Assemblyman discusses son’s death

WASILLA — The son of a borough assemblyman was killed Saturday, having been shot in what appears to have been a botched marijuana robbery.

“My son had no weapons on him just a roll of duct tape and the intent wasn’t to hurt anybody, the intent was just to steal some marijuana,” said Assemblyman Mark Ewing, adding of the shooter, “he shot my son in the face.”

Jeremy Ewing, 34, had recently been in jail on vehicle theft and drunken driving charges. His father said he wasn’t excusing Jeremy’s actions.

“What he did was wrong. He paid for it with his life,” Ewing said.

His son had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, but the condition hadn’t been diagnosed until his most recent stint in jail, when his family was finally able to get him to see a psychiatrist.

“We always thought he was just a free spirit,” Ewing said, recounting the story of his son ended up moving to Hawaii.

The family had went to Kauai for a vacation.

“When we got ready to leave, Jeremy says, ‘I’m going to stay,’” Ewing said. “He stayed and he’d live on the beach and he learned how to surf.”

The details of the robbery are sketchy, but Ewing said it happened at 9 a.m. on Saturday when his son broke into a house that appeared to have contained a marijuana grow.

There were other people involved, probably people his son met in prison, but Ewing didn’t want get too far into the details, fearing he might compromise an ongoing Alaska State Trooper investigation.

He said troopers have done a bang-up job thus far. One of them, Sgt. Michelyn Grigg, he said joked with him that she was putting in so many hours she needed some help with child care.

“One night she asked me if I could baby-sit her kid. They were going to work all night. I said, ‘No problem, bring him over.’”

Ewing didn’t end up baby-sitting.

See more on this story in Sunday’s paper.