of South Anchorage, near Golden View Drive and Bulgaria Drive, a secluded Hillside neighborhood set back on land with long driveways, big sky views, and a deliberate distance from the hubbub of town.

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Around Bulgaria Drive, typical home values often land in the mid–high six figures and above, this is the part of Anchorage where people with money buy space and quiet.

On May 7, 2016, Darlene Kunayak was found in the woods where those roads meet. Reports show a passerby flagged down an officer after seeing her body, visible from the road, (strange an officer was driving by) and police go on to say in their reports they didn’t believe Darlene had been there long.

Later reporting relayed the autopsy summary and the conclusion that there were no fatal injuries and no evidence of foul play but noted something that should stop anyone in their tracks.

Investigators believed Darlene may have died elsewhere and been dropped off where she was found.

Two years later, on July 9, 2018, Marione Evan was found dead in the same area, after she’d been missing for several days. The reporting that followed doesn’t have details about what happened and that matters.

Because for families, silence is not neutrality.

Silence is the message.

Marione’s family did what families always end up doing when official answers don’t arrive. They organized, raised money and tried to bring her home with dignity. Alaska’s News Source reported that her family planned to bury her on Yupik land in Tuntutuliak near the Kuskokwim River, and that she left behind four children and “a loving family.”

She was a loved mother, she was a daughter and her family deserved more than a headline and a fundraiser link.

This is where the way we talk about deaths like these can either honor a life or quietly diminish it.

Public conversation and media coverage or lack of, labels a person and seems to somehow make it their responsibility for being a “victim”.

A toxicology result becomes a verdict on a person’s worth.

Housing status becomes an excuse for why she was “easy prey”.

That’s convenient for everyone who benefits from low expectations. It is brutal for families who are still waiting for someone to care as much as they do.

And here is the part that keeps catching me in the throat: both women were found in the same kind of “in-between” place.

The kind of place where it’s easy to imply the woods did it, the elements did it, misfortune did it.

But the woods don’t move bodies.

If a person did not die where they were found, then there is a human story there that still needs to be told, traced, checked, and proven.

I’m not claiming these cases are connected. But I’m not saying they aren’t connected.

The location is a repeating detail that deserves more attention than it has gotten, and that “no evidence of foul play” is not the same thing as closure.

It is not the same thing as answers.

It is not the same thing as a family knowing everything was done to learn the truth of what happened to their loved one.

If we want a city that protects people consistently, not selectively, then we have to keep saying their names, and we have to keep asking for the basics.

Thorough investigations, clear communication with family members, and accountability that doesn’t depend on whether the public finds a life “sympathetic enough.”

Say their names: Darlene Kunayak. Marione Evan.

Their families are still here and they deserve more than what small investigation steps their loved ones’ death have been given.

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Linda Becerra Moran called 911 because she needed help.

That sentence should land like a simple fact. Because when a person being held hostage calls the police, the ending is supposed to be rescue and safety.

Not death.

But Linda didn’t get rescued. She was shot and killed by the LAPD. Linda, a trans migrant woman of color, reached for the one number America tells you to dial when you’re afraid, and LAPD officers fatally shot her.

https://www.sisterspgh.org/2025/2025/4/1/linda-becerra-moran

Linda’s story exposes something our systems keep trying to hide in plain sight. The way “help” becomes punishment when the person asking is already viewed as disposable.

When the survivor is a trans woman.

When she is brown.

When she is a migrant.

When the word “sex trafficking” enters the picture, that label that quietly turns them into a suspect if they aren’t the perfect victim.

Police departments love the language of rescue.

They pose as saviors while building policies that treat survivors like problems to be managed, contained, controlled.

Linda wasn’t met as a person in crisis. She was met as a threat.

Officers yelled orders in English despite it being clear she was a Spanish speaker.

They responded to visible distress with commands, escalation, force. See the video here, but a warning, it is violent.

Linda spent her final conscious moments being handled as an inconvenience and an object rather than a human being who had already been harmed.

This is what it looks like when “anti-trafficking” rhetoric collides with policing. Survivors are told to report. Told to seek help. But when they don’t fit the narrative portrayed in the media, their pain is filtered through suspicion.

Is she lying?

Is she unstable?

Is she dangerous?

The state’s reflex is not care it is control. And control becomes violence. Fast.

The cruelest part is that Linda’s story isn’t even rare. It fits a pattern when mental health is involved.

Families across the country know this script by heart.

When a loved one spirals, breaks, panics, dissociates, becomes suicidal. A parent calls for help, terrified. A partner calls, begging responders to come gently. A friend calls because they don’t know what else to do.

Instead of clinicians, de-escalation specialists, or trauma-informed care, a badge and a gun arrive, because that’s who we send when we don’t know how to hold human suffering.

When a person is in mental distress, urgency is not the same thing as danger.

Emotion can be seen as “noncompliance.”

Confusion becomes “erratic behavior.”

A cry for help becomes “a threat.”

And when the moment gets messy, as trauma always does, police reach for what is easy and what they’re built to use.

Force.

Linda’s death is not a failure of procedure.

It is the predictable result of a system that treats certain people’s survival as optional.

When survivors call for help, they should not have to gamble their lives on whether they will be believed, understood, or treated as human.

Linda should be here. Linda should have been protected. Linda should have been treated like someone worth saving.

Thank you to the invaluable and tireless work from all the amazing people at The Sidewalk Project, please read how you can stand up for Linda below.

SAY HER NAME: LINDA BECERRA MORAN

On Tuesday, 1/27, the Board of Police Commissioners will conduct their so-called “employee performance evaluation” of the officers who tortured and murdered LINDA BECERRA MORAN. Linda was a trans migrant woman of color who was being held hostage – and who was fatally shot by police when she called them for help on 2/7/25. For nearly a year since her death, LAPD has made continous desperate, pathetic attempts to downplay and conceal Linda’s murder, in the hopes that public outrage will die down. But we will NOT allow this state violence to go unchallenged. We, Linda’s community, will never forget her.

In Linda’s name – SPEAK UP AND FIGHT BACK at BOPC on 1/27!

SHOW UP IN PERSON at the LOS ANGELES BOARD OF POLICE COMMISSIONERS meeting at LAPD HQ TUESDAY 1/27 AT 9:30AM or join on ZOOM;

Engage with our SOCIAL MEDIA to get more information about Linda and ongoing updates about this fight;

EMAIL LAPC by Monday 1/26 at 5pm (feel free to use or adapt our sample letter below);

SHARE this toolkit with a friend.

1. SHOW UP AT LAPC

The LAPC meets every Tuesday at 9:30am at LAPD Headquarters (100 W 1st St, Los Angeles, CA 90012). See below for talking points you can prepare ahead of time – but also, please feel free to just show up. Even if you don’t give public comment, your presence will have a huge impact! The more of us in the room, the more pressure we put on the Commissioners regarding their complicity in state violence. You’ll be able to honor Linda’s life and support folks who knew her personally; protest the hatred, contempt, and fear which Chief McDonnell has for the communities he allegedly “serves and protects”; and get more context from community members and organizers as they expose the violent, racist, sexist, transphobic impact and intent of policing in our city.

