Mother of accused Peterson teens tells her side of the story

WASILLA — Imagine having not just one of your children implicated in the murder of another teen, but then another child then charged with the shooting death of yet another.

Alanah Peterson doesn’t have to imagine it. She’s living it and it’s a living hell.

“I know what I’m going through is nothing compared to the parents who lost their kids, but this is horrible,” Peterson said, on break from one of her three jobs on Monday. “I work every day. If I sit at home, my mind doesn’t stop. It just keeps going and going and going like a tape recorder in my head — on our conversations and things like that on rewind. I’ll look out the window and wonder, are the cops coming to get me?”

Alanah’s younger son, 18-year-old Devin Peterson was one of five teens indicted for the kidnapping and gruesome murder of 16-year-old David Grunwald, whose body was found in a wooded area on Dec. 3. Devin was the only one of the five not to be charged with murder, but was charged instead with three felony counts of tampering with physical evidence and one felony count of hindering prosecution.

In a separate matter, Devin was arraigned on one felony count of exploitation of a minor-making child pornography on Jan. 19.

Then on Feb. 10, the second of Alanah’s three boys, Damien, 19, was indicted in the June 27, 2016, killing of 16-year-old Frank Woodford in Wasilla. Initial police investigations determined Woodford had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound from a 10-millimeter Glock that Damien Peterson and another teen, Austin Barrett — also charged with the murder of Grunwald — had allegedly been handling in the moments prior.

As the investigation into the Grunwald murder developed, police re-opened the Woodford case, and with the testimony of cooperative witnesses, they arrested Damien Peterson on second degree murder charges. On Tuesday, Peterson was arraigned on charges of second-degree murder manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and third degree assault.

Alanah believes her son is innocent of the Woodford killing because, she said, her son is not the sort of person who would shoot another in cold blood, and also because she doubts the reliability of the cooperating witness, Barrett, who is charged with murder in the first degree, kidnapping and two counts of murder in the second degree in the Grunwald case.

“My son had no reason to hurt anybody; he has a heart… Damien’s not a killer. He will help you; he’s a loving kid,” Alanah said. “And it’s a little suspicious to me that you have one of the suspects of the other murder who was at both scenes. Both scenes he did nothing?”

Alanah believes all that Damien was guilty of in the Woodford case was not telling the police the whole story of what happened immediately. She said police knocked on her door at 3 a.m. that night wanting to speak to Damien because a teen had apparently shot himself in a house Damien was at.

Alanah said she told Damien to contact the police immediately and once he did, she was under the impression the matter was closed.

“I thought it really was a tragic accident,” Alanah said. “I had no idea. I still don’t know, but in my heart I firmly believe that had they arrested the right person that night — yeah, get my son for lying… Personally, it’s my belief that if my son had told the truth that night, David (Grunwald) would still be alive.”

Alanah said Damien still hasn’t been provided a public defender. Devin, she said, has private representation, but she can’t afford a lawyer for Damien.

Alanah said she suspected Devin was getting into trouble once he started hanging out with a group of kids that included the four others indicted in the Grunwald case.

“He just tried to cover for his friends like a dumb ass. He was not there, thank God,” Alanah said. “All those kids stayed in my house, crapped in my house, ate at my house, showered at my house. They weren’t like a Crip gang like everyone says.”

Still, she could tell they were often up to no good and she said she tried to steer them in a better direction.

“I took those guys to Job Corps, and when I wasn’t working I was taking them to schools trying to enroll them,” Alanah said. “I tried, I physically tried to get these kids into something different.”

When Grunwald went missing, Alanah said she never made the connection to her son or his friends because she’d never met or seen Grunwald.

“They were already doing crazy stuff, but I didn’t think anybody could kill anybody. It just didn’t seem like they gave a crap. They just took stuff from people and they didn’t care,” Alanah said, adding that she could see a change for the worse come over Devin once he started hanging with that crowd. “Devin quit coming home, didn’t want to go to school, was ditching school. Devin just met these kids and they were smoking weed and hanging out. Then they rode dirt bikes and 4-wheelers, which I wish they’d kept doing. But once all the (bikes) started breaking down or got stolen, they were just, ‘oh, what do we do now?’ and instead of positive things it was all negative.”

Alanah said she called police repeatedly to have Devin arrested on probation violations in the hopes of getting him out of the lifestyle.

“Nobody wants their kid in jail, but at the end of the day, I did turn Devin in seven times. I thought if they did something and put him in Juvenile (jail) until his probation was off maybe they could have taught something different that he wasn’t hearing from me,” Alanah said. “He’d been caught stealing at Walmart, which should have been a violation, peed dirty for marijuana at the (probation officer’s) office, refused to go to school and I contacted them on numerous occasions, but nobody would do anything… I wanted to save him because he’s a kid and doesn’t need to spend his life in jail.”

Alanah said her oldest son is currently in the military and that Damien and Devin have different fathers. She said Damien’s father lives in Anchorage and maintains a relationship with his son, and that Devin’s father recently moved back from Pennsylvania, and Devin refuses to have a relationship with him, though the grandmother on his father’s side remains involved in his life.

She believes the public outcry condemning the parents of the accused in the Grunwald and Woodford cases — which Alanah said has included death threats —is misguided.

“It’s not the parents’ fault,” she said. “At a certain age kids have to know right from wrong. If they didn’t learn it from you they learn it at church or school. This could be anybody’s child. It doesn’t have to be a bad kid to get in this situation.”

Alanah said she’s spent most of her life in Alaska, and that her mother abandoned her when they lived in Fairbanks when she was just 15 years old. A rough childhood, she said, contributed to her being affected with post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that’s been exacerbated lately.

“I don’t take meds or anything, but it’s so bad now I’m like frantic,” she said. “I can barely work. The other day I was catching myself just circling, going around and around.”

Alanah said she talks with Damien frequently.

“He’s OK, but they try not to let me know because they know I’m already freaking out,” she said. “He’s scared he could lose his whole life over this… When you’re 18, you’re not a man. You think you are but you’re not. You’re still a damn kid.”