Assistant district attorney will be missed

The first time I met Brian Sullivan — the state prosecutor shot and killed in Barrow this week — was completely by chance. It wasn’t even on the job, actually. I was helping out with the first party in my son’s kindergarten class.

Sullivan was another parent there. I’m usually a pretty reserved guy in public settings, especially unfamiliar ones. At the time, Finger Lake Elementary was uncharted territory.

Unless someone takes the initiative to strike up a conversation, I can go to an event like that and not say a word. Brian decided to talk to me and I was grateful for it.

We talked about our kids and about our jobs. Brian was pretty interested to learn I was a reporter. He talked about writing a column for my employer at the time, the Anchorage Daily News, when he deployed to Iraq with the Army.

Turns out it wasn’t idle chit-chat. Over the course of that year he actually followed up a few times on the idea and I passed his contacts to my editor — a U.S. Marine Corps veteran — and they seemed to have an immediate military connection. He ended up filing regular dispatches from the war, addressed to U.S. Rep. Don Young to circumvent Army censorship policies.

Later Brian would run for aschool board and I covered his tenure there. I remember one conversation in particular in which I used the term “opaque” to describe the budget process the Mat-Su Borough School District was using at the time. He later used the same word in discussions at the board table.

I also remember talking to him about the position of Mat-Su Borough Mayor, which had come open when Talis Colberg resigned to take the helm of Mat-Su College.

Sullivan asked me who I thought would run for it and what I’d heard. It sounded like the sort of thing a politician asks you when he’s gauging his own chances, but Brian didn’t tip his hand.

“That kind of thing is fun to think about,” was all he said.

Later, he did decide to run. During that campaign he felt I treated him badly during a discussion we had of his time in the Washington state Legislature. Some comments he thought were off the record wound up in my story.

There had been no ill intent on my part. I honestly thought we were back on the record. It was a lesson for me in clearly drawing those lines.

Sullivan was the first and only source I can recall who specifically asked that I be taken off a story. Though I thought he was making too much of the issue, I think the main reason that stung was that he had a point. I hadn’t been as careful as I needed to be and he held me accountable.

I only learned in this week’s reporting in other news outlets that, after that mayor’s race, he had separated from his wife and moved to Barrow. After he placed second to the current mayor, Larry DeVilbiss, in a very crowded field of eight candidates, Brian and I lost touch altogether.

Our families both grew up in the intervening years. My boy — the kindergartner whose party we were attending — is now in junior high. Brian, I read in one of the news accounts, has a daughter in college. I remember her as one of Schools page writers at the Frontiersman.

I was very sad to hear of his death. Brian was someone I have known almost as long as I have been a reporter. I knew him as someone who was always involved in his community, like too few people are. And while we clashed briefly, I don’t think I ever really held it against him. I hope he didn’t take it personally, either.

As a father myself, I can’t help but sympathize with his children and for his family. Their loss is unimaginable and I wish them strength. I hope that the Sullivan family and the community of Barrow eventually find some measure of healing.

I think Alaska in general — and the communities of Barrow and Mat-Su specifically — lost a good one here. Brian will be sorely missed.

Andrew Wellner is the assistant managing editor for the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.