If you’re joining virtually via the BOPC ZOOM, sign in a few minutes before 9:30am. If you intend to give public comment, make sure to hit the “raise hand” button as soon as the meeting is open. Space is extremely limited and will fill up almost immediately — literally, within a few seconds. You will be given one minute for each agenda item you wish to speak on, for a maximum of three minutes. We recommend asking to speak on “ALL ITEMS” when you are called on to give comment, so that you’re automatically guaranteed the max 3 minutes. Suggested public comment ideas below.

2. GET THE LATEST UPDATES ON THIS FIGHT FROM OUR SOCIAL MEDIA:

Instagram @thesidewalkprojectla

Twitter @TheSidewalkProject

The next day, I stood outside the Immigration Office in Anchorage, Alaska, with five others, protest signs in hand. I kept my car running as the temperature hovered around -10, so anyone who needed to warm up could. We took the honks and thumbs-up along with the angry faces, people flipping us off as they drove by. One truck even slowed down just to yell at us to get jobs. We stayed there anyway, bundled against the cold, while a sundog kept watch, it’s bright colors dancing high in the Anchorage sky.

A few days later was the StandUP Alaska vigil in remembrance of Renee Nicole Good in front of the Loussac Library. It had warmed up to 3 degrees, and I stood behind a row of candles encased in frozen water holders. Projected onto the wall of the library “DO-GOOD” and “DE-ICE ALASKA” flickered as several community members spoke about their native corporations in business with ICE, calling on an action request to sign the petition and force a reckoning of humanity, the history of colonization and the harm done fresh in many minds because in Alaska, like other places where indigenous were decimated, the generation trauma left behind is a reality to this day.

I had only heard Keith Porter Jr’s name earlier that morning. Beyond the headlines, social media play by plays and coverage of the protest in Minneapolis. As I drank my coffee I read on the news I could stomach on my phone, a story that highlighted him being the first publicly reported case of an immigration officer killing a U.S. citizen under President Donald Trump.

No one mentioned Keith Porter Jr’s name that night, and I was left standing, looking at the crowd of maybe 100 people, wondering if anyone else had heard his name and knew of his murder. I did the cowardly thing and because I didn’t have the details I do now, I stayed silent. The fear of looking like a fool drowning out my voice of courage. I vowed, walking to my car, frozen hands balled up in my gloves, that I would learn about Keith Porter Jr. and say his name, someday.

While the news, social media videos and shares detailing Renee Nicole Good were at the top without me having to do a Google search, I had to dig for Keith Porter Jr’s coverage, which consisted mainly from local news channels in Los Angeles, Los Angeles Daily News and Facebook posts from friends and community members.

Outside of Los Angeles and outside of communities already tuned into state violence, Keith Porter Jr.’s name barely registered. For many, he was invisible unless you were already searching the web for him.

Renee Nicole Good’s wikipage reads like a history report; Keith Porter Jr’s is a blip on the Deaths, detentions and deportations of American citizens in the second Trump administration

Wikipage, three paragraphs long, and listed under Renee Good’s excerpt.

On December 31, 2025, late in the evening, Keith Porter Jr., 43, fired shots into the air to celebrate the New Year. An off-duty ICE agent who lived in the same apartment complex came outside, confronted him, and shot him. The agent was not arrested at the scene, and Keith’s family was left trying to make sense of how a celebration ended in a death that officials are still investigating.

Two thousand miles and one week later, on January 7, 2026, during a confrontation involving federal agents in Minneapolis, Renee Nicole Good, 37, was shot and killed by an ICE agent.

That officer was not arrested either.

Two U.S. citizens.

Two families forever changed.

Two fatal encounters involving ICE officers with witnesses, both sparking public demands for transparency and accountability.

But when Renee Good was killed, the details of her final moments spread fast.

Her name hit social media feeds immediately.

People shared videos, statements, and outrage, and not just in Minneapolis. A planned “Weekend of Action” saw crowds in major cities on both coasts, including New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Seattle, with over 1,000 events, holding candlelight vigils and protests.

The kind of public recognition that forces officials to respond.

What I can’t shake, and before I fall asleep in bed, I go over and over, in my restless, sleepy mind, microphone in hand, I say what I didn’t know at the time of the StandUP Alaska vigil: What about Keith Porter Jr.?

Part of the answer is how black and brown people and communities are written about and covered by decades of media coverage.

Words matter, they inform the public on how to think of a topic.

Coverage matters, they inform the public who is worthy of being a topic.

And who gets to speak on what happened matters because it teaches the public whose pain is credible, whose truth is trusted, and whose life is treated as disposable.

A Black man holding a rifle gets introduced to the public through a familiar stereotype: dangerous.

Federal officials described the Porter shooting as a response to an “active shooter situation,” while neighbors and family said he was firing into the air, and the story stayed boxed in as a local controversy instead of a national alarm bell.

Federal officials described the Good shooting as a response to a “domestic terrorist”, something national news drew back on after public outcry.

With Renee Good, the story became national instantly and the debate centered on whether she was a threat, a protester, a bystander, or a target. Even when officials tried to paint her as dangerous, the public reaction exploded anyway.

Attention doesn’t just change the conversation. It changes the resources.

Renee Good’s verified GoFundMe rose to more than $1.5 million in two days before it was closed.

Keith Porter Jr. has two GoFundMe pages, one with around $303K and another created to support his daughters, around 78K, but the national megaphone never showed up for him the same way.

No celebrities wore pins with his name. The Golden Globes response centered on Renee Good “BE GOOD,” “ICE OUT” while Keith Porter Jr. stayed largely outside the national narrative.

So I’m asking what we’re all thinking, but don’t always say out loud:

Is it easier to dismiss Keith Porter Jr. because he was a black man?
Because he was a black man with a gun?

Our country has spent generations training the public to see black men as threats first, and fathers, sons, and human beings second?

This isn’t about ranking grief or who is deserving of outrage.

This is about recognition.

It should not take the death of a white woman for the public to notice a pattern that has already been killing people.

Keith Porter Jr. deserved the same humanity.

And our country could have been paying attention long before it became impossible to ignore.

How a government executes its laws and executes its citizens is telling of where we are headed.

This is what I mean by ‘Murdered White Woman Syndrome, the pattern where white women’s victimhood is treated as more urgent, more newsworthy, and more human.

And if you think this is just a national media problem, look at what happens here in Alaska when the victim isn’t white with a story the public is trained to mourn.

In November 2023, Ataja Banks was 18 when she went missing in Anchorage. Nearly two years later, her remains were found near Moose Meadows Road in Wasilla. Her disappearance didn’t become a national story. It didn’t flood the timeline. It didn’t trigger the same urgency that so often appears when the missing person is white, young, and easy for the public to “identify with.”

And she’s not alone.

