Handcuffed escapee found dead in lake

August 16, 2005

KATE KELLY/Frontiersman reporter

MAT-SU - A 20-year-old Wasilla man who escaped from an Alaska State Trooper car one week ago was found dead in Nancy Lake Sunday and investigators have yet to figure out whether angry hornets had anything to do with it.

Nicholas Alan Hill's hands were still bound behind his back by handcuffs that had been placed on him when he was picked up on the Parks Highway for failure to appear in court for an arraignment on charges of being a minor illegally consuming alcohol in Valdez. He originally flagged down the trooper after his car broke down at the Tesoro station at Mile 99 of the Parks Highway and the outstanding warrant was discovered when the trooper ran his name in the computer system, AST spokesman Greg Wilkinson said Monday.

Troopers had been searching for Hill since he managed to get out of his seat belt and kick out a window of the trooper vehicle in order to flee while the trooper attended to victims of a car accident at about midnight Aug. 9 at Mile 65 Parks Hwy.

A photo of Hill from 2002 was released to the press in the hopes that someone would recognize him and help troopers apprehend him on new charges of eluding capture.

But the only call troopers received came at 4:30 p.m., Aug. 14 from someone at Nancy Lake Marina who saw a body along the shoreline of the lake — only three-fourths of a mile from where he had escaped from the trooper vehicle.

Although troopers thought Hill might have followed railroad tracks that ran alongside the lake to find his way back to Wasilla, they did not know if he had been on the tracks before going into the lake, Wilkinson said Monday.

When troopers arrived on the scene, they stepped in a hornet's nest as they were walking down a 30-degree slope. That led them to wonder if hornets had anything to do with Hill's desire to enter the water, Wilkinson said.

"If Mr. Hill also stepped in the hornet's nest, that could have made him run into the lake," Wilkinson said. "It gets quite deep fairly rapidly, but maybe he thought he could just hide from the hornets in the water and didn't realize it had such a soft, silty bottom. But I could be completely off track with this hornet thing."

Or perhaps it was so dark Hill did not realize the lake was there as he was running through the area, Wilkinson said.

One thing's for sure, however: Hill would still be alive today if he hadn't escaped from the trooper vehicle to begin with.

"It's a tragic situation that could have been avoided if he'd just sat still — if he'd just stayed in the car,"Wilkinson said. "I don't think that's too much to ask."

Wilkinson said troopers purposely did not originally release to the press the fact that Hill had kicked out the patrol car window to escape.

"We were very concerned about him and were trying to keep it fairly low key without making it sound like he was public enemy number one on the lam, so that maybe he would come out and turn himself in," Wilkinson said.

Hill's body was transported to the state medical examiner's facility in Anchorage for an autopsy. Preliminary autopsy findings Monday did not reveal any sort of trauma to his body, Wilkinson said.

Contact Kate Kelly at

352-2284.