Abuse, sex crimes are up locally

PALMER — For Detective Sgt. Kelly Turney, this year has been filled with nothing but child abuse and sex crime investigations.

Since the middle of December, he said, he’s had seven cases open up.

“I have five that are open investigations right now,” he said. “Which is high. It’s uncharacteristically high.”

Over at the Alaska State Troopers, the investigative unit’s child crimes division hasn’t noticed any dramatic jump in reports.

“In 2008 my office received approximately 250 reports of harm,” said investigator Luis Nieves. “For this year, we’re only in the second month and we’ve received almost 40.”

Nieves said it’s just the nature of the game. Alaska in general, and the Valley in particular, has long had higher than average rates of child abuse.

“We’ve been in the top five for the last 20 years or so,” Nieves said of the state.

For Turney, the latest bump in child abuse has been somewhat draining. The latest kept him up all night — dispatchers woke him up in the wee hours of Sunday morning. A 13-year-old Big Lake girl at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center reported she’d been raped.

They eventually learned that the rape happened in a home somewhere near Palmer High School. Investigations in Palmer fall to Turney.

The girl knew the two men who were eventually arrested in the rape — Derek F. Burkett, 18, and Nicholas L. Nickoli, 22, both of Palmer. They were jailed on two counts each of second-degree sexual abuse of a minor and one count each of third-degree sexual abuse of a minor.

Turney said that neither man was a stranger to him or the two patrol officers on duty at the time.

“We knew exactly where we needed to go to contact these folks and do the follow-up,” he said.

Without getting into too much detail, Turney said the incident involved alcohol and drugs and was, in his words, “non-aggravated.”

Which means, he said, “there was no force used. Sometimes you have in sexual assault cases where force is used and that was not the case in this case.”

He was able to make the arrests and pull the case together that day, he said, mostly because he had the help of the patrol guys.

“It was just a matter of going through the investigative process, doing the interviews, securing the scene, serving what search warrants needed to be served,” he said. But, “I couldn’t have done near the work I did without my patrol officers “

Turney said he doesn’t get nearly the volume of sexual abuse cases as Nieves and his colleagues. Turney doesn’t know how they handle it.

Nieves said it gets hard sometimes but knowing you’re on the right side that keeps them going.

“Our mantra here is that we speak for the children,” Nieves said. “That’s what keeps us going. I think that’s what keeps everyone in this office going.”

But Turney and Nieves agreed — child abuse and sex crimes can’t help but get to you.

“For me, these kinds of cases are very draining,” Turney said Friday. “Yesterday I had a case where I had to do multiple interviews in one day.”

Usually one interview knocks him on his heels.

“I did multiple ones yesterday so I was pretty fried last night when I got home,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.