Kenneyon Baker was only 16 when he was shot in front of his home in Anchorage on October 15, 2024.

Alena Toennis, 16, was found dead on a powerline trail in Wasilla in November 2024.

Aaron Jon Edwards Jr., 17, was found dead in a car parked at the intersection of 13th Avenue and Karluk Street in Anchorage on April 27, 2025.

Only one of these cases has been solved, Alena Toennis, and a suspect has been charged in both state and federal court. Alena mattered. Her death deserves full attention, compassion, and justice. This article is not about diminishing her. It’s about asking why that same urgency so often fails to show up when the victim is black or brown.

Ataja Banks was last seen getting into a gray pickup truck with a cover at Cuddy Family Park in midtown Anchorage. That wasn’t highlighted by media, but it was on her MISSING POSTER.

Kenneyon Baker’s family can’t get a call back from the detective and their lives have been upended by threats that the Anchorage Police Department has not investigated or followed up on.

Aaron Jon Edwards Jr. family shares “We do not have many details, and don’t have answers to any questions.” on their GOFUND ME.

So here’s the question many Alaskans don’t like to sit with.

Is it easier to dismiss missing people of color?
Because our country has spent generations training the public to see black and brown as threats first, and fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, as human beings, second?

News outlets and the media provide more coverage to cases involving white victims, especially young, conventionally attractive, middle-to-upper-class women. Media coverage sways public awareness, determining which issues the public thinks about, and how they think about them, a large part being the language and the images used.

Cases involving black and brown victims regularly receive less attention and are less likely to be humanized (photos with family are less common). Much of the time an unflattering ID or a less desirable booking photo is used.

If we only show up, write about, stand outside with a sign, or say their name when the victim is white, then outrage isn’t justice.

It is selected silence, shaped by narrative, reinforced by media, and used to decide whose life counts as worthy of public outrage.

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One case centers on an alleged sexual assault at a Fairbanks campground. The other follows a shooting after a youth soccer practice in a crowded Anchorage parking lot.

A Duke Law review, SURVEY OF ALASKA’S LAW OF SELF-DEFENSE, underscores a key issue in the Anchorage case: if a defendant moves toward the person they later shoot, that can become a legal disqualifier for self-defense, regardless of the defendant’s claimed fear.

Anchorage: The Fox Hollow Case

The Anchorage case stems from November 8, 2025, outside the Fox Hollow Golf Course & Sports Dome. Luke Charles Simonson, 36, is charged with first- and second-degree murder in the death of Timothy Grosdidier, 45. According to charging documents, the conflict began after Simonson nearly struck a child with his truck. Simonson told investigators that Grosdidier was unarmed but yelling and “kept advancing,” and that Simonson feared for his safety.

Prosecutors say dashcam video contradicts Simonson’s account, showing him stepping out with his gun already drawn, moving toward Grosdidier, and firing as Grosdidier does not appear to advance. They argue that “moving toward” is legally significant: the Duke review notes self-defense protects someone under attack, not someone who escalates a dispute they helped provoke.

To raise self-defense in Alaska, a defendant must first meet the “some evidence” threshold, after which prosecutors must disprove it.

Fairbanks: A Self-Defense Claim After an Alleged Sexual Assault

Simonson’s case is still pretrial, but Tessa Hillyer, 38, has already been tried for the May 2025 shooting death of Raymond M. McPherson Jr., 48, at a Fairbanks campground, where he was found with six gunshot wounds. The trial focused on whether her use of force was justified and proportional, and what jurors could hear about the victim.

On December 10, 2025, a jury acquitted Hillyer of first-degree murder but convicted her of second-degree murder, which carries a sentencing range of 15 to 99 years in prison.

Prosecutors said Hillyer reported an attempted sexual assault and claimed self-defense, investigators noting a bruise near her eye. At trial, she testified that McPherson tried to force sexual contact, hit her, and that she shot him only after escaping to her car, grabbing her pistol, and firing as he lunged until the magazine was empty.

Bail and the Question of Who Gets to Go Home

The contrast between these cases is clearest before trial, at bail.

Judge Andrew Peterson lowered Simonson’s bail from $300,000 to $250,000. After a family member posted bail, Simonson was released to home confinement at his parents’ Wasilla property with an ankle monitor and limited permission to leave.

In Fairbanks, a judge had set Hillyer’s bail far higher: a $1,000,000 appearance bond (10% cash) plus a $1,000,000 performance bond (100% cash), with strict third-party supervision, GPS and alcohol monitoring, no alcohol or weapons, tight travel limits, and no-contact orders. She was to remain in custody until monitoring was in place. She never bailed out and remains incarcerated.

The bail gap reflects a harsh economic reality. Simonson’s release was feasible with six-figure cash and family housing/support, while Hillyer’s required seven-figure money plus intensive state oversight. Hillyer’s terms effectively operated as preventive detention for someone without wealth.

A Violent Backdrop

A University of Alaska Anchorage fact sheet, citing FBI data, notes Alaska has the highest rape rate per capita, averaging 105 rapes per 100,000 residents, nearly three times the national average.

Placed alongside the Fox Hollow case, Hillyer’s case raises a broader question: not whether Alaska law recognizes self-defense on paper, but whether Alaska courts and communities recognize it in practice, especially when the defendant is a woman alleging sexual assault, and when surviving the encounter risks becoming its own punishable act.

The Reasonableness Problem

These cases hinge on one question: what would a reasonable person have done? Alaska’s self-defense law is fact-driven and sometimes doesn’t require retreat, but fear alone isn’t enough. Evidence like video, forensics, and witnesses can make or break the claim. And the first decision comes before trial: who gets to go home. Bail, family property, and money for experts can shape the record and leverage early. The result is a system where reasonableness is not only a legal standard, but a gatekeeping tool.

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When I was 17, I came back to Juneau after almost a year in Seattle. The state had sent me to treatment in Bothell, Washington. I was released from state custody at the end of treatment, and I stayed, moving in with a group of friends. As you can imagine, it didn’t end well for us, and we scattered back to our lives.

I’d been a runner since fourteen, since the state first scooped me up and put me in the Miller House. Running was the only kind of control I knew.

I could have been a girl who went missing in Seattle.

But I had one person who loved me and answered the phone when I called for a ticket home.

My grandmother, Lorraine.

Just as soon as I was back in Juneau, I wanted out, so I jumped on a ferry and headed to Sitka.

After a drunken month, I found myself in the drunk tank, in bad shape, arrested for being drunk and disorderly.

I was flown back to Juneau in handcuffs. I spent a month at Johnson Youth Center, the juvenile detention center in Juneau.

A month later, I was released to a transition house stocked with two other girls I knew from the Miller House.

I hated being back in Juneau, hated how the streets knew my name and how it closed doors and made people see me in a small way. The transition house was pitched as a stepping stone toward emancipation. A house that promised “independence” like a coupon clipped from a paper I couldn’t afford.

