Man found guilty of attempted murder

Sept. 13. 2005

MARY AMES\Frontiersman reporter

PALMER - A Palmer Superior Court jury on Monday afternoon found a Point Hope man guilty of attempting to murder his former girlfriend when he attacked her in the garage of her mother's Farm Loop-area home earlier this year.

Jurors in the trial of Tariek Oviuk also found him guilty of second-degree assault and not guilty of first-degree assault. They began deliberating late Thursday.

Superior Court Judge Eric Smith will sentence Oviuk on Jan. 16, one day short of a year after Oviuk beat, kicked and slashed Grace Oomittuk on Jan. 17. Oomittuk called 911 on a cell phone in her pocket and the dispatcher was able to hear the attack as it was happening, locate the cell phone's home base and send two Alaska State Troopers to the scene.

Oviuk, 24, and Oomittuk, also from Point Hope, had been a couple since their early teens, before Oomittuk broke off the relationship about a year before the attack. Oviuk and Oomittuk have two children together.

The defense didn't contest the fact that Oviuk attacked Oomittuk, who required hours of treatment in the emergency room to repair blunt-force trauma wounds to her head and severe cuts to her face and body. At issue, Assistant Public Defender Diane Foster said in her opening statement, was whether Oviuk intended to kill or do serious bodily harm.

Oomittuk had filed assault charges against Oviuk at least twice in Point Hope, according to her testimony and that of former North Slope Borough police officer Larry Hinken. Oomittuk stated that although Oviuk had hit her and threatened to kill her while in Point Hope, it was "nothing serious."

"That's practically all the normal relationships in Point Hope," she testified.

Hinken estimated that in the 16 and a half years he worked as a police officer for the North Slope Borough, 50 to 60 percent of his calls were for domestic violence.

It is common for victims to minimize past events and not to want to go into details, he said. Based on his training and experience in domestic violence cases, victims especially minimize abusive events if there are children in the relationship.

"The emotional toll is tough on children and parents," Hinken testified during the trial. "When you have children involved, it creates more problems for victims because if a partner is arrested and is a provider, who pays the bills?"

Hinken also explained what he called the cycle of violence to the jury. It is a dynamic, he said, that starts with small arguments, proceeds to verbal abuse then escalates to physical contact such as a slap, push or shove.

Once that happens, he testified, the next episode will be an escalation of physical violence.

"It just becomes more violent each time, with murder/suicide an obvious last act," he said.

Oviuk threatened to kill himself when troopers arrived and had cut himself on the side of his neck before he was taken to the hospital. But the wounds he inflicted on Oomittuk were far worse.

"They worked on her for hours," said Connie Fredenberg, Oomittuk's mother, describing that night in the emergency room. "She had multiple staples in her head, multiple stitches for the cut on her forehead. They lifted that flap up and you could see half of her forehead. She had two cuts on her side, but she begged them to tape her because she was so tired of stitches."

Contact Mary Ames at 352-2284 or mary.ames@frontiersman.com.