Jury hears from neighbors, troopers in Talkeetna case

PALMER — At least for his Talkeetna-area neighbors, the night Robert Carey died of a gunshot wound started out relatively peacefully.

Ross Nold, a professional miner who lives nearby, said he spent the evening eating dinner and watching movies with a family that was new to the area.

Nold spoke Thursday in the trial of Jeremy Nelson, who is accused of killing Carey and wounding his wife, Verna Carey, during a confrontation in January 2011 at the Carey home on Wolf Trail, near Mile 115, Parks Highway.

He said he’d been helping this family since they arrived in the area. They didn’t seem to know quite how to build a proper cabin or what it takes to live off the grid.

When winter set in, “I was deathly afraid that there was going to be three little frozen bodies,” Nold said.

As they were watching movies, he heard gunshots. Some loud, then quite a few more that weren’t as loud. Later, he heard snowshoes squeaking down the trail outside the cabin. He got up at one point to stretch his legs and that’s when he heard Carey in the distance.

“I heard him say, ‘you need to just get the hell out of here,’” Nold said.

Then he heard one loud boom, maybe two. The second might have been an echo. There was a noisy generator running at Carey’s place making it hard to tell.

After the gunfire, Nold said he heard Carey’s wife cry out. He told the neighbors he was with to stay in the house and went to find out if the Careys needed help.

Arriving at the Carey home and ducking behind cover, Nold said he called out “hello in the house! Is everybody alright?”

No answer.

Then he heard more snowshoeing and followed the sound back to where Nelson was living. He saw the shooter get on a snowmachine at Nelson’s place and drive up to another neighbor’s house. He eventually collected that family he’d been hanging out with, drove them to a neighbor’s house and called for help.

“You never did see his face when you heard this snowshoe movement that night?” Palmer District Attorney Roman Kalytiak asked.

“No,” Nold replied. “Didn’t have to — his snowshoes, went to his house, left on his sled.”

“Did you ever call out to him when you were trying to follow him?” Kalytiak asked.

“Nope. Thought about it. But no,” Nold said.

Nold’s attorney, Jeff Bradley, spent the bulk of his questioning Thursday poking holes in Alaska State Troopers’ investigative techniques, the implication being that troopers didn’t investigate the murder fully or properly to be certain they had the right guy.

In questioning since-retired trooper investigator Michael Carpenter, who is now a commercial pilot, for instance, Bradley seemed to find it odd that a team of troopers — numbering 10 officers at times — would need to search the Carey house twice to find a bullet hole from a .45-caliber gun.

Also, he took special note that instead of using dowels to show the trajectory of a bullet in a photograph, troopers improvised using baling twine they found at the scene they were investigating.

Later, he asked Carpenter about how he removed the slug from a wooden stud inside the wall. Carpenter said he used a steel pocketknife. Bradley noted that the steel knife was of a harder metal than the copper slug and asked what trooper training had to say about using that tool for that job.

“The basic theory is that you wouldn’t want to let the steel come into contact with what you were trying to preserve,” Carpenter answered. “Common sense would tell you that you wouldn’t want to dig around in there and damage the evidence.”

“And you violated your common sense in using a steel object to extract a softer metal, didn’t you?” Bradley asked.

“No, no. Care was taken,” Carpenter replied.

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