Our house mom, Lisa, was a widow whose husband had been killed in a drunken fight at a downtown bar years before. Some days she was easygoing, letting us stay up late or being ok with us switching laundry days without a fuss. Other days, she picked at us like a mean, starving crow.

Five minutes late to dinner: points gone.

Dishes not put away on schedule: points gone.

Points meant privileges: phone time, TV, a later curfew.

She kept all the good food in her office-bedroom behind a locked door. Cereal with cartoons on the back, creamy brand-name peanut butter, chips and soda. Lisa smoked skinny Capri cigarettes and played Solitaire on the computer until the screen burned a ghost of cards into the glass. If she liked you, she’d let you smoke in there with her. Her son had the room with the bathroom and never did chores. That was our department. The four of us, two to a room.

Still, I was safe, and there was food, and it wasn’t JYC with the orange walls that echoed.

Soon enough, I took to drinking Little Kings in the bathroom. Small seven-ounce bottles that hid easily in my oversized green ADIDAS sweatshirt. I got a job at the Federal Building, working the register at the cafeteria.

I went along with the plan. I was never caught drinking, but I felt lousy about it because I was showing up to AA, nodding along, saying the words.

Only a few weeks before, the doctor at JYC had told me my liver was enlarged for my age. He stood before me in a white suit, glowing in a dark orange room during an initial examination after I was transferred from the Sitka holding cell.

I went back to my detention cell and looked in the polished steel mirror. I saw a skeleton of whoever I could have been, someone broken. I knew what alcohol did to me.

I didn’t care enough to stop.

What did it matter? I stared into that reflection, my eyes empty. I wasn’t going anywhere except back to Juneau to the same shit day after day. I flipped myself off.

But now I felt a little alive, and there were good moments in the house, proof that even ruined soil can grow something. A shiny Christmas. Our tree was soft with cheap tinsel. We took turns placing the angel on top like we were promising ourselves something bright. We giggled, then went out to smoke on the porch.

My roommate was Marion, quiet, sharp-eyed, demure. A teenage ghost. Someone who wouldn’t play along with how we were supposed to be. Loud, hungry, flirty.

Marion came through Miller House on day treatment. The file said depression.

Years later, that “depression” got its real name: Hodgkin’s.

That spring, Tracy arrived at the transition house. Marion and I had been sitting on my bed talking about Seattle, and I was embellishing the life I lived for the few months, pretending it wasn’t a drug-fueled struggle.

Tracy had been transferred from Sitka, and I had even seen her a few times when I was there. I gave her a big hug. Tracy and I had run together for years. We had both lived at the Miller House together. Had run away, been arrested, caused mayhem, together. I had sent her the most obnoxious oversized Garfield card only weeks before.

On a different afternoon years later, the three of us had toddlers in tow when Marion punctured her port, and blood burst from her chest. Tracy and I moved quickly. Kids, car, hospital.

But here and now, at the transition house, we were forming the easy basis for our friendships, each of us as honest with ourselves as we could. Life lay before us, and we felt defeated, each of us with reasons our bodies and heads were fighting battles we couldn’t see.

“What’s this place like?” Tracy asked.

“Great, in some ways,” I said. “Hard when Lisa’s being a petty bitch.” I was deciding whether to crack a Little Kings there or take it to the bathroom and gulp it like cough syrup. I knew Tracy could keep a secret. Marion, I wasn’t sure about, not because she talked, but because she noticed.

“I don’t know what I’ll do when I move out,” Marion said. “My mom says she can get me on with the state, but I can’t see a nine-to-five job. It sounds boring.”

I bounced up, sitting cross-legged. “I’ve got a secret. Do you two want to drink?”

Their eyes went big; sometimes I felt older than others, like I’d lived three lives by seventeen. It made me generous and mean in turns.

“I’ve got some Little Kings. I’ll share if you want to partake.”

“Yeah!” they both said in unison, shaking their heads.

We moved like we were planning a heist. We just had to go outside to my stash, so we smoked a cigarette, made sure no one was watching, and pulled the plastic bag out of the sparse trees beside the house where I had put my stash the night before. I had taken my sweatshirt off to wrap the bag, opening the door and going in first. Acting like there was nothing different. Act as if.

Lisa sat in her office, clicking through Solitaire. She didn’t look up.

“Bad thing about these is you need a can opener,” I said once we were in the room with the door closed, and I opened my top drawer, where I had one. It felt good to be with friends. We sat on the floor between the two beds and split the six bottles.

A few months later, someone else needed the bed at the transition house.

The first step toward emancipation was supposed to be moving in with a roommate. The Federal Building cafeteria, where I worked, was right across the street from a place my case manager had found, and she had thought it was perfect.

“Independent living,” my case manager called it, as if it were a brand.

What it meant was I had the freedom to spend my whole paycheck on booze and weed and cigs and then steal my roommate’s food when I got hungry. She worked long hours. I hardly saw her. I told myself that not seeing someone meant I wasn’t stealing from them. That’s one of the lies you learn early.

I told myself I’d stop drinking. I’d be eighteen soon. Then what? That’s the question the state never answers. What happens when the busywork ends and you’re still a kid with a grown-up body and no idea how to live life?

After a month, I disappeared and went on the run. Big surprise.

I remember a party in the Valley in someone’s trailer, a hand on my back, a laugh I didn’t like. I woke in the hospital with an IV in my arm and a nurse telling me I was lucky. When my blood alcohol fell below a number that meant I was allowed to be released, they walked me over to JYC. It was almost summer, the most precious, shortest season in Juneau, and I was once again staring at pumpkin-colored cinderblock, a kiddie jail painted like Halloween. I kept thinking of the sun outside, of the way the ocean smelled before the fish started spawning.

A social worker set it up for me to go live with my auntie Leah.

Leah was different. She wasn’t a foster parent or a woman renting me a safe room because the state paid her for it. Leah was family, the aunt I didn’t have by blood but had in my life. She’d known me since I was a baby.

When my mother needed a safe couch or a ride or a smoke and a laugh, Leah was there. They had been best friends from their teen years, but when I was 12, Leah was medivaced to Seattle. Her liver and alcoholism nearly killed her. She had stayed in Idaho, where her extended family lived, and had gone to school to become a drug and alcohol counselor. I hadn’t seen her in so many years. She had just returned to Juneau, only weeks before.

She picked me up in her blue Subaru on a day so bright the mountains cut the sky open. We smoked Marlboros, listening to John Cougar Mellencamp on her tape deck, and smiled, hugging as we caught up with each other as she drove me to the big house on Star Hill she was renting.

I told her about Seattle and about the transition house; she told me how she’d gotten clean and didn’t drink anymore.

She showed me the room that was mine. Really mine.

We sat in the little kitchen with coffee, and I felt the knot in my shoulders loosen.

She’d told me what happened with her drinking, when years earlier, they’d medevacked her to Seattle when her liver gave out. “Hep C from sharing needles,” she said. She talked about school, how close she was to finishing her degree, and how good it felt to have me there.

“Amber,” she said, smiling, “this is your house too. You know that, right?”

I nodded, surprised at the way the words landed like a warm, fuzzy blanket.

Growing up, when we all lived out on North Douglas, I used to go to Leah’s whenever I needed out of my mother’s trailer.

Safe wasn’t a feeling I had often, but I had it at Leah’s. Some nights, my mom and Leah would sit up drinking, singing songs in the kitchen at Leah’s. “Between a Laugh and a Tear” was their drinking song, often on repeat while I watched the kids in the back. Leah’s son Chris, the same age as my little sister Tiana, five years younger than me, would be playing in Chris’s room, and I would drift to sleep in the back bedroom with the TV humming.

Summers, once I was old enough to remember, were the best: me in the back of Leah’s Pinto with the kids, my mom and Leah up front, windows down, music up, the loop downtown again and again. Past the bus stop, past the cruise ship docks, waving out the window at people we knew.

In second grade, a teacher asked if anyone knew what “cruising” meant. My hand was the only one up. “Driving around downtown,” I said. The class laughed, and the teacher laughed with them. We were all telling the truth in our own ways. I didn’t know what was so funny.

By sixth grade, school wasn’t the point. Huffing gas before the first bell, mixing my mom’s bong water with oregano and pipe scrapings, and crisping it in the oven, my latest scheme, to trade for booze. That was my curriculum. I didn’t want to be bad, but when you’re hungry, you learn to hunt. I was hungry to be numb.

You find a pack. You figure out which adults want to help and which want to be heroes, and which will lock the pantry and call it love. You learn to tuck away what the doctor says, what the judge says, and you make a map out of the moments that feel like home.

Tracy, Marion, and I were just girls doing our best with the scraps we’d been handed. We hid Little Kings in the trees and shared them like communion. We held each other’s hair back and secrets close. We watched the way the sun slid down the mountains and promised that someday we’d follow it out.

We didn’t call each other out on the stories we told ourselves. We knew they weren’t always true. We stood by them anyway.

We were wolves, not because we were wild, but because we knew how to keep one another warm.

Then the years took their cut.

Tracy vanished on February 14, 2019. Swallowed by fog and silence on a day filled with hearts and rom-coms and flowers. A poster with her pictures “MISSING” across the top could never hold her fisherman-meets-valley-girl way with words.

Marion died on May 24, 2024, after the cancer squeezed the last bits of life from her. Near the end, when she was counting breaths, promising to eat, trying to feel rest, I wanted to ask her to tell Tracy I was still looking. I wanted to ask her to stay and watch over me. Over her kids. To be a part of the trees and the water and the air. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to accept that she was leaving.

I’m older now. People have come and gone. But those nights on the floor between the beds, sharing Little Kings, made a pack out of us.

I say their names. That’s how I keep them alive.

I say we were girls who counted points and shared smokes and told lies for each other and still made room for gentleness. I say we grew into women who carried children and dreams and brokenness that didn’t make us any less than whole. I say we were wolves. We may have been bitchy to each other, but we wouldn’t let anyone else be bitchy to us. We earned our warmth. We taught each other how to live with loss long before anyone taught us how to live.

We were wolves. Not feral but faithful. We learned to carry one another through winters that didn’t end.

Tracy, today, October 19, is your birthday. We will never stop looking.

Marion, I never stop talking to you.

And me. I’m still here: the last prints in a stretch of fresh snow, tending the small fire of what we had. When night comes, I lift my head and call.

That’s what a wolf does for her pack.

That’s how we find our way home.

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From an early age, I learned that being alone meant being unworthy of company. I clung to friendships, even fragile ones, just to avoid solitude. I’d hang out at other kids’ homes, wait while they got ready, linger in their presence, anything not to feel the ache of being by myself.

Later, in my teens, addiction taught me another form of aloneness. Isolated, afraid of myself, afraid of others. I didn’t yet understand the difference between being alone and being lonely. That realization came much later.

Recovery brought me back to myself. It taught me how to be with the discomfort, to feel without fleeing, to sit with my thoughts without chasing a high or a person. That was the foundation for walking the Camino de Santiago, a journey where I was rarely physically alone, but deeply alone in my thoughts. In a different country. Speaking a different language. Separated, yet strangely connected.

Fast forward years later: I’m trekking through a golden-hued valley in Spain. I pause, turn around, phone in hand, capturing the rolling hills. It’s June, the hottest June on record they say in the news. I rise before dawn to beat the sun, yet still sweat through my fast-drying clothes under a 12-pound pack. And yet, I’m exactly where I want to be.

1. It’s okay to sit still.
I used to believe movement was survival. But the truth is, stillness is also strength. Whether sitting at a café, lying on a blanket by the sea, or pausing on a stone wall in a city I don’t know yet. Remaining is a form of presence. Take up space. Stay. Savor the café con leche and croissant. Watch the clouds roll by. Wander aimlessly. Explore without urgency.

2. Live in the moment.
We hear that phrase so often it can feel hollow but when I remember Spain, what stays with me most are the moments shared. Like the evening I found myself in a lively bar-café, drinking my usual Aquarius, with some regional ham and cheese before me, when a woman from my albergue appeared. She danced and sang while enjoying her meal. “My birthday is in a few days,” she said, one of the few things I understood before pulling out my translator. Later she told me she was turning 72. From Mexico. Walking the Camino for herself. “I lived for everyone else,” she said, shaking her head. “Now it’s my turn.”

She became one of my heroes.

3. The Universe always answers.
One tough morning, as I trudged uphill with a heavy heart and heavier thoughts, I prayed the kind of walking prayer that only comes in rhythm with breath and footsteps: That Tony, my domestic partner, would listen. Would be kind. Would communicate meanfully.

Moments later, I passed a man who had waved from his car on the road earlier. He was entering a café as I walked by. “Buen Camino,” he nodded warmly. I smiled and returned the greeting.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Alaska,” I replied. Most people didn’t know where Alaska was, or had heard of Alaska and found it interesting, a far away land they had never met someone from.

“Do you know Alaska?” he asked, or so I thought.

Then he repeated it: “Juneau, Alaska?”

Laughter burst out of me. “Yes!” I said. “I’m from Juneau!”

“Let me buy you a coffee,” he offered, delighted to meet someone who knew his Juneau. I’d just had one a few miles back, but something told me this moment mattered. So I agreed.

I told him I was walking alone, but gestured to my hip belt, “I’m not really alone.” I carried the ashes of my grandparents, my mother, my friend Macadoo and his daughter Jennifer. He listened, then shared his own story: at 89, he was walking the Camino his way, driving between villages, walking a few kilometers each day. “My wife never wanted to do it. I always hoped we would. But now, I’m here and she’s with me.” He pulled up his pant leg to show me: purple socks in her honor. Her wedding band is on his pinkie finger. We talked about family, travel, the Camino. He did very well for himself, and had traveled extensively. Asking where his favorite place to travel was, he answered, “anywhere with her.” Meaning his wife.

I smiled, moved. I didn’t even know my new friends name. “What’s your name?” I asked, extending my hand.

He took it, smiling back.

“Tony.”

Not every message from the universe is dramatic. Sometimes it’s quiet, like saying no when something doesn’t feel right. Or saying yes, even when part of you thinks you should say no, just to save time.

4. You can say no.
When I was about 11, my mom took me shopping for school shoes. I didn’t see anything I really liked, but feigned interest in a blue pair of tennis shoes. The salesman brought out my size, and even though I didn’t want them. My feet looked like flippers, but I felt bad and said, “Sure.”

My mom had been impatient during the trip, and I’d already picked up on this unspoken rule: If someone puts in effort, even if it’s not what you want, you owe them. Because he went and got the shoes, I had to smile and take them home.

I wore them maybe twice. Then I made sure to lose them quickly. It sucked, because there wasn’t more money for another pair. I’d made a bad decision from a place of guilt—and it cost me.

Fast forward to Astorga, a beautiful city, with windy hills and castle tufts along the edges of a walking stroll on the Camino, and I needed a larger day pack because I’d been sending my big bag forward (it was June, and brutally hot and I needed all the help I could get). I wandered into a shop where the salesman was eager to help. He used a long pole to pull down several fancy day packs from high shelves, removing the stuffing and presenting each one proudly.

But they weren’t right. Too big. Too expensive. Too… not me.

And still, I felt it: that same childhood guilt bubbling up.

But this time, I thanked him, smiled, and left. Down the alley, I found a tiny convenience store where I spotted a plain, awkwardly-zippered backpack for five euros. It was perfect.

No guilt. No obligation. My 11-year-old self would’ve been proud.

5. Take the Bus When You Need To
Our bodies have limits. Some of us are good at certain things, some of us aren’t, and that’s okay. One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn and re-learn is not to compare myself to others. My Camino isn’t anyone else’s camino, and although I wrestled a bit about shortcuts, no one but me was walking in my shoes. Literally.

Even when I think I’m not comparing, I’ve started asking myself why I feel bad about changing my mind. It usually comes down to one of four things:

Guilt

Because others are doing it, so I should too.

Expectations

Because I had it in my mind to do something, and dammit, I need to follow through.

Comparison

Because I assume someone else knows better, or is stronger, or doing it the “right” way.

Desire

Because I simply don’t want to. And honestly, that’s the only reason that should matter.

I took a cab. I took a bus. While walking the Camino.

One morning, my legs were done. I needed rest. I called a cab to the next town, and it was exactly what I needed.

The bus was different.

I needed that too, but it came with more doubt. I boarded reluctantly, still trying to cling to the idea that “real” pilgrims walk every step. As the narrow road twisted up into the hills, the bus hugging cliffs with nothing but a sharp drop below, I suddenly wished I hadn’t gotten on. My stomach clenched. It was terrifying. I told myself I should’ve just kept walking. I should’ve earned it.

But here’s the truth I keep coming back to: I was tired. I was scared. I needed help.
And needing help is not the same as failing.

I used to think growth came from pain. From doing the hard thing no matter what.
But now I know that growth can come from kindness. From listening to yourself. From choosing rest, and not making yourself suffer just to prove a point.

Sometimes the hardest trail to take is the one where you let it be easier.

I wasn’t always the woman who could savor her own company, let alone trust herself to know what she needed, whether it was rest, movement, silence, or connection.

But somewhere between the quiet museum corners, sunrise walks, shared stories, and small acts of choosing myself, again and again, I became her. I am still becoming her.

The Camino didn’t give me that transformation, it revealed it. I had it in me all along. Every step, detour, and pause reminded me that healing isn’t a finish line you cross, it’s a life you learn to live.

One choice at a time.

Alone, but never lonely.

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But Refuge Coffee Collaboration, backed by Priceless Alaska, offers no such refuge to sex trafficking victims and sex workers who do not meet their redeemable victim criteria (i.e., someone who opposes laws that harm sex trafficking survivors and sex workers).

Refuge Coffee Collaboration recently opened its doors in the Spenard neighborhood of Anchorage, presenting itself as a warm and welcoming café “supporting survivors of human trafficking”. Refuge claims that proceeds go toward helping survivors.

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THE BACK STORY

Dicey Pricey - The Tale of Priceless details how a spacious South Anchorage home, donated to house trafficking victims, sat mostly empty. Despite the public image of tireless aid and outreach, few sex trafficking survivors found shelter behind its doors. Serious questions arose about how funds were used and who was actually being served.

Now, with Refuge Coffee Collaboration opening, those questions continue to go unanswered.

A simple look into the organization’s EIN (72-1525990) reveals the multiple religious based nonprofits operating under the umbrella Grace Alaska: Love Alaska, Priceless Alaska, Chosen Alaska.

Love Alaska markets itself as a nonprofit aiming to uplift Alaskans by encouraging volunteer involvement in “hurting areas of society.” On the surface, this sounds noble. But a closer look reveals vague claims and a lack of clarity about how donations are actually used. Through its initiatives, Priceless and Chosen, the organization trains mentors to engage with trafficking survivors and at-risk youth. However, their language deliberately blurs the line between consensual sex work and sex trafficking, a conflation that fuels dangerous policies and public misunderstandings.

These groups use similar language about serving the marginalized, but their actions tell another story.

Instead of offering direct services to survivors, much of their effort appears focused on training volunteers, including law enforcement and the general public to “spot trafficking.” This approach centers outsiders and institutions rather than empowering those with lived experience. It also reinforces harmful stereotypes, excluding actual sex workers from the conversation unless they fit a narrow “rescued victim” narrative.

We are either the right kind of religious victim or we are pimps because we do not buy into their shame and fear-based religious stance.” - Anonymous sex worker who had previously been provided services from Priceless.

NOW OPEN

Refuge Coffee Collaboration, owned by Grace Alaska per their business license, is open for business in Spenard, a neighborhood named after the colorful French-Canadian, Joe Spenard. Much like the man himself, Spenard has historically been known for its independence and notoriety for a good time, with working houses in a quasi red-light district up until the early 2000’s, rowdy bars and one of the only strip clubs that actually paid it’s dancers an hourly wage. RIP PJ’s.

Spenard was it’s own city until September 1975.

Refuge was recently featured in the Anchorage Daily News’ Open & Shut series, which tracks business openings and closings, noting that the café provides jobs for sex trafficking survivors, “We don’t put them on the bar, but they help pick out items for merchandise and help with food preparation,” said Allison Mogensen, the current executive director of Priceless and previous Director of Client Care at Love Alaska, “It’s back-of-house work for their safety and our safety.”

Morgensen stepped into the role of Executive Director for Priceless in September 2023. Before that, she worked with both Priceless and Chosen, first as a Case Manager (2021–2022) and then as Director of Client Care (2022–2023). In public appearances, she frequently references an FBI award as a mark of the organization’s credibility, describing it as recent, though it was actually given in 2018. The continued emphasis on a seven-year-old award raises questions about the organization’s more current accomplishments.

On the back wall, behind a long table designed for group gatherings, are black-and-white images of several Alaska sex trafficking survivors whom Priceless claims to have served. Small placards highlight their individual stories, images muted in black and white with gold accents covering their faces so their identities aren’t distinguishable.

One portrait of TL, a sex trafficking survivor, shared that Priceless got her story wrong. TL shared she had asked Priceless years ago to change her bio, yet they had not, “I wasn’t a meth user. I asked them to change it. It never was changed.”

DARING TO SPEAK OUT

Some sex trafficking survivors and sex workers from Community United for Safety and Protection have dared to speak out against proposed laws that would further harm their communities. While they advocate for safety, rights, and harm reduction, organizations like MyHouse, Priceless, and the Alaska Stop Human Trafficking Alliance (ASHTA) work closely together to lobby lawmakers and influence legislation without involving or listening to the people most directly affected. Survivors and sex workers who challenge these efforts or offer alternative perspectives are frequently discredited, sometimes even labeled as “pimps” or “traffickers,” especially when their advocacy conflicts with the narratives and goals promoted by these well-funded, politically connected organizations.

There’s little room in the narrative for empowered sex trafficking survivors or sex workers, those who survived without being “saved.” People who speak out against harmful policies are often vilified, especially if they don’t fit the narrow image of a redeemable victim.

“The heart of the coffee shop is creating space for the community to learn more about trafficking in our state,” Morgensen said in the Anchorage Daily News series.

But whose stories are actually welcome in that space, and whose stories are left out?

FOLLOW THE MONEY

The IRS Form 990 is a public document that nonprofits must file each year. It shows how they make and spend money. Anyone can look it up online to see how nonprofits are using their funds.

In 2020 Grace Alaska received over $51,974 in for the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act Grant.

Raising money using the image of helpless girls chained in basements and rather than funding shelter or harm reduction, the money donated supports business ventures centered on more fundraising.

Meanwhile, Priceless mentors are enlisted to spread religious rhetoric under the guise of fighting sex trafficking. The founder and executive director of Priceless, Gwen Adams (a self-proclaimed crazy church lady), sits on committees and holds leadership roles that inform legislative policies of prostitution laws.

In 2020, Priceless reported $5,474 in “program service revenue,” categorized as “class fees.” It appears they’re charging mentors and offering paid “sex trafficking awareness” classes, raising the question: If the goal is to support survivors, why is the focus on monetizing training instead of providing real, accessible services?

In 2022, they received more than $178,000 in grants. The 2022 990 lists a grant from the Alaska Native Women’s Resource for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault from cultural specific populations. However, it does not specify how much of the $178,049 in total government grant revenue came from that source, raising concerns about transparency in how public funds are tracked and reported.

Grace Alaska 990 2020 and 2022

HOUSE BILL 68

House Bill 68, introduced in the Alaska legislative 2023/2024 session, proposed a new Class B felony: Prostitution in the First Degree.

This statute change would have criminalized owning, supervising, or managing a place where someone engages in sex for a fee.

Earlier drafts defined a prostitution enterprise as two or more people organized to exchange sexual conduct for money. The bill aimed to target traffickers by reducing demand through criminalizing those who purchase sex, and created harsher penalties for consensual sex workers working together for safety.

Gwen Adams, the founder and current executive director of Priceless at the time, fully supported House Bill 68, although it would have made having a place of prostitution Sex Trafficking in the First Degree, an unclassified felony.

In Alaska, unclassified felonies, like murder or sexual assault, have set sentences written into law ranging from 30 to 99 years in prison.

Adams gave an emotionally charged presentation in support of House Bill 68, citing numbers and data without offering any sources or explaining where the information came from.

The full presentation from Priceless had data without citing where the numbers came from.

Still, HB 68 had some good parts, like the vacation of judgment for prostitution and misconduct involving a controlled substance if the person was a victim of sex trafficking, although there was some confusion about how a person would have to prove they were a sex trafficking victim.

In a subsequent draft of HB 68, it lists presumption and burden of proof in a vacation of judgment, “must prove all factual assertions by a preponderance of the evidence.“

Overall, HB 68 sought to expand criminal penalties while doing nothing to protect sex trafficking survivors or sex workers and would have expanded laws increasing police power, encourage profiling, while making it more dangerous for people in the sex trade to access safety, housing, or justice.

In what world does arresting sex trafficking survivors and sex workers for felonies combat sex trafficking? The founder of Priceless is lobbying for laws that criminalize the very people they claim to raise money and get grants to protect.

Right now, in Alaska, prostitution is a Class B misdemeanor, which is up to 90 days in jail and a fine of $2000.

MOVING FORWARD

The newly opened café in Anchorage’s Spenard neighborhood presents itself as a community-oriented space supporting survivors of human trafficking.

In an Instagram post from in January earlier this year, National Human Trafficking Awareness month, both Adam Legg, the Executive Director at Love Alaska, and Morgensen talk about the injustice of enslavement, with “all of us in the community being involved in that fight”.

Refuge states that proceeds go into programs to assist individuals affected by trafficking.

But do they?

If Refuge Coffee Collaboration is to be a true refuge, it must start by listening to the people it claims to serve. It must make space for sex trafficking survivors and sex workers at the table. Not as tokens for grants, not as warnings, but as equals.

Until then, there is no refuge here.

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I’m an Alaska Native army veteran who, rather ironically, was stationed at Fort Wainwright, in Fairbanks Alaska. This is ironic because soldiers rarely awarded their station of choice from their “dream sheet.” 

Long before arriving at Wainwright, when I was still in basic training, I was exposed to the rampant anti-Native racism rife in the U.S. military. I was ordered to sing cadences – marching songs – that reference Alaska Native women’s genitals as being “mighty cold,” told that enemy territory is “Indian country,” the enemy is “Indians” and “savages,” and that Native American names and words were white property, and could be used as ironic nicknames, platoon names and as equipment and weapons nomenclature.

When my group of soldiers arrived at Fort Wainwright, my new company commander cautioned us about visiting downtown Fairbanks, because local “Eskimos” would beat and rob us, possibly even murder us. 

We were quickly reminded that as Arctic soldiers we had to demonstrate our toughness by “raping squaws and wrassling polar bears.” 

My aunt and female cousins lived just down Richardson Highway from Wainwright. When the other soldiers laughed, my outrage, alienation, and disillusionment only increased. 

It is this language and attitude on the part of the U.S. military that has directly contributed to the history of white military men’s habitual rapes of Native women and white society’s tolerance and endorsement of the rapes and murders. 

As recently as 2018, Alaska courts gave a white man a “rape pass” seemingly continuing to allow the victimization of Native women with impunity.

Although American Indians and Alaska Natives serve in the Armed Forces at five times the national average, Donald Trump’s newly appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently abolished Native American Heritage Month in the military.

If you’re an Alaska Native or Native American, carefully consider the implications before enlisting in institutions that demean your identity, treat your people as enemies, and fuel the ongoing crisis of violence against Native women. The military’s decision to cancel Native American Heritage Month is more than just an oversight – it is part of a broader effort to erase Indigenous history, silence Native voices, and uphold a system that marginalizes and disregards Native contributions. This deliberate act of erasure makes it clear that while Native people are expected to serve, their history and sacrifices are not worthy of recognition.

Trump’s attempt to overturn birthright citizenship in an executive order uses an 1884 Native American case, Elk v. Wilkins as a legal analogy. The implications of applying the logic of Elk v. Wilkins today would mean that the U.S. government could deny Native Americans the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship.

Trump issued an executive order that would eliminate birthright citizenship, but a federal judge blocked the order temporarily shortly after 22 states quickly mounted a legal challenge. 

There are alarming reports of ICE agents detaining and harassing Native Americans. Reports of ICE agents detaining and harassing Native Americans have raised serious concerns about racial profiling, violations of sovereignty, and the erosion of Indigenous rights. In some cases, Native people, particularly those living near the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico borders, have been stopped, questioned, and even detained despite carrying valid tribal IDs or proof of citizenship. Tribes nationwide are rushing to provide IDs, legal protection, and information as ICE increasingly stops Native Americans, demanding proof of citizenship.

In Southeast Alaska, Tlingit and Haida, a tribal government representing over 37,000 Tlingit and Haida Alaska Natives worldwide, responded to Executive Orders from the Trump Administration by sharing how and where to get a tribal ID and a summary of the potential impacts on Tlingit & Haida and Southeast Alaska Native communities which included a pause in the funding of energy and infrastructure; protection of access to our traditional lands and resources.

The U.S. military has long relied on the service of Native Americans, yet it continues to uphold the very structures of racism, violence, and erasure that have historically oppressed Indigenous people. 

The Native post-colonial scholar and thinker Eduardo Duran says that the U.S. military is no place for Native Americans, and given the prevailing attitudes and additional traumas Natives experience in the military, he’s probably right.

The decision to abolish Native American Heritage Month in the military is nothing short of a slap in the face to the thousands of Native soldiers who have fought and died for a country that still refuses to respect them. It sends a clear message: Native contributions are good enough for war, but not worthy of recognition. This erasure, combined with the military’s entrenched racism and its long history of enabling violence against Native communities, makes it painfully clear that Indigenous service members are expected to give everything while receiving little in return. 

Until these injustices are confronted, Alaskan Natives and Native Americans must ask themselves – why should we continue to serve an institution that refuses to honor us?

Read more from Dave Stephenson here.

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The case of Cassandra Lee Boskofsky exposes a disturbing pattern of negligence and systemic failures within the Anchorage Police Department (APD), highlighting the broader crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Alaska.

In October 2019, the APD made a critical error upon arresting Brian Steven Smith. On his phone, they found graphic photographs of a woman, severely beaten and likely deceased. Despite the clear signs of violence, these photos were not immediately connected to the missing person case of Cassandra Lee Boskofsky. Instead of pursuing a possible link, APD investigators claimed they couldn’t determine if the woman in the photos was even dead. This initial failure to act on crucial evidence set the stage for years of unanswered questions and delayed justice.

Even with the shocking images in their possession, APD failed to connect them with Cassandra’s disappearance. A composite forensic sketch was created from the photos for a Sentencing Memorandum dated July 3, 2024. This sketch, which could have been instrumental in identifying the victim, was not shared with the public. This suppression of information further hindered the investigation and prolonged the family’s agonizing wait for answers.

The Boskofsky family’s journey to find answers was filled with further distress due to the APD’s mishandling of the case. Instead of using proper channels, Detective Lee shared the graphic photos with the Boskofsky family via Facebook Messenger on July 6, 2024, leading to their immediate identification of Cassandra. This informal method of communication is a stark indication of a flawed investigative process. Adding insult to injury, during Smith’s sentencing on July 12, 2024, Judge Saxby was incorrectly informed that the victim in the photos in the sentencing memorandum had not been identified. The family, present in the courtroom, was forced to witness this cruel display of injustice.

This case underscores a grave systemic issue: the neglect of marginalized communities and the failures of law enforcement to protect them. This case highlights the broader crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Alaska. The APD’s handling of the Boskofsky case, marked by inaction, poor communication, and a disregard for the family’s pain, exposes a system desperately in need of reform. The failure to act on crucial evidence and the repeated dismissal of Cassandra’s case reveal a system that is deeply flawed.

As of now, Cassandra’s remains have not been located. The APD has not publicly released the forensic sketch, although Alaska news outlet KNBA has. A reward is offered for information that could lead to the discovery of Cassandra’s remains.

The mishandling of evidence, the failure to communicate with the family, and the continuous claims of uncertainty, despite strong evidence, are all indicative of a system in need of serious reform. The community demands answers, accountability, and justice for Cassandra and her family.

As an Alaska Native woman, Cassandra’s case became another example of the systemic neglect faced by Indigenous women, who are disproportionately affected by violence and often overlooked by law enforcement. Smith himself states he deliberately targeted marginalized individuals, including sex workers, demonstrating a pattern of exploitation and violence directed at those deemed less worthy of protection. Cassandra’s story shows the broader issue of who the police choose to prioritize, often leaving those who are already marginalized, including “migrant workers, the houseless, the criminal justice impacted, and sex workers,” unheard and unprotected.

Cassandra’s family deserves answers, justice, and a full investigation into her disappearance and presumed murder. 

Her family created a petition to demand police accountability. Please visit

https://www.change.org/p/justice-for-cassandra-lee-boskofsky-demand-accountability-and-policy-reform-e95b1034-69c2-4779-84c5-ed93edb97234

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With a heavy heart, we share that Kelly - known lovingly as Katie TCL, or Katie the Cleaning Lady - has passed away in a tragic car accident. This world is a little dimmer without her vibrant spirit, but her memory will forever shine brightly in our hearts.

Kelly was a woman of deep passions and boundless love. She was most alive in nature, finding joy and freedom fishing in the Kenai Peninsula and camping under Alaska’s vast skies. Planting flowers brought her happiness. And if you ever saw her on a motorcycle, you knew her to be bold, and adventurous, living each moment to the fullest.

She loved her animals fiercely, having two dogs and a cat named Tazzy. Her dogs, Loki and Lulu, were also in the accident, and we’re immensely grateful they survived and are now receiving the care they need. Thanks to overwhelming generosity, their vet bills have been fully covered - a beautiful testament to the love Kelly inspired in all who knew her.

To celebrate Kelly’s life, consider donating to the SPCA or Friends of Pets, causes close to her heart. Or release a red balloon in her honor, listen to her favorite music, and dance - embracing her joy and free spirit. Thank you to everyone who has supported her memory, her beloved animals, and all who loved her. Kelly may no longer be with us, but her beautiful spirit and love remain with us always.

Kelly, thank you for being you. You will be missed. RIP.

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